To carry on the discussion from yesterday about our defense not being that far apart I decided to crunch some numbers to see if I was smoking as much crack as everyone seemed to think when I made the statement yesterday about the US defensive core being close to if not better than Canadas.
What I did was I took the top 6 left handed shots and the top 6 right handed shots from each country. Lined them up, came up with a top 7 for each country. Compared their stats for last season as both an entire pool of players both countries have to draw from, and the top 7 I came up with.
Things I found from this comparison:
1) Canada has a much deeper pool to draw from, blows the US away when you analyze the top 12
2) Team Canada is very strong on right handed shots, weak on left handed shots where as Team USA has a better mix of both handed shots.
3) This does not take into consideration that Team Canada may have Right Handed shots playing the right point on their actual final roster.
4) I left off Letang and Subban from the final grouping, yes that skews the numbers a bit but I don't think I'm way off in the rosters I came up with.
Rosters I went with, please let me know if you think these are way off or if I missed someone (entirely possible) and I'll make adjustments:
USA:
Carlson - Suter
Shattenkirk - Yandle
Byfuglien - Mcdonagh
Martin
Canada:
Weber - Keith
Doughty - Bouwmeester
Pietrangelo - Staal
Seabrook
GP, Weight, TOI are all averages. I'm not smart enough to know how to average height without too much work. All stats pulled from hockey-reference.com.
TLDR - People here undervalue the likes of Carlson, Mcdonagh, and Yandle. Feel free to flame away at what I skrewed up and how much I suck because team Canada is Godly and no one is even close and one year of stats isn't relevant etc. etc.
Note: I'm Canadian.