August 22, 2014

Glendening vs Andersson Part 2

Sorry for the lack of activity, its been a busy week as I get back into the swing of things. Last time I looked at the battle for the 4th line center between Luke Glendening and Joakim Andersson. My conclusions concurred with one reached over at WingingitinMotown, that Andersson should take the final spot.
Despite this evidence, Babcock loves Glendening’s competitiveness, and matches him up against the opposition's best. In theory, although Glendening may lack Andersson’s offensive ability he has a greater ability to frustrate scorers on the opposition. Think Dubinksy’s play against Crosby during the first round of the playoffs. Thankfully, we have a way to quantify this and see if the theory matches performance. Thanks to stats.hockeyanalysis.com, we can compare how the opposition did against Glendening or Andersson to how they did against the rest of the league.
Due to the small sample size I'll ignore the GF% and just compare the CF% at 5-5 play. Again we see that Glendening does indeed face tougher competition as they average a 50.13 CF% compared to only 49.70% for Andersson. However Glendening craters against this competition, as his possession decreases by nearly 6%. For comparison's sake, on average Glendening’s competition possesses the puck as well as the Winnipeg Jets. When playing Glendening, the opposition's possession improves to Chicago's level. Andersson on the other hand manages to take the slighter easier competition and decrease their possession by nearly 3%. While this is not conclusive evidence, it is becoming more and more evident that despite the love for Glendening’s speed and gritty play, Andersson should be in the lineup.


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