Line Match ups
Line Match ups
One of my pet peeves about the video announcers is that they provide no analysis of things like line match ups. Either they think the match ups are intuitively obvious or they don't do any homework about the other team.
Each game I watch on video or at the rink, a few things are intuitively obvious. When the top six forwards get juggled and recombined across two lines yet again, I mumble "searching for that elusive scoring chemistry, I guess." I used to notice that although D pairings seem pretty fluid, it always seemed that no first-year D ever went out without a junior or senior as her partner, sort of like when Ruggiero played D in a men's minor league game she was always paired with a 250 pound grizzly bear to watch her back. Then the other night I noticed Pucci and Romatowski were playing together, on the number one power play, no less.
But when it comes to line match ups, I'm in the dark. It seems this year's third line is primarily a checking or energy line, but does that mean they often get used against opponents' first lines? I'd love to know. You might take a stab at it by looking up the other team's leading scorers online and see how their match ups work out.
But then you look at the Providence game, when Dempsey won 24 out of 27 face-offs: PC's three leading scorers are Cottrell, Ruff and O'Neill but the first two are both centers and both went 6-16 on draws that night, so it appears Dempsey's line (and which line is that, by the way, 1A or 1B?) was out a pretty equal number of times against the Cottrell and Ruff lines. What, if anything, does that indicate? Brownian motion? Chaos theory?
Going into the Beanpot I tried to rekindle some interest over on the Beanpot thread by restating the original poster's question, how are the teams likely to match up, and I gave a brief list of what I think of as H's signature strengths and its one obvious weakness (that they could use a few more finishers of the Brine/Corriero variety). No response as yet. I can remember in years past that BC would meet H's challenge to skate with them in a free-flowing game whereas NU and BU would turtle up in the defensive zone in hopes of a low-scoring game. But this year, who knows? I'd like the announcers to do the legwork on this one rather than have to go over to the BC, NU and BU threads and bone up about their seasons myself.
