Pluses:
3 goals on 6 shots in the 2nd period.
4th line outburst of scoring.
George plays well when the team in front of him has it's collective head screwed on a bit tighter, and with better alignment.
Manson touched into his playoff mode a bit, and still restrained himself from killing a couple of stars players who deserved a beatdown.
Meh:
Slo Joe Hansen.
Byram still needs to simplify his game, and he is improving from earlier this season.
Moose nudged his GAF factor up from -10 to -8. Still fell down a bunch, and damn near killed himself trying to hit someone along the end boards, but scored a goal while falling down.
The refs. Always.
I'd rather see Byram push himself more. He looks best when he's skating and attacking. I can live with some turnovers if he's also creating more. He's got the skill set to be a creator and puck driver.
Last night Byram made several good defensive plays with his stick and made a few slick outlet passes too. He turned it over once or twice. But Toews iced it a few times too and also turned it over a couple times. Good players make mistakes. You just want them to make more good plays than bad.
Byram is playing his best hockey the past several weeks vs how he played from about Nov 15-Jan 15th. Glad he's seeing a nice uptick in performance. He's back to +0.
He was a -10 about a month ago. +/- is a meh stat, but are you surprised he's made a lot of progress in this stat over the last few weeks? I'm not. The eye test tells us both he's playing pretty well.
It's going to be great when Makar stops turning all his high danger scoring chances into dump ins from the mid slot.
His shooting lately doesn't look like shooting at all. I'm not sure what he's aiming it, but it's not the net or even the goalie.
