Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community - View Single Post - [News] Matt Stajan activated from IR; Corban Knight assigned to Adirondack

gvitaly · 12-04-2014, 01:48 PM

I am glad to hear Stajan is back, and hopefully he will get into game shape rather quickly. I am a little surprised at the rose colored glasses regarding Stajan a little bit though. To get things into perspective the Flames had a 78.1% PK when Stajan was healthy, compared to 75.4% right now. He makes a difference on the PK and we only conceded 1 PPGA with him on the ice, but he won't make that big of a difference.

As for faceoffs, Stajan's stats are a little padded thanks to all his starts on the 4th line. If you take a look at when he was playing a shutdown center last year his faceoffs really suffered-
Nugent-Hopkins 44.2%
Towes 40%
Backstrom 57.7%
Thornton 46.2%
Crosby 20%
Sedin 63.6%
Datsyuk 29.4%
Tavares 27.3%
...
All the Figures taken from Faceoffs.net
There are examples that go both ways, but I don't think that Stajan can be relied upon as a faceoffs specialist consistently. A cherry picked example would be his short handed faceoffs percentage of 31.6% during this season. I do agree that he still is better than Granlund/Bouma in the faceoff circle by quite a margin. I just want him to start on the 4th line, get into game shape, and earn more responsibility... just like any other player.

12-04-2014, 01:48 PM	#78
gvitaly Franchise Player Join Date: Jul 2010 Exp:	I am glad to hear Stajan is back, and hopefully he will get into game shape rather quickly. I am a little surprised at the rose colored glasses regarding Stajan a little bit though. To get things into perspective the Flames had a 78.1% PK when Stajan was healthy, compared to 75.4% right now. He makes a difference on the PK and we only conceded 1 PPGA with him on the ice, but he won't make that big of a difference. As for faceoffs, Stajan's stats are a little padded thanks to all his starts on the 4th line. If you take a look at when he was playing a shutdown center last year his faceoffs really suffered- Nugent-Hopkins 44.2% Towes 40% Backstrom 57.7% Thornton 46.2% Crosby 20% Sedin 63.6% Datsyuk 29.4% Tavares 27.3% ... All the Figures taken from Faceoffs.net There are examples that go both ways, but I don't think that Stajan can be relied upon as a faceoffs specialist consistently. A cherry picked example would be his short handed faceoffs percentage of 31.6% during this season. I do agree that he still is better than Granlund/Bouma in the faceoff circle by quite a margin. I just want him to start on the 4th line, get into game shape, and earn more responsibility... just like any other player.