The idea was brought up in a recent post about using advanced stats to build the optimal line combinations for the Wings this up coming season. Before going any further I have to add the disclaimer that I am still very much a novice at interpreting advanced stats and my ultimate hope is that this post will foster more intelligent discussion about how to use the advanced stats for more than evaluating individual players. Also before going into the actual numbers and lines I have to set up the assumptions and parameters I used for my analysis.

For the roster I used the following assumptions to build the player pool:

- Only players currently on the roster were considered (so no Alfie)

- The player had to have at least 10 games with the team over the last 2 seasons. Some of the sample sizes were small enough as it was (Weiss) without trying to figure out who a kid with only 4 games under his belt should be paired with for optimization.

-Players were considered by position as they are listed on the depth chart on CapGeek with 1 exception. Sheahan is listed as a LW but I obviously chose to use him as a C.

For the stats I decided to use purely Corsi For (CF%) for the past 2 seasons that I took from Hockey Analysis (). For Weiss and Jurco obviously only last year's stats were looked at.

For forwards I started with the centers and compared the CF% with to the CF% w/o. When it came time to build the lines I put wingers with the center whom they had the biggest differential between their with and without CF% with the only stipulation being that the CF% with had to be above 50%. The one exception was Weiss simply because no one had above 50% CF With numbers with Weiss but for pretty obvious reasons he is still a better center going forward then Andersson or Glendening.

With the defenseman I did a similar comparison except once I found the With or Without You (WOWY) differential I compared them for each player and looked for pairings where the differential was a positive for both players (meaning each one had a higher CF% With then a CF% Without). I also did not consider any pairings with less that 60 minutes played together to mitigate the sample size issues. Let's start first with the forwards.

After looking at the 6 players on the Wings listed as center (Pav, Weiss, Helm, Sheahan, Andersson and Glendening) I settled on the obvious 4 of Pav, Weiss, Helm and Sheahan to build my lines around. Keep in mind as well that the line order is in no real particular order and their QoC was not taken into account as this is more about how certain guys play together on a line only. So without further rambling here is the optimized lines I came up with. The numbers in parentheses are the CF%w, CF%w/o, differential in that order.

Datsyuk line

LW- Zetterberg (58.46/51.1/7.36), RW - Abdelkader (56.7/50.8/5.9)

Sheahan line

LW - Nyquist (59.12/53.96/5.16) RW - Tatar (58.03/56.33/1.7)

Helm line

LW - Miller (55.36/47.76/7.6) RW - Jurco (62.5/55.1/7.4)

Weiss line

LW - Cleary (44.15/48.07/-3.92) RW - Franzen (46.2/52.05/-5.85)

Obviously that Weiss line could and likely would be a flaming dumpster fire but I would completely be comfortable with the other 3. On a side note, in almost every data set I looked at Sheahan was #1 or #2 among the centers. Obviously this is due in part to all the others being injured at times but he had some pretty impressive numbers last year, especially when it came to assists. Now onto the defensemen, and this surprised the heck out of me. The numbers in parentheses are the CF%W and W/O for each player followed by the differentials.

Kronwall (53.1/52.3/0.8)/Ericsson (53.1/51.3/1.8)

Quincey (54.1/49.7/4.4)/Smith (54.1/55.0/-0.9)

DeKeyser (54.4/49.0/5.4)/Kindl (54.4/52.8/1.6)

The big thing that jumps is the Quincey/Smith pairing. Strangely enough Smith actually had the best overall numbers out of everyone. There was a positive differential for every qualified defenseman pair with Smith and he had a negative or slight positive (.5 or below) differential with every qualified defenseman. In other words, every defenseman with the Wings who has logged more that 60 minutes total with Smith over the last 2 seasons has a better CF% with him then without him and he has a better or damn near equal CF% without then with.

So there you have it. The optimized lines and pairings for the Wings based on my understanding of Corsi For WOWY numbers over the last 2 seasons. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did putting it together and let the spear throwing/discussion begin.