Vancouver Whalers - 28 games in, what is going right, what is going wrong?

  The Whalers did not have a very good season 54 and hoped to bounce back in 55 from the league's worst 11 wins and so far are on pace to do so with 8 wins just a little bit past halfway through the season.  The team had hoped for a bit more success especially after starting the season with two wins in their first three games with both victories coming against two very good clubs, Anchorage and Colorado. Unfortunately that was immediately followed by a 4 game losing streak which included three one-goal losses. Later in the season they looked like they were again getting back on track with another two wins in three games with one of them being against the juggernaut that is the Berserkers.

  The wheels came off of the bus for a bit after those two wins. The Whalers played their worst hockey of the season for the next nine days and lost six games in a row, some of them being total blowouts. The good news is that they have bounced back since with two wins in four games and the two losses between those wins being tight contests that could have gone either way.
The Whalers’ current record doesn’t do the team justice; they’ve lost seven one-goal games and a few of their two-goal games were the result of empty net goals.  A different bounce in half of those games would give them 12 wins on the season, good enough for 8th place overall instead of 11th at this point in the season.

What is going right:

• Goaltending: Name Redacted has kept this team in at least a half dozen games if not more. While his GAA is 3.04, his save percentage is .911 and would probably be higher if the team had a decent backup to rest him more. He is easily the team’s MVP.
  
• Face-offs: The centers are winning a majority of their face-offs, always a good quality to control a game and drive play towards the opponent’s net.
  

• Shots Blocked: They are one of the top teams in the league for blocking shots.
  
• Takeaways and Giveaways: The team is in the top half of the league for both of these categories, something only Anchorage can also claim.
  

What is going wrong:

• Shot differential: The team is being constantly outshot by opponents, sometimes by ridiculous margins.  A showcase of this was a recent home game where they were outshot 60 to 13. That is not a tenable
  
• Penalty Killing: The team is a putrid 75.5% on the penalty kill, worse only than the expansion Battleborn. It doesn’t help that two of their best special teams defenseman for this situation, Slimy Snail and Zebulon Leavitt are in the top 8 in PIM making them often not available to assist on the kill for their own penalties.
  
• Power Play: As bad as the penalty kill is, the power play is somehow more atrocious, ranked dead last with 8.9%.  One bright spot here is that the team has a least managed to not allow a single goal against when on the man advantage.
  
• Scoring: The team is dead last in goals scored.
  

The future:
This is a young team in a rebuilding year. They’ve picked up a cadre of promising young rookies who are already developing into future stars and have a good core of players who will be available to them for the next season.   Don't be surprised to see this team move up quite a few spots in t, especially as it has some good defensive players and some budding offensive power.  This team is also starting to gel at the right time this season. They’ve had two recent wins against a struggling St Louis team and if they can start winning more of those one goal games they can move up a few spots in the league rankings and maybe even finish in the middle 4.

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