Yesterday Carolyn Wilke tweeted this chart.
If you read the title of this post you know exactly who that team was. The Blue Jackets as a group probably had the most average collection of forwards in the NHL this past season. What that graph is showing is how players were deployed by their coach, and the success they had from a possession standpoint, in relation to the line they played on. So first line players were judged against other first line players and so on. Every Jacket forward is right in the middle so no player was given extreme offensive or defensive zone starts and no player thrived or struggled in terms of Corsi.
This really helps drive home the point I was making in the piece on
Brandon Pirri. The Jackets do not have a star player up front. They are a collection of middle six forwards. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing; there is nothing wrong with having the 15th best forward group in the league. The problem for the Jackets is that that is the strength of their team.
Carolyn followed up that tweet with usage charts for every team, here are the Jackets.
The first graph is the same as the one above just with the labels identifying each player. It’s a little hard to read since the players are so close together. The one name that does standout is Gregory Campbell, he is the farthest left on the graph, representing the player that struggled the most. Nick Foligno is the player farthest to the right, representing the player with the most success, though still very average overall. Alexander Wennberg and Scott Hartnell were the two most sheltered players, while Brandon Dubisnky to the surprise of no one was relied upon the most in the defensive zone.
The second graph is the same idea as the previous two but includes all situations to give you an idea of a player’s special teams usage. At the top of the graph you see Wennberg and Hartnell again, Ryan Johansen, Foligno and Brandon Saad, all key power-play contributors. In the bottom left you see Dubinsky, Matt Calvert, William Karlsson Cam Atkinson and Campbell, the main forwards who were used on the penalty kill.
If you followed the Jackets closely this past season none of this is ground breaking. It is interesting though to see where the Jackets lines stack up across the league. They are right in the middle which isn’t bad; it could be a whole lot worse. Going into next season this shouldn’t change much at all, the Jackets are bringing back the majority of this group with the only addition likely to be Oliver Bjorkstrand and maybe Josh Anderson. Bjorkstrand is going to be a good player but I wouldn’t expect him to move the needle that much in his first full season. If the Jackets are going to contend for a playoff spot next season they are going to need their defence corpse and goalies to step up big time as right now the forward group doesn’t look like it will be much better than average.
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