By the numbers: Why was Team Canada so dominant in the men’s hockey tournament?

At the 2005 world junior championship, Canada won its first of five gold medals, having out-scored its opposition 41-7. That team was widely considered to be one of the best ever assembled at the annual junior tournament, and graduated six members from the squad onto the 2014 national men's team that just wrapped up a gold medal victory at the 2014 Sochi winter games.

Those players were Sidney Crosby, Patrice Bergeron, Jeff Carter, Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry and Shea Weber. All were key players in Grand Forks, North Dakota in 2005 as well as Sochi, key players for two teams that blew threw the opposition both on both offence on defence. All told, 13 players playing for Canada during the golden generation of Canadian juniors between 2005 and 2009 wound up on the Olympic team and helped Canada steamroll through the international hockey circuit.

Some of the games may have looked close on the final scoreboard, but Canada dominated the tournament like none other. Since the National Hockey League began releasing its players to play in the games in 1998, no nation had gone unbeaten on its way to gold. Not only that, but the Canadian team didn't trail for a single second during the entire six-game tournament, and in its most challenging games against Finland, the United States and Sweden, conceded a single goal against.

There were concerns during the games about the lack of scoring from the Canadian squad, particularly from the forwards, but the overwhelming team defence from Canada more than made up for it. Despite never trailing, Canada managed a massive shots on goal advantage over its opposition. In the National Hockey League, its expected that teams with the lead will surrender quite a few more shots as the opposition presses for a tying goal.

Not so for head coach Mike Babcock and his troops. Especially against the United States and Sweden, the Canadians kept up a relentless pressure with the lead and held onto the puck in the waning minutes of close games rather than hanging on for dear life, as is tradition. Canada out-shot and out-chanced its opposition decisively throughout the tournament:

(Scoring chance numbers were tallied by hand, using the definition found at Edmonton Oilers blog Copper and Blue)

Those numbers include special teams, and it's worthwhile to point out that in 32:28 of shorthanded time on ice, Canada was out-chanced just 5-3 and held an even goal differential.

So why did Canada hold such an advantage over its opposition? The team played an aggressive style with the lead, perhaps the orders of head coach Mike Babcock. After the gold medal game, Babcock gave the press a lesson in team defence, by invoking a form of defence that isn't conflated with blocked shots and hits, merely keeping the puck off the opponents' stick by having it on your own:

The players Canada brought to the tournament didn't hurt, either.

There's a measure some NHL numerical analysts use called 'Corsi', which is a simple shot differential statistic used to determine what happened to a team's fortunes when a player was on the ice. Shot differentials correlate heavily with zone time, and it's intuitive that if a team out-shot its opposition by a 10-5 (or similar gap) margin with a certain player on the ice, that player more likely than not contributed to the difference.

When the Canadian Olympic roster was named, analysts noted that Canada's roster was full of players who have positively influenced the shot clock this season.

(Corsi numbers can be found over at websites such as ExtraSkater.com, BehindTheNet.ca and HockeyAnalysis.com)

Canada was the only team to have the luxury of such a roster. Some of the leagues top scorers, such as, say, Taylor Hall, Phil Kessel or Thomas Vanek, haven't put up good Corsi numbers to go along with their high point totals. Not to suggest that the Canadian brass put together the roster by looking at numbers, or that Kessel and Vanek's respective countries made mistakes by including them on the roster, but Canada had the depth to make tough decisions by cutting Hall or Claude Giroux by including a better two-way player. It can't be a complete coincidence that general manager Steve Yzerman filled his roster with probably the lowest number of controversial selections compared to other nations. Other than Chris Kunitz's addition (and his advertised chemistry with Sidney Crosby didn't materialize throughout the tournament) there weren't a lot of complaints with Canada's roster initially, with the team sacrificing bringing an extra older role player to Sochi in favour of young, skilled players such as Duchene or Jamie Benn.

And whatever it was, worked.

Though the forwards had trouble scoring throughout the tournament (per ExtraSkater.com, the team's shooting percentage was 7.1%, which was seventh out of 12 teams in the games. Generally, teams score on about 8.5% of their shots in all situations) there was never the sense that Canada was in any real trouble. The numbers above display the dominance Canada displayed on the shot clock when the game was on level terms. By my count, the United States earned just a single scoring chance in the entire final 10 minutes of the semifinal game despite trailing by a goal and, in theory, throwing everything they could offensively against goaltender Carey Price. That was a better performance than Sweden who had a single scoring chance throughout the entire second and third periods.

In essence, while the goaltending was great, it needn't be more than merely "pedestrian". In return for shutting down opposing forwards from getting good shots away from dangerous areas, Price stopped everything from the outside and didn't allow rebounds.

James Mirtle wrote over at the Globe and Mail that the 1-0 scoreline against the United States was not indicative of the way the team played. That game could be extrapolated for the rest of Canada's tournament. They didn't score a lot, but they were stifling defensively and recovered loose pucks in a machine-like fashion, pinning opponents in the offensive zone. The tournament ended in such anti-climatic fashion, Canada looked bored by the end. It was pure velvet.

So this leads to the question: where does this team fit historically? Unfortunately, this current group failed to generated a generation-defining moment like Sidney Crosby's Golden Goal from 2010 or Mario Lemieux's Canada Cup-winning goal in 1987 and may become the lost juggernaut when looking back on this tournament in 10 to 20 years. Because of that, there's reason to believe this may have been one of the best hockey teams ever assembled, by the fact the team never had to crawl out of a dramatic and obvious hole. Each forward line played with a purpose. Crosby's top line was excellent at creating scoring chances (though they found it tough to finish) while Jonathan Toews shut down top forwards and Ryan Getzlaf played extended sequences cycling along the boards with his linemates on the right end of the ice.

Forget the narratives about the big ice surface or teammates being able to gel so quickly in a short tournament—these games were another data point towards proving the axiom that putting good players on the ice with each other should result in good things, and there is no reason to overthink roster choices, or grow to worry about shots not going in. Teams that are as strong on the puck as Canada will probably win a lot more games than they lose.

As described by Thomas Drance at The Score:

Some fun facts:

• A bit player in 2010, Patrice Bergeron played 83:47 of ice-time throughout the 2014 tournament. At even strength, Canada out-chanced the opposition 32-6 with Bergeron on the ice. He had Canada's strongest chance differential among all forwards, including linemate Sidney Crosby.

• Canada's top defensive pairing was Duncan Keith and Shea Weber. Canada out-chanced the opposition 47-15 with Keith on the ice at even strength in the tournament, despite his pairing often being matched up against the other team's strongest forwards.

• No Canadian player was on the ice for more scoring chances against than for—the lowest differential among regular players was Rick Nash, at a mere +8. (14 chances for, 6 against)

• Sidney Crosby was on the ice for 36 scoring chances for at even strength. Generally, one out of every five or six chances will go in, but only three did for Crosby in Sochi. His one-goal, two-assist statline for the tournament is deceptive. Crosby was the most dangerous Canadian offensively all tournament.

• This season in Pittsburgh, Crosby and Kunitz have recorded a point on the same goal 40 times. 0 such occurrences happened in Sochi. In Anaheim, Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry have recorded a point on the same goal 41 times. Only once did the two earn a point on the same goal, both assisting on Weber's 2-0 goal versus Austria.

• Canada scored 17 goals and allowed three in the tournament. In 2010, the team scored 35 and allowed 16. The closest scoreboard comparable is the 1998 Czech Republic team that won gold. They scored 19 goals during their six games and conceded six.

Ultimately, Canada turned an excellent five-year stretch for its juniors into two Olympic gold medals. Over the next few years we should be able to see whether Canada's struggles at the annual junior tournament manifest into a team that gets outclassed in best-on-best competitions.

But that's in the future. There's presumably a debate to be had about this current generation's place among the all-time greats in Canada's proud hockey history. They weren't flawless, but they were much more dominant than my chewed fingernails would suggest and there was never a minute in the tournament they were in real danger. At least for this generation, the theories of Canada's easing grip over international hockey were simply overstated. With the golden junior generation in its prime, Canada barely broke a sweat on its way to its second consecutive gold medal.