Back in June 2015, the NHL made a pretty significant rule change for the way faceoffs would be conducted.
Prior to the 2015-16 season, the visiting player always had to put his stick on the ice first before a faceoff, and the home team player would follow. The old way would give the home team's center an advantage for each faceoff. The home center would benefit from seeing the visiting player's positioning, giving him an idea of how the visiting center might be trying to play the puck and being able to adjust accordingly. The visiting center would also be starting the draw from a fixed, stationary position, while the home center had the advantage of more movement since he was coming into position second.
Beginning in 2015-16, the visiting player would only always have to put his stick down first when the faceoff took place at center ice. For the other faceoff spots on the ice surface, the defending player would have to put his stick down first, giving the aforementioned advantages to the offensive player.
Which Penguins centers are especially skilled in draws in the different zones, and which ones have room for improvement? Let's break it down.
Per Puck Base, an advanced stats website that specializes in faceoff stats, the league average saw players in the offensive zone take a slight edge in draws, winning 51.1 percent.
SIDNEY CROSBY
Overall faceoff win percentage: 55.6 percent
Offensive zone faceoff win percentage: 59.1 percent
Defensive zone faceoff win percentage: 52 percent
Crosby's overall faceoff percentage ranked No. 13 in the league. He's just good at faceoffs, wherever they are. But he benefitted more than most players did from the advantage gained in the offensive zone, ranking No. 9 in the league in offensive zone draws.
Crosby's skill in offensive zone draws was a hot topic in the 2016 Stanley Cup Final, when Sharks center Logan Couture was asked what made Crosby so good at offensive zone draws, when Crosby had the advantage of putting his stick down second.
"He cheats. He gets away with that. He's Sidney Crosby. ... He times them and yet they don't kick him out for some reason; probably because of who he is."
When Couture says that Crosby "times" his faceoffs, he's talking about the way Crosby takes advantage of the momentum that comes with being able to put his stick down last in offensive draws. Crosby will sometimes stay a little far back from the dot, and move forward just in time. Or he can just sweep the puck away as it drops:
But even when Crosby is the one who has to have his stick down first, his hands are just that fast, and that's why he also wins most defensive zone draws:
EVGENI MALKIN
Overall faceoff win percentage: 50.3 percent
Offensive zone faceoff win percentage: 52.4 percent
Defensive zone faceoff win percentage: 49.5 percent
This was a good year for Malkin, the first in his career that he finished with an overall win percentage over 50 percent.
It's also the first year that he won most of his offensive zone draws, even since the NHL made the rule change in 2015-16. From 2015-19, his offensive zone draw win percentage ranged from 46.9 to 49.1 percent. Not awful, but not a winning percentage.
Malkin's been slowly improving his defensive zone draws ever since the rule change. He was awful in the first two seasons of the rule change, winning only 34.5 percent and 37 percent of defensive zone faceoffs respectively, making him more of a liability in the defensive zone. He's been improving every year since, and now just about breaks even in the defensive zone, which is better than league average when at that disadvantage. He's turned himself into more of an asset for those defensive zone starts.
“Everybody goes through their ups-and-downs, but when he’s determined in the circle, he’s a hard guy to go against," Matt Cullen told Dave Molinari of Malkin's work in the faceoff circle last season. "I wouldn’t want to take a faceoff against him, because he can beat you in so many ways.”
MARK JANKOWSKI
Overall faceoff win percentage: 44.7 percent
Offensive zone faceoff win percentage: 43.8 percent
Defensive zone faceoff win percentage: 42.6 percent
Jankowski as a whole wasn't that great at faceoffs last year, and it didn't seem to make a difference much either way if he had the advantage of putting his stick down last or not, with just over one percentage point separating his offensive zone faceoff success from his defensive zone success. Sometimes when you look at these underlying numbers for a player with less-than-stellar overall faceoff numbers, you might see that they're just especially bad at defensive zone draws where they're at a disadvantage, and that's what's bringing down the overall average. Not in Jankowski's case, though. He's just "meh" all-around here.
TEDDY BLUEGER
2019-20 faceoff win percentage: 45.2 percent
Offensive zone faceoff win percentage: 48.5 percent
Defensive zone faceoff win percentage: 43.1 percent
For Blueger to continue to grow and eventually claim ownership of the Penguins' third-line center role, he'd ideally get better at faceoffs. And when we look at the breakdown of his win rates by zone, you can see that he's really not that bad when he's in the offensive zone. But there's a pretty significant drop off when he has to be the player who puts his stick down first. There's a lot of room to improve in those defensive zone draws, but Blueger is still young and has a decent starting point from which to grow.