Great point by Cassidy on Coyle being a righty. In hindsight they might have been better trading for a lefty center since now with Kuraly out they are going into playoffs with no left draw-men.
crunching numbers on faceoffs... we see a good faceoff guy wins around 55% at most... and the crappiest guys win around 45% and a great number of guys are between 49% and 51%
when you calculate how many faceoffs a guy might take in a typical game and say most guys take less than 20 on average... and you realize that many faceoffs are not won cleanly and become scrums... then the number of times it really matters if you have a good faceoff guy/or a bad faceoff guy is far far far less significant then whether you have a good zone entry guy or a good zone clearance guy
sure we all see those 10-12 times a year a goal gets scored off a faceoff... so what? around once every 400 faceoffs a team might score because they cleanly won a faceoff? does that sound about right?
is this really a real thing that people really should be spending real time giving real concern too?
I bet the stats on getting scored on by bad penalties is way way way higher.
ive seen soooooooooooooo many games where the team that dominated in the faceoff circle got beat absolutely spanked on the score sheet. I know it sounds smart to talk about faceoffs and their impact on a game but ive never seen anyone successfully tie faceoffs to zone time or corsi or cupey or whatever they call their fancy stats.
when it all averages out... a guy takes around 20 faceoffs a night and wins around 51% and loses around 49% and the next guy on the bench wins around 49% and loses around 51% and the difference is one guy wins 11 and loses 9 and the other guy wins 9 and loses 11 every 4th or 5th night and over the span of a season one guy might have lost 3-4 important faceoffs the other guy wouldnt have lost
ultimately I give a lot of credit to the wingers for winning/losing faceoffs because when im watching the game many faceoffs are tied up by the 2 centers and its a winger that will dig the puck free and actually make a play