Just over two weeks ago, the NHL debuted NHL Edge advanced stats, a new section of the league website that shows data obtained from the league’s player and puck tracking data.
Immediately, Zach Werenski’s phone blew up.
The Blue Jackets defenseman’s buddies were surprised to find that when the league listed the fastest skaters in a game this season, Werenski checked in third with a maximum speed of 23.50 mph, also the top mark of any defenseman in a game setting.
No one thinks Werenski is slow, but in a league where swift-skating defenders are taking over blue lines, people – including Werenski – didn’t necessarily think he’d be the fastest.
“Sonny Milano sent it to me and was like, ‘What the hell?’” Werenski joked. “I was like, ‘I don’t know, man. My mind is blown, too.’
“I can still move, I guess. I’m getting old, but I still got it.”
It was one of the more interesting observations from the data, which lists top-10 leaderboards for the league in a variety of categories and also allows fans to explore by players to see where they rank, percentile-wise, in all the measurements.
For a fan of the game who has ever wondered, “That guy was flying; I wonder how fast he was going?”, or, “That shot was a bomb; just how fast was it?”, it’s a massive look into some really cool numbers.
Count Werenski among those intrigued. If he’s on the CBJ bench during a game and sees a shot that catches his attention, he looks up to the Nationwide Arena video board, which shows the number live. The Blue Jackets debuted the feature a season ago along with skater speed and distance leaderboards, plus possession time numbers that are obtained throughout the game.
“Anytime someone shoots it, I like to see what (the speed) is – at least the hard shots,” Werenski said. “Like an (Alex Ovechkin) or a (Steven) Stamkos or anybody on our team, it’s cool to see how fast they shoot it. I remember opening night, that (Flyers forward Owen) Tippett shot went 102 or something like that. It was a missile. On the bench I saw it because it was kind of by us. He missed it wide, and I was like, ‘That seemed like a bomb.’ And I looked up and it was 100-whatever. So I always like looking up there.”
Currently, NHL.com lists that Tippett shot as 99.7 mph, the 10th-fastest shot in the NHL on the season. Two Blue Jackets are listed among the top 10 forwards, as Emil Bemstrom has unleashed a shot of 96.30 mph this season, good for sixth in the league, one spot ahead of Patrik Laine (96.26). A little more digging shows Laine had eight 100 mph+ shots the previous two seasons, second in the league among forwards behind Buffalo’s Tage Thompson (11)
One of the most interesting stats might be what the league is calling “bursts,” or a when a player reaches a sustained speed above a given threshold (22 miles per hour or 20 mph). Currently, the Blue Jackets as a team are second in the NHL in 20 mph+ bursts (343) and tied for third in 22 mph+ bursts (17).
In other words, the Jackets have a fast team, in part because of such players as Jack Roslovic and Adam Fantilli. Currently, Roslovic is tied for fifth in the NHL with 57 bursts of 20 mph or above, which checks out given how his skating is one of the most notable parts of his game. Fantilli isn’t far behind, though, with 50 20 mph+ bursts.
Fantilli said he doesn’t spend too much time looking at such numbers, preferring to really only dig deep into numbers when it comes to what he does in the gym. At the same time, seeing he’s one of the top players in the league in terms of a stat at least confirms what he previously thought about his game.
“It’s definitely good to know that I’m getting up there that quick, but I’m not focusing on it too much,” he said before laughing. “Maybe I should.”
On the team level, the Blue Jackets coaching staff gets a motherlode of player tracking data delivered each day, and it goes a lot deeper than the public data. Forget about shot speeds and skating miles per hour – that data goes deep enough to show where goalies tend to leave rebounds, what types of penalties certain referees tend to call, and how teams tend to break out the puck.
“We call it the Holy Grail,” head coach Pascal Vincent said. “We have pages and pages. You have no idea.”
Vincent said he does look at some of the data, but he also can’t afford to get bogged down given the Jackets average a game every other day. The team tends to focus on specific numbers obtained in recent games, such as five- or 10-game spans, and CBJ director of hockey analytics Zac Urback and assistant coach Josef Boumedienne are the “stats guys” who tend to know what is best to look for.
When it comes to the numbers recently posted in the public domain by the league, Vincent said he does catch himself in awe of some of the things that happen on the ice.
“Some numbers are crazy, right?” Vincent said. “I remember when we were in Edmonton one year and (Connor) McDavid, I can’t remember how fast he was skating, but I was like, ‘Holy (cow).’ I couldn’t even go that fast on a bicycle myself. It was unreal.”
McDavid may be fast – his top speed this year of 23.10 mph is in the 98th percentile among league forwards – but we now know he’s no Werenski. Even if the CBJ defenseman and his friends can’t believe it.
“I was actually mind-blown when I saw that,” Werenski said of his top speed. “(Damon Severson) and I talked about it, a lot of times as D you don’t really ever get up to your top speed.”
“That’s my excuse anyway,” Severson chimed in.
“There’s kind of a time and a place to get fully to top speed,” Werenski said. “I think the one I did was in OT vs. Minnesota. I had the puck in our corner, went around the net and went all the way down the ice. That was a rare occasion where you actually go full speed.”
Texier Finally Gets Reward
The return of Alexandre Texier this season was viewed as a big deal for the Blue Jackets, who had missed the potential top-six wing who can get it done on both sides of the puck the last season and a half.
The 24-year-old Frenchman might have been the Jackets’ best player in preseason, too ... which is what had to make his start of the season so frustrating to some.
Texier has been playing his usual solid game away from the puck, but the production simply didn’t follow, as the winger went 11 games without a point to start the campaign.
The other side of the coin, then, came Monday night in Florida as Texier finally got on the board in the third period with a tiebreaking goal. His stick-with-it tally, a good bounce off the post that sat in the crease for him to bury after his centering pass went off a Panthers player, was part of a two-point night and would have been the game winner if the Blue Jackets had finished off the win.
