[Wild About Numbers]: Trying To Make Sense Of Ryan Suter's Negative Puck Possession Numbers

Below are two player usage charts showing each of Ryan Suter's seasons from 2007-08 (his 3rd year in the league) up to the current season. The bubble colour indicates positive (blue) or negative (red) Corsi relative to the rest of his team. The bubble size is the amount. The X-Axis indicates "Offensive Zone Start%". The Y-Axis represents "Quality Of Competition" in the first chart and "Quality Of Teammates" in the second.

(Right-click on the images and select "open link in new tab" to see them full size)

Season-By-Season Corsi Relative

-Quality Of Competition:

• What this chart tells us is that Suter was a majorly positive influence on his team's puck possession for 5 seasons in Nashville, but suddenly became a negative influence when he arrived in Minnesota.

• What's stranger is, in terms of deployment, Suter has played the easiest minutes of his career in Minnesota. His usage this season is very comparable to the 2007-08 season.

• His best season was his last one in Nashville, in which he played tough competition with hard zone starts and yet put up great numbers.

-Quality Of Teammates:

• The quality of teammates is another factor that needs to be considered, and this chart shows that Suter had fairly normal QoT last season and slightly below average so far this year.

• Just to underline how great his 2011-12 season was, not only did he play tough competition, he did so with his lowest quality of teammates of the seasons in the chart above.

• There is nothing in these charts to suggest that Suter's deployment in Minnesota has been the cause of his dramatic turnaround in underlying numbers.

This Season

-Here's a player usage chart for the Wild's defencemen this season:

Defensive Partners

Ice Time

-Here is Suter's total TOI/G and in various situations from the last 7 seasons:

• Suter's TOI/G has increased by nearly 3.5 minutes since 2011/12, with most of the increase coming at even strength. It could be argued that this is effecting his numbers by making him more fatigued.

• It's been discussed here ad nauseum, but Suter's over-usage could come back to bite the Wild down the stretch if he ends up hurt. I know he's a great athlete but that doesn't make him invincible.

• It could also be argued that he would be more effective if a few minutes were shaved off his ice time and he was a bit fresher.

Scoring

-Here are Suter's scoring rates overall and at even strength in each of the last 3 seasons:

• It's not just Suter's underlying numbers that are suffering this season, his even strength scoring has nose-dived somewhat.

• Last year he was pretty much the sole generator of offence on the Wild's blueline, but this year he has found it much tougher. He is still producing well on the powerplay, but he is just not scoring with anywhere near the same efficiency at even strength.

Limiting Shot Quality

There was an interesting point raised by ThatGuy22 in a thread a while back that went like this:

Suter plays a positional hockey game. His goal is to let the shooter come to him, and keep himself between the shooter and the goalie. He is perfectly happy to let shooters take long range shots, as long as they don't get into a decent scoring position to do it. It saves energy allowing to play half the game, but does a number on his Corsi/Fenwick.

Arguments against Corsi based around shot quality have been researched and disproven many times, but these normally focus on the a team level, so this concept regarding individual players is very interesting and warrants further attention.

The numbers at the time backed the theory up somewhat, with Suter allowing a lower percentage of close range shots than some other notable NHL defencemen. The issues of course were sample size, the possibility of it just being randomness and whether or not this tactic was actually producing positive results in terms of stopping the other team scoring goals and helping the Wild to do so at the other end of the ice.

I decided to look a bit further into this, so I looked at the average distance of shots allowed while Suter and 49 other defencemen were on the ice over the last two seasons. I discounted shots from 30 ft or greater because these outliers would skew results.

-Here are the 50 defencemen this season and last season ranked by average shot distance allowed (This is road data only to minimise noise created by scorers bias):

• It's interesting that there are some players who registered very similar "average shot distance against" numbers in both seasons, but there are also some who posted two years of wildly different results so it's hard to say how repeatable a skill this is.

• The opposition shooting percentage numbers fluctuate wildly, suggesting that it's a stat largely driven by luck and randomness as opposed to shot distance.

• Some of the guys who are near the top both years, such as Brian Campbell, Victor Hedman, Tom Gilbert, Jay Bouwmeester and Andy Greene post positive Corsi numbers while seemingly doing a great job at forcing opponents to shoot from further away. This puts something of a knife in the idea that playing that style of game results in ugly underlying numbers.

• There are some guys near the top of both tables, such as Matt Carle and Justin Schultz who have poor puck possession numbers but seem to be good at forcing longer range shots against like Suter.

• What this all suggests is that there's a whole lot of randomness at play here.

• Also of note, last season, Marek Zidlicky's average distance of shots surrendered was about the same as Suter's but the Devils conceded goals on a lower percentage of those shots than the Wild. Likewise, this year Justin Schultz has similar average distance to Suter but a lower Sh% against. You could read into that and say that they were better than Suter at limiting "quality shots" against, but it's most likely that it's just randomness and driven by goaltending.

• The R-squared value 0.0017 means that there is no correlation between the average distance of shots against while a defenceman is on the ice and their Corsi relative, or at least not within this sample of players.

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Let's say Suter is employing a technique of allowing shot attempts against but preventing quality scoring chances, then surely the positive effect of this technique would show up in his numbers compared to the rest of the Wild defence.

-The following table shows the Wild's 5v5 goals, shots, unblocked shot attempts (Fenwick) and shot attempts (Corsi) for and against per 20 minutes this season with Suter on the ice and where he ranks among the Wild's defencemen:

• Suter is fairly middle-of-the-pack in all areas, but the one that stands out is he has the lowest on ice goal rate of all Wild defencmen.

• If he is employing defensive techniques to limit shot quality against, it isn't having any major effect on his numbers by the looks of things. He's seeing goals being scored while he's on the ice at a fairly normal rate.

Summary

I've gone into as much detail as I can on this. I can't say for sure that Suter's poor puck possession numbers aren't a result of some kind of shot quality-limiting technique, but I have reason to believe that is not the case. A key thing to consider is that he posted excellent numbers in Nashville so, unless he drastically changed something technically when he arrived in Minnesota, he could just be underperforming or suffering from not playing beside an experienced elite defenceman like Shea Weber.

You can dismiss the numbers and say that anything that insinuates Ryan Suter isn't playing at an elite level must be wrong, but it's worth bearing in mind that the accepted elite defencemen in this league such as Duncan Keith, Alex Pietrangelo, Drew Doughty, Zdeno Chara and P.K. Subban are all positive Corsi players. Isn't it strange that Suter isn't?

In my opinion, whether by the eye-test or by the numbers, the Wild need more from Suter. He is often talked about as a top-5 or top-10 player in this league but I don't think we've seen that this season. He's been good, but he needs to be great if this team is gonna turn into a serious threat come playoff time.

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So, what are your thoughts on all of this, Wilderness? Any suggestions of other things I could've looked at here, or anything I missed? Leave a comment in the comments section. I'm interested to hear some opinions on this.

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[P.s. Major props to SomeKindOfNinja, the site I used for all the shot location data and some of the player usage charts. Also, thanks to Stats.HockeyAnalysis, BehindTheNet, ExtraSkater and Hockey Abstract for various other numbers.]