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(See here for more information. The position of the bubble is determined by the coaching staff; the size and color of the bubble are entirely up to the player.)
Let's get straight to it.
Click to embiggen.
- Most of the bubbles are a similar size to last week, so things are starting to settle down a bit.
- Tyler Kennedy's bubble moved up quite a bit to reflect stiffer competition and turned negative again. I'm not sure what might have brought this about.
- The left-side players are all slowly making their way up toward tougher and tougher competition. Some people like Brandon Sutter and Matt Cooke aren't faring well, but Pascal Dupuis is taking on all comers and beating them soundly.
- Mark Eaton didn't fare well in his limited playing time. That experiment might be over sooner than we thought.
- Deryk Engelland continues to lose the three-way fight with Robert Bortuzzo and Simon Despres for those last defenseman spots. It's pretty clear that one spot is--or should be--Despres's to lose at this point.
- Can anyone complain about Beau Bennett? Not me.
- Oh, and Brooks Orpik doesn't have the biggest bubble anymore because he actually did pretty well this past week. Sidney Crosby does.
And new for this week, I'm incorporating a chart that normalizes for zone starts. Thanks to Eric T. over at Broad Street Hockey for helping me move forward with this. The attempt here is to remove the affects of zone starts on relative Corsi numbers. As people have mentioned, it's easier to have a positive Corsi if you're starting a lot of your shifts in the offensive zone, so this allows us to see what would happen if everyone had exactly 50% zone starts. It's still put on the same axes so that you can see where their real zone starts are, but the size and color of the bubbles do not actually reflect that on this chart.
Click to embiggen again.
- Pascal Dupuis is even better than he looks. SELKE!
- I'm not going to stop bagging on Brooks Orpik, but this does take the edge off a little.
- Paul Martin when taken in this context is positive, which might jive with some people's eye test a little better.
- Matt Niskanen and Dustin Jeffrey, despite having >50% OZ%, still look better in this context than in the straight-up chart.
- Tyler Kennedy is positive here, but barely.
- Deryk Engelland is still negative, but not quite as bad, but Despres's bubble is almost the same as it is in the regular chart.
- Despite being over 60% OZ%, Beau Bennett gets even better viewed in this light, which is astonishing. I think he's proven himself.