Now that we’ve reached All Star Weekend, I’ll share what I’ve been working on for the first half of the season.

So this summer I wanted to take a look at some specific line combination stats. For instance, the TOI differences, scoring rates, and ultimately which lines should get to see more time, which play offensively, defensively, etc. It sounded cool, but there’s not too many stats kept as to history of line combinations so I couldn’t do it last season. So this season I have spent time after each Wild game to record the general line combinations for that night, shot reports, goal reports, TOI summaries, powerplay summaries, etc. so I could assemble a pretty cool summary, so I hope you enjoy.

First off, here’s a list of skaters that have played at least a game for the Wild this season, their average line number (for the games they played in), the percent of Wild games spent on each line (they don’t add up to 100% unless they’ve played in all 46 games), and the average EV and PP ice time they see in their games:

Note Stu Bickel’s average ice time is the same (it varies whether he plays forward or defense, but he honestly doesn’t get much ice time and I didn’t want to sort it out for a summary report).

Anyway, here’s the general report on the production of each line combination, and a graph!

The “% of F/D” stats in the table (illustrated in the chart) shows the line’s percentage of each stat in regards to their position’s total stats. For instance, the top line on the Wild has taken 34.2% of all shots taken by forwards, and have 37.7% of the goals scored by Wild forwards. Note that the second defensive pairing has 80% of all goals scored by Wild defensemen.

Some comments before we continue. The reported line combinations may have been (rare, but occasional) shuffled in between periods causing the stats to be slightly off of “actual”. Also, line TOI calculations were taken as the average amount of TOI between the skaters on the line. So if there were injuries, the average TOI for the line might be slightly skewed for the game. Also, players like Stu Bickel and Stephane Veilleux were extremely limited in TOI when they played (not too often, but again occasional), so when they played, the 4th line average TOI was usually like a minute or two lower than usual. All in all, these small disparities pretty much get overwhelmed by the overall season stats, and I know the overall numbers are definitely usable and analysis of these stats is still valid.

Now into actual analysis (this is all even strength stats, so keep that in mind). First off, you can see that the amount of shots taken by each line or defensive pairing is closely tied to how much ice time the see. This is expected, and there doesn’t seem to be a line that is super far off from the average seconds/shot mark for the Wild. Now for what you notice immediately: the second defensive pairing is a scoring machine. Out of the 20 defensemen goals, 16 of them have come from whoever was playing on the 2nd pair that night. I’ll put this into perspective. Defensemen aren’t supposed to put up anywhere close to number that forwards do, but that’s more goals than the 4th liners had (13) and close to the 2nd and 3rd lines (18, 17). And remember there’s only 2 defensemen in the pairing compared to 3 forwards per line. Some of this is from Scandella’s 9 goals this season, but even so, there are 7 other goals (more than any other individual defenseman on the team) to be accounted for. Also, they have the highest shooting percentage of any line or pair for the Wild (12.7%), much higher than the league average 7.9%. Crazy. Also, Ryan Suter and whoever the other skater on the 1st line is have a total of 1 EV goal in 46 games (Suter has it on the first game of the season) on a total of 147 shots on net. If there is any redemption from their garbage-tier shooting percentage, the 1st D-pair has 18 EV assists (half of all defensive assists), so it seems that they dish the puck around to the forward lines instead of scoring themselves.

For the forward lines, the first line is extremely productive (as I stated in a previous puck possession post, actually!). They have 38% of total forward goals and 40% of total forward assists on only 31% of forward time. On average, they take a shot every 145 seconds on the ice, and score every 10 shots. That’s 0.63 even strength goals per game from the line that plays against the best players in the league. The second line takes shots at the same pace as the top line (147 sec/shot) but has such a tough time scoring (2065 sec/goal vs 1451 sec/goal for the 1st line). The Wild’s depth, as you could expect with 6 relatively big names (Parise, Koivu, Pominville, Vanek, Granlund, Coyle) extends only down to 2 lines, as the stats show. The shooting rate is far lower for the bottom two lines, sitting at 179 and 192 sec/shot for 3rd and 4th line respectively. The scoring rate is better than the second line, but still not too great. The weird thing to me was that the 4th line produces assists just as often as the 1st line (876 sec/assist vs 859 sec/assist), so even though players on the 4th line rotate out quite a bit, they have mustered a decent amount of chemistry and has done a good job of finding opportunities to score. Here’s a chart summarizing the seconds/event stats I’ve been giving (note that the 1st D Pair has a stat of 58,800 seconds per goal and it destroyed the scaling if I left it like that):

So I feel like I’ve just been reading you numbers, and there’s really not too much analysis that can go on with this. I mean the shots and TOI numbers are relatively the same, so as a coach you don’t have to drastically alter how often lines are on the ice. Maybe give a touch more to the top two, but you don’t want to wear out your skaters. As for the horribly uneven D-pair scoring rates, you might give less time to the top D line, but that means that you don’t get extremely-defensive minded Suter playing as long, which isn’t smart to have the all star play less. Anyways, here are some cool stats that I found while doing this. When the Wild’s top line takes at least 8 EV shots, they are 10-2-4 (5-0-1 when they take at least 9 EV shots). No one line has had 3 even strength goals in a game. There is only 1 game where each line has scored an EV goal (7-2 W over the bolts). The first line had 5 EV assists in the opener against the avs (the most out of any Wild line in any game this season). When the 4th line scores an EV goal, the Wild are 5-5-1 (this is surprisingly bad, like what the heck, it doesn’t matter if the 4th line scores or not).

Well, there you have it. I guess this wasn’t too special of a post, but it’s been nice to keep track of the Wild during the season. If I can find a way, I’ll look at goals allowed vs goals scored (ie +/-) for each line to see which lines may be risky to put on the ice, etc.