One positive thing the Canes have (or "had" I should say at this point) was the emergence of Bryan Allen and Tim Gleason as a shutdown defense pairing. When these two were paired together, they took over 60% of their draws in their own zone, were constantly matched up against the opposing team's top lines and had 50% of the team's scoring chances go in the Canes favor. That pairing has since been split up with Allen being regulated to third pairing minutes (for whatever reason) but the Canes are going to have a big decision coming up within the next year as both players contracts are expiring and they might be forced to keep one or the other. Both are having great seasons and could have solid trade value in a few months for a team looking for a shutdown defenseman but the idea of losing these two is very troubling when you consider how big of a role they play.

That's when it hit me. Just how much is the going rate for a shutdown defenseman in this league? Even better, just how hard is it to replace a shutdown defenseman? I'm talking about guys who are more one-dimensional because guys like Drew Doughty, Nicklas Lidstrom, Shea Weber and Zdeno Chara are signed to large contracts due to their great play at both ends, but what about a guy who is more of a defensive stud who contributes little offense? That description fits Allen and Gleason to a T and it made me think that replacing these two may not be as big of a hassle.

Whenever I think of the Gleason/Allen situation, I'm reminded of when Mike Komisarek was set to become a free agent after the 2008-09 season and appeared to have suitors all over the league looking to ink him to a big deal. However, a hockey mind that respect mentioned that he would not pay Komisarek big money because he believed that a stay-at-home defenseman like him could be found in other places for half the cost. An alternative option was Greg Zanon. Komisarek was a stud that year with -1.1 corsi rel. with a 39.8% OZone rate while Zanon had a worse -11.7 corsi rel with 42% of his draws coming in the offensive zone. Komisarek signed with the Leafs to a contract worth $4.5 mil per season while Zanon signed with the Minnesota Wild for about half that. Since then, Zanon has continued to play in a shutdown role for the Wild while Komisarek was hurt for the majority of the first year of his contract and was used in a lesser role in the second year. The Wild signed Zanon to play the same role as Komisarek was supposed to play on the Leafs for half of the cost. What is even more interesting is that the Leafs had guys on cheap contracts like Keith Aulie, Luke Schenn and Carl Gunnarsson play the shutdown role and make Komisarek expandable, making his contract look like an albatross.

Is this just a one time thing or are other teams replacing their highly-touted shutdown defensemen for less money? What does this mean concerning the future of Allen and Gleason? We'll explore things further after the jump.

One of the most misleading stats in hockey is powerplay and penalty kill percentages because they are driven by variable stats like save and shooting percentage, which regress over time. For instance, a team might have a powerplay that's generates only 1-2 scoring chances per game total, but they are clicking at a 25% efficiency because most of the shots they take end up being goals. That last sentence should tell you that they are getting lucky and how that plays a big role into how "good" or "bad" their powerplay may be. On the penalty kill, you could have a unit that manages to not allow any shots for a minute and fourty five seconds, then a harmless looking wrist shot from the point sneaks past the goaltender and the penalty kill gets tagged for a goal allowed despite doing just about everything right.

The goal of a penalty kill is to prevent as many shots and chances against as possible, which is why I look at those numbers instead for determining how good a team is in that area. Carolina appears to have the 26th ranked penalty kill with a 78.4% success rate according to this metric, which indicates that the PK hasn't improved that much compared to last year. General observation tells you otherwise, which is why we need to dig deeper into the Canes PK to see how "bad" it really is. In terms of shots allowed per 60 minutes, Carolina has the 12th worst PK in the league surrendering about 53 shots per 60 mins. and while that isn't good, it is a hell of an improvement from last season when they were the second worst penalty killing team in the NHL.

Defensemen are generally considered the main players on the penalty kill but forwards play a big role as well. It's their responsibility to win battles along the boards, block shots, win faceoffs and clear the puck which are all critical when killing penalties. Outside of Brandon Sutter and Patrick Dwyer, just about all of Carolina's forwards struggled at killing penalties last season so I wanted to look at their performance so far this season. There are also some personnel changes that have taken place over past year, so going deeper into the forwards performance on the PK will show how much of an effect they've had. The results may surprise you.

More after el salto

Three points in three games this past week for the Canes. That doesn't sound too bad, but they were outshot, outchanced and outscored for yet another week. All three games were decided by only one goal and the fact that two came in losses does show that the Canes were getting slightly unlucky the past week but they were VERY lucky to even escape Toronto with a point and they were outplayed by the Canucks at even strength in their only victory. The numbers for the week match up with the team's overall performance this year, though. Their shot rate was about 46.6 while their chance rate was roughly the same. It is frustrating that we're not seeing much of an improvement in that area under Kirk Muller but we're seeing some improvement on the powerplay with 12 scoring chances generated on the man advantage compared to only 7 powerplay chances given up. Cam Ward also seems to be regaining his usual form and he could steal us some more wins down the road. He did against Vancouver and Carolina may have not have even earned a point in the standings last week if it wasn't for him.

Injuries are playing a big role into the lack of progress, though. Jeff Skinner and Joni Pitkanen were two of the team's best possession drivers and it's going to be interesting to see what the numbers look like with both of them out of the lineup. I have a feeling they won't be pretty though. Most of us have accepted that this team is too far out of the race to make a push towards the playoffs so it's evaluation time from now on.

More after the jump

I was just as shocked as anyone to see that the Jamie McBain-Tim Gleason defense pairing was kept together in Thursday night's game against the Canucks because of how poorly those two played as a unit until then. While they had a respectable outing that game, I thought Kirk Muller would have decided to reunite Bryan Allen and Tim Gleason since they were going up against a strong offensive team and McBain has struggled in a shutdown role thus far. That's when I began to thought to myself the negatives of the Allen-Gleason defense pairing. Both guys are studs in their own zone and the best defensemen on the team in terms of preventing chances against but neither are that good of puck movers.

There is a lot of pressure put on defensemen to get the puck out of their own zone with break-out passes that you need to have a puck-moving defenseman on almost any pairing. One of McBain's strengths is being able to move the puck well and with Joni Pitkanen on the shelf indefinitely, that makes him an attractable option for the top pairing. Allen and Gleason, on the other hand, are not known for their puck-moving skills but are both so bad that they can't play on the top pairing?

This is where looking at zone entries and exits will come in handy. Derek Zona of Copper and Blue looked at this for the Oilers and the folks at Broad Street Hockey have been tracking zone entries for the Flyers all season. The latter part is what we're the most concerned with here because having a defenseman that can get the puck out of the zone is crucial for establishing any kind of offense. To compare McBain and Allen's puck moving skills, I watched each of their shifts from the last game they played on a pairing with Gleason (Thursday vs. Canucks for McBain and Nov. 26th vs. Florida for Allen), recorded what happened each time they touched the puck in the defensive zone and logged how they advanced the puck. Did they make an outlet pass to a forward in the neutral zone, rely one of the forwards to exit the zone, make a big slap pass around the boards and hope for the best or do it the old fashioned way and exit the zone themselves?

Find out the answer after the jump

The Carolina Hurricanes were hit hard with injuries the past week as it was announced last night that both Joni Pitkanen and Jeff Skinner will be out indefinitely after sustaining concussions. I don't even need to tell you how critical of a loss Jeff Skinner is, so I'll save the statistical mumbo jumbo for him. However, I do want to touch on how the injury to Joni Pitkanen will effect the defense. He's missed about 10 games already and has been such a key piece to the defense that things tend to get shaken up a lot during that time. That's certainly been the case this season as the Canes have gone through about 30 different defense combinations this year and the only two consistent pairings were Pitkanen/McBain and Allen/Gleason. Tomas Kaberle and Jay Harrison was the only other defense pairing that had a long tenure and that's obviously defunct now. The constant mix-and-matching on the blue-line has been going on all season but it always seems to increase a ton whenever Pitkanen is out of the lineup. He always logs a ton of minutes and is playing TOUGH situations this year, so that's understandable. After the jump, we'll take a look at how Carolina's defense pairings have played this year and some possible solutions as to what the team can do while #25 is on the IR.

Before his terrific performance against the Leafs last night, Cam Ward was one of the main frustrations with this Hurricanes team as he's clearly played below his standards this year. Ward has been Carolina's back-stop ever since he took them to the Cup in 2005-06 and has been performing at a high level for the past three years (EV Sv% <.920 during that time). This year, however, he's taken a sharp turn downward with his even strength and overall save percentages being way below the league average. He's beginning to show frustrations with both his play and, to some extent, the team around him. So who is to blame for Ward's struggles? Is the defense in front of him making his job harder or is the problem with Ward centered around himself? We'll explore this after the jump.

One of the features on this blog is the weekly rundown of the Hurricanes performance and at the beginning I present a graph called an "OZ Coke Chart" which is a graph that shows how each player on the team is being used. It plots a player's offensive zone starts on the x-axis agianst his corsi relative to quality of competition (corsi rel QoC) on the y-axis to show how tough his assignments are. A player with a high corsi rel. QoC and low percentage of offensive zone starts are usually shutdown defensemen or defensive forwards capable of playing well against the opposition's top players. On the other end, players that are given a higher percentage of offensive zone starts and are placed against average to bad competition are those who coaches do not trust defensively and shelter them as a result. The idea comes from Rob Vollman at Hockey Prospectus and is being used by many different team bloggers including the Flyers, Flames, Stars, Capitals and Blue Jackets.

I've been monitoring this for the Hurricanes all season and figured it would be a cool idea to see how other Southeast coaches are using their players. I did make one extra addition with this, though. To show how each player is performing, I used a bubble graph and color coded the bubbles to show if a player has a positive (blue) or negative (red) corsi relative rating. This will help display how well a player is driving possession in his role. The bubbles also increase or decrease in size depending on what his corsi relative rating is. If he's positive and has a big bubble, then he's killing it territorially. If he's negative and has a big bubble, then he's getting dominated. Have I lost you yet? Hopefully not, because we haven't gotten to the good stuff yet. That comes after the jump.

What do we make of the past week for the Carolina Hurricanes? They got their first win under Kirk Muller by defeating the Oilers in dominant fashion, but they also had two stinkers against Calgary and Winnipeg. I mean, they were only outscored 13-14 and outshot 92-97 so how bad could they have played? Well, the data is skewed a bit from that Oilers game because if you eliminate that, then the Canes were outshot and outscored by a much bigger margin. Also, their performance at even strength was a mixed bag. They controlled only 46.8% of the shots five-on-five but had the advantage in scoring chances by owning 52.5% of those, but I'm willing to bet that most of it is from the Oilers game and when they were playing catch-up to the Flames on Tuesday. Goaltending brought this team down for the second week in a row as Cam Ward was pulled twice and stopped only 86.5% of the shots he faced. Not even close to being "good enough." It's been a weakness for this team all year and it hasn't been improving.

I breakdown the past week for the Canes after the jump

One thing statisticians love to throw around is how "x player is on pace for y amount of points" whenever they are on a hot or cold streak. Take Jiri Tlusty for instance, he's off to a pretty strong start by his standards with six goals and 11 points in 31 games. He is currently on pace for 16 goals and 29 points if he plays all 82 games, which would be career highs for him. Is it possible that he keeps up that pace? Sure, but it's equally likely that he won't because things like injuries, slumps, hot streaks, etc can happen at any time and change a player's goals and points per game rate. Actually, a player's "scoring pace" changes just about every game when you think about it, which is why I thought it would be a fun idea to look at every regular forward on the Canes, see what their pace is and whether they'll finish above or below that mark. We'll start this after the jump.

Bryan Allen has arguably been the Hurricanes' best defenseman in this very forgettable season. He's played 18-20 minutes a night, is usually given the toughest assignments and has posted a 4.5 Corsi Rel. rating, which is the best among defensemen. Not only that, but he has been outperforming the entire defense corps when it comes to creating and preventing scoring chances. Despite his great play, Allen's seen his role decrease by a lot over the past few weeks. Was Kirk Muller the reason for this? We'll find out after the jump.