What does Alex Wennberg bring to the Rangers
Other than handsomeness: depth.
For a team like the New York Rangers, that’s been firmly entrenched amongst the contender class since the start of the NHL season, the trade deadline was last call. It was a final opportunity to reconfigure the lineup with a jolt in the arm from outside the organization and give the existing group a vote of confidence and reward simultaneously. Coming into this season, there was no question whether or not the Rangers would be a playoff team and have as strong an opportunity as ever to make a deep postseason run.
Sure, there were reservations about hiring Peter Laviolette to replace Gerard Gallant – it was uninspiring and safe. Thankfully, my hesitation was proved folly and Laviolette has this group firmly in the thick of things in the Eastern Conference with a solid shot of winning the Metropolitan Division outright. Through 65 games, the Rangers sit at 90 standings points, 4th in the entire league.
With the added context of injuries and individual players struggling through a good chunk of the season, to have a point cushion to the cutline that substantial is a great indicator of potential. Think about it like this, prior to Monday night, first line center Mika Zibanejad hadn’t scored a 5-on-5 goal since December 23rd. In the second week of February, Igor Shesterkin’s save percentage was still below 900. Only one of the three Rangers defensive pairs has a positive expected goals share for the season and on top of that, two of the team’s top nine forwards, Filip Chytil and Blake Wheeler, which is part of why the team went out and acquired both Alex Wennberg and Jack Roslovic ahead of the deadline.
If the Rangers were a business, the elevator pitch would be simple: They’ve already performed pretty well relative to the market and have room for growth because key contributors have under- performed. There is ample room for New York’s existing players to make a jump in performance, regardless of the additions of Wennberg and Rosolvic.
Before getting to Wennberg himself, it’s important to point out that neither he or Roslovic is a savior. They are not high-impact players capable of swinging a game on their own through individual play. Players capable of making that type of impact in the entire league are few and far between. Other than Jake Guentzel of the Pittsburgh Penguins or Pavel Buchnevich of the St. Louis Blues, there simply weren’t a ton of high-end players available.
If I’m reading the tea leaves correctly, my supposition is that general manager Chris Drury feels his core is good enough and only needs to improve on the margins. When it comes to improving the overall quality of the lineup, Wennberg definitely checks the box. Penciling him to the third line center role gives that group a pivot with significantly more NHL experience and has a track record of helping drive possession. There’s no arguing that a deeper lineup helps because it increases a team’s margin for error, especially in a best of seven playoff series.
There is an argument to be made that the Rangers should’ve pushed more chips into the middle of the table for a more high-end player with the eastern conference being so wide open this season. That said, it’s clear that Drury didn’t feel the prices were conducive to a big swing, so he opted for more specialized additions.
Usage and deployment
Nothing about Wennberg’s skill set or talent screams first line player, but with the Seattle Kraken, he’s played a lot, especially this season. Through 62 games, the Swede was the Kraken’s most commonly used forward playing 50 more minutes total than the next forward on the team, Yanni Gourde. Of his 18:49 average time on ice this season, 2:16 comes on the man advantage and 2:21 comes on the penalty kill.
At face value, we can assume that Wennberg is going to get significantly less usage with the Rangers. He’s being brought in to play as the third line center and likely won’t get onto either of the first two special teams units in New York. The one real red flag is how harshly Wennberg struggled on the penalty kill in Seattle where, of the 36 power play goals they conceded, Wennberg was on the ice for 21 of them.
In looking at Wennberg’s opposition, Kraken coach Dave Hakstol was doing him no favors. According to PuckIQ’s quality of competition database, Wennberg was deployed against “elite” competition 45% of the time, by far the largest portion of his icetime. Throw in the fact that even though he was playing the most minutes, he was doing so starting in the defensive zone 56% of the time.
So, in terms of usage, Wennberg was drawing the toughest defensive assignments in the most difficult of environments possible for creating offense and preventing chances against. Despite that difficult role, Wennberg was not obliterated in goal share, which bodes well for his usage in a more favorable situation.
Being that the Kraken don’t feature a ton of high-end talent, but have more of a quality depth roster construction, Wennberg has seen a few different linemates over the course of the season, his most common being Jaden Schwartz, Andre Burakovsky and Oliver Bjorkstrand. Of his most common line mates this season, only Burakvosky sticks out as being poor defensively.
The one concern with Wennberg’s toolbox is his speed. According to the NHL’s edge database, the forward is below 50th percentile in top skating speed and exactly the 50th percentile in speed bursts over 20 MPH. While it might not seem like an issue at face value to be average, line mates Kaapo Kakko and Will Cuylle are not the most dynamic skaters and lack top-end speed.
If Cuylle-Wennberg-Kakko is supposed to be the Rangers true checking line to salt the game away, that means matchups against other teams’ best players who are typically amongst the faster players on the ice. Being slow isn’t necessarily a death knell for a player or team at large, but it does mean they have to fall back on their structure and stick to it to not get exploited.
One last component of Wennberg’s deployment to consider is his most common defensemen. Yes, every forward will play with all six defensemen on their team during the course of the game, the state of play being so fluid, you’re never going to be able to staple them together. With that said, Wennberg’s most common blue liners were Jamie Oleksiak and Will Borgen. Those defenseman both profile as defense-first skill sets and have positive on-ice defensive impacts.
Lastly, because the old heads still value it, Wennberg took an average of 17 faceoffs per game and won them at a 46.7 percent clip in Seattle, which would rank last amongst the Rangers current four centers. There’s reason to believe playing lower in the lineup, against less-talented players, that number could bump up closer to a 50-50 coin flip.
Zone entries and transition play (All zone stats via Allthreezones.com)
Understanding a player’s game in hockey is more challenging than the other major North American sports because it can often be challenging to separate an individual player’s performance from the team environment. There are plenty of players who thrive on bad teams because of their raw talent and sifting through transition play is a concrete means of determining just how much impact a player has on the game state.
The best players in the world, like Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon and Mat Barzal, to name a few, are amongst the best puck carriers in the world. They receive the puck on their stick in the neutral zone with speed and weave through traffic, then either drive the net or gain the zone and wait for reinforcements. That top-end speed and puck possession is a cheat code in today’s league where defense is less physical and players are smaller than ever.
In the case of someone like Wennberg, what jumps out is how little time he spends in the offensive zone. The NHL’s edge stat database has him at 38 percent of his TOI in the offensive zone in all situations, which is below the 50th percentile. What’s interesting is that, at even strength, that number shoots all the way up to 60 percent, which is in the 70th percentile of all players. That large disparity stems almost entirely from the penalty kill, where Wennberg has struggled harshly this season for the Kraken.
In terms of gaining the offensive zone itself, Wennberg carries the puck into the zone 51.8 percent of the time and at a rate of 18.2 per 60 minutes of ice time, both of which are above NHL average. The issue for Wennberg is that even though he gains the offensive zone and spends a decent amount of time there, the Kraken weren’t generating a ton of offense off of the cycle or the rush. Wennberg’s 6.66 shots off the rush per 60 and 7.40 chances off the cycle were the second lowest ratio on Seattle and would only be better than Goodrow on the Rangers.
But again, with the context of his deployment, that does make sense. If Wennberg is on the ice against the other team’s best players, his job isn’t to generate offense; it’s to get the puck into the offensive zone and make the opposition work to get the puck back. In an ideal world, Wennberg fills that type of role with the Rangers and both Kakko and Cuylle add to the ugly goal count.
In the offensive zone
On top of his defensive responsibilities, Wennberg profiles as a facilitator/playmaker more so than a scorer or a puck chaser himself. When looking under the hood, it’s clear that Wennberg as an individual does not shoot the puck often.
Wennberg passed to a shot at the third highest rate of any forward on the Kraken, only trailing Jordan Eberle and Jaden Schwartz. However, when it came to shooting the puck himself, his 5.5 shots per 60 was the third lowest on Seattle. Going a step further, his 6.86 individual scoring chances (which includes blocked shots and misses of the net) were the lowest figure on the entire team. The counterpoint to defend Wennberg’s hesitancy to shoot is that two of his most common linemates, Bjorkstrand and Burakovsky, were 1st and 3rd respectively on the Kraken in individual chances for.
Further contextualizing Wennberg’s facilitation, he did not pass to set up dangerous scoring chances often. His .370 high-danger passes per 60 were the single lowest rate in the entire NHL. Wennberg himself is registered as recording zero scoring chances off of a high-danger pass this season. That would be in line with an extremely low rate of individual chance creation, and further support the case that Wennberg is just not going to shoot often.
Through his first 61 games of the entire season, Wennberg’s 80 shots-on-goal ranks 339th of all players in the NHL of the 879 players who’ve suited up for at least one game this season. Based on who Wennberg was deployed with in Seattle and the responsibilities associated with a heavy workload of quality opposition, this makes sense.
There is a hope that playing in a lighter workload will allow Wennberg to round out his game more. In the forward’s first game as a Ranger, his ice time was 15:12, three whole minutes less than his average time on ice with seattle. Sure, some of that could be attributed to the game getting out of hand for the St. Louis Blues, but it does show a potential blueprint for how to maximize Wennberg’s talent and potentially bring out some more offense.
Though the line was slightly outchanced at 5-on-5, the style of play was tantalizing. This isn’t a knock on Jonny Brodzinski, who’s done a more than serviceable job as the third line center in the absence of Filip Chytil, but there’s a reason he’s been an AHL tweener most of his life and Wennberg is in his tenth NHL season.
Looking at Wennberg’s heat maps from HockeyViz.com bears out a similar visual. In the offensive zone, the Kraken were creating 5 percent below league average with the Swede on the ice. The counterpoint to that, is, even if the team’s offense wasn’t as efficient, it was also conceding offense at a lower rate than league average.
The catch here is that though Wennberg and the Kraken weren’t getting the puck on net and creating a whole lot, they were getting offensive zone time. To reduce this as simply as possible, even though expected goals can’t tell the whole story, it does do a reasonably strong job of indicating possession and control of the game. If Wennberg, Kakko and Cuylle have the puck in the offensive zone and are able to work a cycle, they won’t have to defend.
This is the most simple way to limit the other team’s scoring opportunities. In an ideal world, this third line would be used to salt the game away 90 seconds of zone time a pop. I’m very curious to see what type of matchups this line receives from Laviolette. Three players who cycle well and have decent puck skills presents an opportunity to limit scoring chances of the other team’s best players or to take advantage of other team’s with less talent in their bottom six.
Either way, it’s a good choice to have to make.
Final thoughts and looking ahead
It’s perfectly reasonable to look at the Rangers’ deadline and feel a touch underwhelmed. When last week started with the potential of Guentzel or Pavel Buchnevich, to end up with Wennberg and Roslovic is like getting khakis and socks for Christmas. They’re not exciting, but you damn well know you can’t still wear the same pair you’ve had since you were going to college formals.
That’s the post-deadline mindset I’m operating with. Coming in, I felt the Rangers’ veterans performance down the stretch would ultimately dictate just how high the ceiling of the team could be. In adding two forwards who have versatility to their games as opposed to a high impact play driver, that responsibility falls on the core players even more.
The biggest feature of Drury’s deadline adds is deepening the lineup. No, the Rangers high-end talent won’t square up well against the Florida Panthers. No one is taking Zibanejad and Panarin over Alex Barkov and Matthew Tkachuk. That’s not hating, that’s just the reality of the fact. Sometimes the other team has better players. The key is just to not get smoked when they’re on the ice.
Now that the Rangers have a more well-rounded top nine, the fall-off throughout the lineup is less stark. No, Wennberg or Roslovic probably won’t be point-per-game forwards that swing the result of multiple playoff series, but their presence means that the Rangers have more paths to victory during a best-of-seven series.
In the hockey playoffs, where the lower seeded team wins at the highest rate of the four major North American sports the key is to keep the flow of the game close enough that your star players can swing a game. A handful of key plays determining the outcome of playoff hockey is part of both its charm and frustration.
The Rangers formula this season is the same as the last few: keeping game flow close at 5-on-5 special teams domination and elite goaltending. The formula works when the team’s best players can make the plays outside of structure that separate them from the normal players in the league. That’s part of why Panarin’s struggles against the Devils last spring felt so glaring.
Panarin, like Kreider, Zibanejad, Fox and Shesterkin, is an essential component of making the formula work. That was the argument to meet the high asking price for a Guentzel or a Buchnevich. That “one more guy” into that formula would lighten everyone else’s load enough to increase the margin for error more substantially.
The metaphor I like to use is a band. Everyone needs to be on time for the music to come out right. If one person is off, even slightly, Whiplash J.K. Simmons will throw the music stand across the room and kill the vibe. Ultimately the Rangers’ small margin for error was their undoing in pretty much all of their playoff runs from John Tortorella up to and including last year against the Devils under Gerard Gallant.
Adding Wennberg and Roslovic to this group does help give slightly more breathing room. Both will help the team’s control of play at 5-on-5 which is sorely needed. It puts less responsibility on the team’s defense and Shesterkin to be perfect if they don’t have to play as much in their own end.
Having a great goaltender like Shesterkin helps immensely during the course of a long regular season. But in a short sample, even the greats aren’t infallible. Shesterkin did everything in his power to will New York past New Jersey last April and he couldn’t also put the puck in the net himself.
Ultimately, the song remains the same for the Rangers. The team’s stars are good, the path to a Stanley Cup requires greatness. Roslovic and Wennberg have the ability of helping facilitate a bridge between good and great.