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It's been almost a month since the last Usage Chart post. The biggest reason for that is that most of the bubbles were moving slowly enough that it wasn't easy to see just how much they'd changed. A secondary reason was that the Penguins were making trades seemingly every other day and the new players' data was kind of corrupting the charts a bit.
Now that things have stabilized a bit, I've updated the charts, minus Dylan Reese and Trevor Smith, whose name I had to look up just now because he made no impression on me at all. First up is the bog-standard Corsi chart.
- It is clear that Dan Bylsma sees Brandon Sutter as a true 1-for-1 replacement for Jordan Staal. Unfortunately, his performance does not bear out this usage. I don't think this surprises anyone here, and we should have expected this from the start.
- As fun as Douglas Murray has been to watch, he's really not doing much to ensure his playing time beyond being an immovable object.
- Pascal Dupuis.
- It's nice to see Jussi Jokinen and Jarome Iginla coming up nicely on the positive side of things when they were both pretty big question marks in terms of possession numbers. Insert caveat here about Iginla playing for Calgary, of course.
- Robert Bortuzzo has done well with his recent playing time, but still neither he nor Deryk Engelland have given us reason to call for them over Simon Despres, especially now that Murray is apparently locked in place in the top 6.
- Okay, so Beau Bennett doesn't look so hot here, but consider that his recent linemates have all been players who were more negative all year long. Basically, if there's a problem on that line, I don't think it's him.
- Hey, don't look now, but Tyler Kennedy might not be doing so poorly after all, guys.
Now for the Adjusted Corsi chart. In this case, Corsi has been normalized for zone starts.
- Biggest winners: Brooks Orpik (+8.86), Brandon Sutter (+7.89), and Paul Martin (+6.25), who was pushed into the positive by the normalization process.
- Biggest losers: Evgeni Malkin (-7.11), Jarome Iginla (-4.94), who was pushed negative, and James Neal (-4.90).
- The only other player who swapped signs was Robert Bortuzzo, who went negative.
And now for the Fenwick-based chart.
- Biggest winners here (in comparison to straight Corsi): Joe Vitale (+10.6), Craig Adams (+9.8), and Tanner Glass (+7.7), although this is kind of damning with faint praise. They're blocking shots because they can't seem to prevent them from happening even a little bit.
- Biggest losers here: James Neal (-8.7), Simon Despres (-7.7), and Evgeni Malkin (-6.8). Is anyone surprised by any of this? All three of these guys are very solid positive-Corsi and positive-Fenwick players to the point where these losses didn't really hurt them at all.
- Color changes go to Tyler Kennedy who dipped slightly into the negative, and Deryk Engelland who dipped even more slightly into positive numbers.
The next set of charts will be after the season.