[driveway]

Face offs are an overrated statistic. They feel important, but they actually aren't.

It takes something like a +70 differential in face off wins to result in a single expected goal. The difference between the best and worst teams in face offs is a win either way: the very best team gains a single win, the very worst team loses a win, and that's over the course of an entire season. We're a lot more than a single win away from being competitive in the league right now.

There are other areas of the Flames' game which require vastly more attention than our face offs.

Edit: And if you want to criticize any of our players on face offs, the last one you should be mad at is Monahan. The dude takes an absolutely massive number of draws. He's taken the 4th most draws of any player in the whole league. Last year he finished 7th. This year Only O'Reilly, Giroux, and Little have taken more. He's tied with Bergeron. The kid is a horse, and he's won the 10th most of any player in the league. He's outright won more draws than Kopitar, H. Sedin, Backstrom, Tavares, Getzlaf, MacKinnon... many of these players he's won almost 100 more face offs than.

Yes, his percentage could go up, but when you consider that he's 21 years old and the next most heavily-used face-off taker of similar age is 22 year-old Mika Zibanejad who has taken 151 fewer draws than Monahan, I think we can lay off the kid.