Willkommen » reliable production from those bringing up the rear

TURIN, Italy -- Juventus and Italy playmaker Andrea Pirlo is expected to be sidelined until the new year with damaged knee ligaments. Pirlo limped out of Sundays 1-0 win over Udinese after just 13 minutes. Juventus says Pirlo underwent tests on Monday which revealed he has "a second-degree lesion to the collateral medial ligament in his right knee." The club has not revealed how long Pirlo will be out for, but an injury of this type normally takes at least a month to recover from. Juventus plays Bologna, Sassuolo and Atalanta in the Italian league before the winter break and also has a crucial final Champions League group match at Galatasaray. Pirlo has been instrumental in Juventus winning the past two Serie A titles. Rickey Jackson Saints Jersey . They wanna make t-shirts about it and sell them at our next hockey game..DB: Wow, they want to make t-shirts? That sounds pretty amazing.MS: Yeah, I was also on the Top 10, I was number 1 today, so that was pretty cool. 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Goodell says he had fun watching the game Sunday and thinks fans did, too.Optimal player deployment is a hockey question thats never going to have a definitive answer. Each team has unique roster and character traits that necessitate different use of skaters and goaltenders and some teams are afforded luxuries other teams dont possess. But trying to extrapolate the best possible performance from a 23-man roster is a league-wide question - one thats ingrained in a hockey operations or coaching staffs ability to maximize performance for each player on the roster. Like never before, todays NHL has an insatiable appetite for competent even-strength hockey players. And there are a lot of factors at play here. For one, the phasing out of enforcers and specialists has created a window of opportunity for a wave of skill players to take on larger roles at both positions. Front offices in Vancouver and Toronto have pointed to successful models in Los Angeles and Chicago - two franchises which have enjoyed reliable production from those bringing up the rear. And teams are cognizant that first lines and first pairings win a lot of hockey games. But finding the appropriate balance between maximizing their ice-time and minimizing fatigue effects has led to further prioritization of back end guys who can pick up the slack as needed. Theres another factor at play – the creation of more even-strength ice time by the continued decrease in penalties. Take for an example, this seven-year graph of the average NHL teams total power play minutes: In just seven seasons, the NHL teams full season average power play time has dropped more than 100 minutes from 528 to 426 – a 19 per cent decline. Its substantial - and there are shot and goal differentials to be won in the additional minutes created for five-on-five play. Have organizations handled their deployment as a result of this? I think the answer is yes. Take, for one example, the comparison chart below showing ice time for forwards (meeting our minimum criteria of 245 minutes played) in 2007 and 2014: The rightward shift here should seem apparent – a higher concentration of guys playing larger minutes now as opposed to seven years ago and fewer guys picking up scrap minutes in smaller roles. Thee number of forwards playing ten or less minutes a night has dropped from 109 in 2007, to 65 in 2014.dddddddddddd And the number of forwards playing between 13 and 16 minutes a night has moved from 153 in 2007 to 231 in 2014. As a group, teams may still be leaning on their star players, but theres also been a more balanced spread of total ice time than there was seven years ago. So on a league-wide scale, forwards have experienced considerable change in deployment. But what about defencemen (meeting our minimum criteria of 245 minutes played)? Other than defensive defencemen, specialists on the blue line have been far less common than specialists (be it special teams specialists or enforcers) in the forward ranks. I think a large part of that is the fact that teams only carry six defencemen into a game and at least four of those guys play significant minutes every night. That said, I anticipated less overall change - at least relative to the forwards: My intuition, of course, was wrong. The rightward shift is rather clear here, too. There are far fewer players picking up scrap minutes on the blue line today then there were seven years ago. And again, there is a noticeably larger concentration of defenders picking up significant minutes per game. The 16- to 20-plus minute band is particularly interesting. In 2007, 38 per cent of regular defenders were playing 16 or more minutes a night. In 2014, that number has jumped to 64 per cent. Combine the importance placed on puck possession and territorial control with dissipating non-even strength minutes and you have a premium placed on guys who can skate regular shifts at five-on-five. This premium is more evident in some cities than others. But at the league level, talent and depth are no longer a luxury – they are a necessity. Popular hockey analytics writer Travis Yost joins TSN as a columnist appearing every Tuesday and Thursday during the season on TSN.ca and as a frequent guest on TSN Radio. Yost has appeared as a regular contributor to The Sporting News, NHLNumbers.com, Ottawa Citizen and HockeyBuzz.com, where he served as one of the sites lead analytics writers in addition to covering the Ottawa Senators beat. ' ' '