Silver Nuggets: Paul MacLean's use of defencemen
Earlier this morning, Derek Zona over at the excellent Copper and Blue, looked at the defensive deployments by Tom Renney. Derek was kind enough to send me the Senators version of this (he really is awesome by the way).
The size of the bubble represents the magnitude of the player's zone-start adjusted relative Corsi. A blue bubble is a positive zone-start adjusted relative Corsi and a red bubble is a negative. Thus, the biggest blue represents the highest Corsi, followed by a smaller blue bubble, then a smaller white bubble and the largest white bubble is the lowest zone-start Corsi.
The x-axis represents the relative Corsi of the opposition faced by each defencemen. The more right a bubble, the tougher the competition they faced. The y-axis represents the percentage of face-offs taken in the defensive zone. The higher the bubble, the larger the percentage of defensive zone starts.
Jared Cowen is the only player that comes out on the negative side. This is despite Cowen playing a far-easier competition than most of the players. This would suggest to me that Cowen is playing a lot of time in his own zone and struggling to get the puck out. David Rundblad on the other hand, has the highest Corsi rating, despite playing against the toughest competition out of any Senators defenceman (albeit only slightly). While Rundblad has more than held his own by this measure, I get the sense that Rundblad is being misused at this point in his career. As expected, Chris Phillips has the highest percentage of defensive-zone starts. Brian Lee faces the easiest competition.
Tonight's game
- Game preview. (Senators Extra, Ottawa Sun)
- The panel is split with four predicting a win and three predicting a loss. Peter went with 3-1 for the Oilers. (Senators Extra)
- The Senators haven't practised yet today, but Bobby Butler remained on the fourth line yesterday despite this two goals in Calgary. (Sylvain St-Laurent)
- You can listen to Bryan Murray talking to reporters about the Nikita Filatov situation here. (Team 1200)
- Murray said he might consider being a "good guy" and let Filatov go later if he doesn't plan to keep him in Ottawa. (The 6th Sens)
- The Senators plan everything down to the last detail on road trips. Everyone gets 8-9 hours of sleep. They question the players on if they are tired, hungry or irritated. Before leaving for the west, the Senators kept the players up an extra two hours on Sunday to adjust to the time difference. (Ottawa Citizen)
- Paul MacLean has waited a while to get a head coaching opportunity, but he finally got the right set of circumstances to be able to get a chance. (Edmonton Journal)
- Daniel Alfredsson scored an own-goal late in the second period against Calgary. Ian Mendes was scheduled to interview Alfredsson during the intermission and was considering asking for a different player. But, he ended up going ahead and talking to Alfredsson anyway, because Alfie is not the kind of guy who hides. Alfredsson walked up to Mendes and right away he said, "Ian, I put that one in my own net." He really is such an incredible leader. (Sportsnet)
- Tim Murray and Randy Lee talked about the struggling Binghamton Senators with Joy Lindsay. Murray acknowledges the club is missing the veterans from last year, but says they wanted to keep them, it was the players that chose to leave. (Press & Sun-Bulletin)