Top 10 worst face-off guys this season

Tom Collins

2015-02-09

RyanNugentHopkins

The ten guys hurting your fantasy teams most on the draw

Every season, there's a few certainties you can count on when it comes to faceoffs and the impact on pools that count them – Claude Giroux and Patrice Bergeron will be excellent, Antoine Vermette and Jason Spezza will somehow still be underrated, and Manny Malhotra – when he plays – will be among the tops in the league.

But what about the flip side? Who are the guys that are struggling, and is it a new thing or more of the same? As it turns out, for some on the list, this year is an aberration, while for others, it's sadly part a career-defining pattern.

Some leagues count faceoff losses, or even faceoff percentage. But make no mistake – even in a league that counts just faceoff wins, the guys below are hurting you by just not winning enough draws.

For the list, I’m only considering players with at least 450 faceoffs so far this season; and to be fair, I only took one player from each team (take note Mika Zibanejad and Mark Scheifele). So while there may be players with worse faceoff winning percentages than those on this list, keep in mind the amount of faceoffs taken. Case in point – Tyler Ennis may have a gruesome 36.8% winning percentage, but he's only taken 182 faceoffs.

Without further ado, here are the top 10 worst faceoff guys this season.

10. Logan Couture

This is one of those anomaly seasons I talked about in the introduction. Look at Couture's last five years:

2014-15: 554 faceoffs taken, 46.6% won

2013-14: 950 faceoffs taken, 50.4% won

2012-13 (lockout year): 489 faceoffs taken, 51.5%won

2011-12: 910 faceoffs taken, 51.4%won

2010-11: 888 faceoffs taken, 53.4% won

He's been very consistent in both faceoffs taken and percentage, so this season has been an unpleasant surprise. There's no real reason – yet – to believe he's going to be horrible again next year, but no question this season has been a disappointment.

9. Bryan Little

Little has lost more faceoffs than anyone else in the league this season. Now, that's a stat you need to be careful with, as generally the players who take among the most faceoffs can also lose the most. It's like the giveaway stat in that the guys who handle the puck the most are going to lose it more often than the guys who never touch it. With faceoff losses, Claude Giroux is fourth, but he's also got a 55.9% winning percentage, so the losses are tolerable. But Little loses more faceoffs than he wins, as he sports just a 49% winning percentage. That's not horrible, but it needs to be much better for poolies.

8. Henrik Sedin

Most people think I have a personal bias against the Sedins, but there's no doubt Henrik belongs on this list. Sedin is 12th in the league in faceoffs taken with 1,007, but has won just 48.1% of them. And whereas he usually hovers around 49 to 51%, and last year even won 52.3%, a drop of four percentage points is both disappointing and a rude awakening to his owners.

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7. Evgeni Malkin

I sometimes wonder how much of Malkin's success is owed to Sidney Crosby, who gets the harder defensive matchups along with more of the media scrutiny and most of the pressure. Could Malkin handle that same spotlight every game for eight years? Even in faceoffs, Crosby protects Malkin. In fact, for the last three years, both Crosby and Brandon Sutter have taken many more faceoffs than Malkin. And that's because Malkin is pretty bad in the faceoff circle, including this year, as he's won just 42.6% of his 465 faceoffs taken. Ouch.