Quote:
Originally Posted by Flash Walken
If I'm reading this right, this link says he played 24% of his even strength icetime with tkachuk and backlund last year, where he produced 33% of his offense.
Tkachuk and backlund played 17% of their minutes last year with Bennett and produced 11% of their points in those minutes.
So that's about 20 games in the spot mangiapane has been in. Bennett predictably saw his point totals shoot up, but he was a drag on his linemates.
This year mangiapane has played 40% of his minutes with them and produced 38% of his points there. Backlund has played 34% of minutes with mangiapane and produced 51% of his offense with him.
What's best for Bennett and what's best for the team are often in conflict which is why Bennett gets the leftover minutes; there are better performing line combos that take priority over getting Bennett icetime.
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Well everyone is going to have their own take aways.
I’d caution you against building an entire case on percentages with low sample sizes. When you have 3 even strength points and 11 percent, another measly point pushes that up to over 14 percent. We are not dealing with statistically significant sample sizes
Is it surprising that Backlund and Tkachuk had better chemistry with Frolik, with whom they played most frequently for complete seasons, than with Bennett in the limited time he played? Should it be?
I think you can see that Bennett has very low percentages of time with consistent linemates. Contrast to Mangiapane, who has had 40 percent of his time w/ Backlund and Tkachuk and 30 percent of his time w/ Tkachuk and Lindholm
It looks okay now, especially since Backlund was returned to C and entered beast mode. But it sure wasn’t looking good before this stretch, where Mang was coming off that 11 game pointless streak
The point there is that the coaches had a steadfast refusal to separate Mangiapane from Tkachuk, no matter how it was going for many, many consecutive unproductive games.
The thing people point to, and what is indisputable, is that Bennett has simply not gotten that consistent set of middle six linemates.