I've volunteered to join Derek Zona's Scoring Chance Project and will be keeping track of the Red Wings scoring chances throughout the season.

Firstly, the scoring chances are based off a rough, 'home plate-like' area in the offensive zone. The zone is draw like so, thanks to New Jersey Devils' SBN blog, In Lou We Trust:

Now, my guess is that early in the season the numbers won't be as clear-cut and, well, good. I don't know how many of you have attempted to track scoring chances for a game, but the amount of subjectivity is pretty astounding and I found myself drifting off into thought about what needed to be different about the play that just occurred that I did/didn't rule as a scoring chance for me to make the opposite decision of the one I made. Then I scrambled to rewind my DVR back the 45 seconds I missed.

Once I've got probably ten games or so under my belt, I'll feel more comfortable about my data, but for the first few weeks, think of these are pretty good, but probably not great, snapshots of what happened. If anything, I'm probably over-recording the number of scoring chances that occurred, but I'm not sure yet.

All of this is 100% made possible by the one, the only Vic Ferrari who has a wonderful app at his Time On Ice site that we just plug our data into and it spits out these nifty charts that I'll present below the jump. Onward!

Detroit's numbers should be bolded. If not, they are always the left side of each column. So they out chanced Ottawa 7-4 in the first period, were out chanced 7-9 in the second and even in the third at 6-6.

We out chanced the Senators, but a strong finish to the second period for Ottawa closed the gap. Given that Ottawa was also down 3+ goals most of the game as well, their urgency in trying to come back plays an effect here -- usually called score effects. Detroit was getting out chanced for a bit in the third period (something Mickey mentioned on the telecast) but that wasn't entirely due to what Ottawa was doing; rather it had more to do with Detroit's sitting back protecting the lead.

Individually, here's how Detroit's players fared, sorted by jersey numbers:

The +/- column is the same as a player's +/- for goals for/against, but done at the chance level. It includes all aspects of the game: even strength, penalty kill, power play.

Ian White and Henrik Zetterberg both led the way with +5 in the chance department, while Brad Stuart had a rough night at -5. The Bertuzzi-Abdelkader-Helm line wasn't particularly good either, but Zetterberg-Cleary-Filppula had a fantastic night; and it wasn't just Zetterberg.

Even before looking at the chance data, I thought Jakub Kindl had a very solid game and it is nice to see that in the data as well.

Below is all of the data I tracked -- I had 39 total chances in the game. But, like I mentioned before, I am probably counting a few that aren't really chances at all as I'm just trying to get my bearings in this project.

I was also keeping notes on what happened. I'll try to get back to the comments section tomorrow to clear up anything that is confusing.