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Brandon Sutter did not file for arbitration by the deadline on Saturday which I found peculiar. By not filing for arbitration Sutter forewent one of his bigger pieces of leverage. Now the only leverage he has in negotiations would be an offer sheet from an outside source and we all know how often those are thrown around.
With a lot of talk going around on what Brandon Sutter's true value is I wanted to take a look at one of the statistical anomalies that has shown up in Sutter's career.
Brandon Sutter has never been a very good possession player yet he almost always seems to find a way to have a goals for percentage which is better than his possession. How does he do this? Is there a certain part of Sutter's defensive game that lends itself to poor possession but also keeping goals out of the net?
Here is his career chart:
As you can see his goals for percentage is on average a lot better than his possession.
I started digging through some other numbers and I believe I stumbled across the reason for Sutter's "success" in the goal for percentage department. It wasn't anything that he was doing special. Sutter just happened to be on the right side of luck for a long time. Here is a chart of his on ice save percentage throughout his career.
You'll notice that it has a similar curve to what Sutter's goals for percentage is throughout his career.
Here are the on ice save percentage leaders over the past 6 seasons (length of Sutter's career) courtesy of Hockey Analysis.
Brandon Sutter has an incredible .938% on ice save percentage. That is insanely high. That can help explain how somebody who is usually buried in their own end can see better than normal goals for percentages.
You'll notice that the names on that list are random, you have some good players, some really bad players, and some average players.
Just to show how random on ice save percentage is here are the bottom 10 players from that same sample size.
There are some good players including a few superstars on that list and it just goes to show how random the goaltending is.
These are some of the things you'll want to think about before extending a player that will likely see his value exceed 3M. Especially a player that just may have been on the right side of lady luck.
Thanks for reading!
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