The Penguins have themselves a big week and it begins tonight with a contest against the Dallas Stars. The lineup will be close to the same one that we saw on Saturday night with two potential changes. It was an optional skate this morning so here are the lines from yesterday:
Full attendance at Penguins practice in Cranberry following a day off on Sunday. They're sticking with the same lines and D-pairs:
— Pens Inside Scoop (@PensInsideScoop) October 23, 2023
Guentzel-Crosby-Rust
Smith-Malkin-Rakell
O’Connor-Eller-Zohorna
Nieto-Acciari-Carter
Graves-Letang
Pettersson-Karlsson
Shea-Ruhwedel
Joseph-Ludvig
So one of the changes from the practice lines will be John Ludvig taking the place of Chad Ruhwedel and making his NHL debut alongside Ryan Shea.
Mike Sullivan said John Ludvig will make his NHL debut tonight against Dallas.
— Pens Inside Scoop (@PensInsideScoop) October 24, 2023
The defenseman, claimed off of waivers from Florida on Oct. 9, has played parts of three seasons in the AHL with Charlotte and the Syracuse Crunch.
Both Ruhwedel and Pierre-Olivier Joseph stayed on later during the optional morning skate today. I personally thought Ryan Shea would yield his spot back to Joseph after a game and it will not be playing out that way. This should be a pretty big wakeup call for him.
The top four will eat up most of the ice time, but the bottom pairing isn’t insignificant. They will need to meet the moment and provide competent minutes. The team can’t be throwing away points after some of the early results this season.
In net will be Alex Nedeljkovic for his second start of the season. The first one went quite well. It was against the Flames where he stopped 34 out of 36 shots in the victory. Penguins could really use another quality start as they give Jarry the night off in preparation for Colorado on Thursday.
I'm sure this will ruffle a few feathers, but Evgeni Malkin's defensive work and off-puck play/engagement this season has blown Sidney Crosby's out of the water.
— Danny Shirey (@DannyShireyPGH) October 24, 2023
Will that stay true all season? I doubt it. But right now it's not close.
This is the first time I can remember Malkin being afforded the opportunity to play lion's share of his minutes with a bonafide top pairing guy. Previously, Sid would get steady diet of Letang while Malkin got whatever was left over. Now with Karlsson, both Crosby and Malkin can get a steady serving of top pairing caliber defense help and the early returns in 2023-24 show it has helped Geno quite a bit so far.
That said, the Letang pairing with Ryan Graves has not been good out of the gate. I’m not very concerned with Letang because he has a very large sample of being very good to excellent. I’m going to let things play out for Graves as he is on a new team and we are only five games into the season. It is something I will be paying attention to. Graves not being able to play with Letang would be a problematic development, for sure. We aren’t there, yet.
Yesterday the NHL released their player tracking ‘EDGE’ statistics. These are the kinds of stats that are fun to look at, but I’m weary of their actual use in analysis. For example, top skating speed doesn’t really tell me much about a defenseman. How many situations does a defenseman get in a game to skate hard in a straight line to build up momentum? The zone time stats don’t have any context that xGF% would provide. Probably the dumbest part of the data dump was the NHL’s choice to hold back a ton of information. If a player was below the 50th percentile in any stat they were all just lumped together in a ‘below 50th percentile’ label. So now you have no idea if a player was 49th percentile or 5th. Pretty lame choice. Speaking of the percentiles, the website isn’t exactly accurate with those, either.
Edge looks promising but needs QA. NHL forgot to invert measures and percentiles, one example, with offensive/defensive measures. pic.twitter.com/f2W8VCPMFz
— Travis Yost (@travisyost) October 23, 2023
The Canucks only play 40-minute games I guess? Also, find the mystery 20th goal.
— Travis Yost (@travisyost) October 23, 2023
Trust this data with caution for now IMO. pic.twitter.com/GjnQIHTLvw
For now, it is surface level information, empty calories if you will. It will take time and some fine tuning before it has value at an analysis level, if ever. It’s the NHL we are talking about here. My expectations are low. Thanks for reading!