Fancy Stats: Can Rattie Get His Groove Back?

Tonight’s game against Buffalo is not a make-or-break game. It is not against a division rivalry, and in fact, is against a team that is currently wrestling for last place in the league.

Who Is Ty Rattie?

Ty Rattie is recent call-up from the AHL, a right-winger who is known on the Chicago Wolves for his sniping and his effectiveness on offense.

In his first year with the Wolves (2013-2014) he nearly cracked 50 points (48 – so, so close), with 31 of those coming from goals.

This season he’s racked up 28 points, 17 goals and 11 assists. The goal below isn’t typical for him, but watching Rattie it doesn’t even look difficult. He’s clearly talented, so what’s the problem? Why isn’t he scoring more for St. Louis?

This article talks briefly about Rattie’s history as a goal-scorer, and contains this magical little gem: Rattie scores a goal backhand, while falling down:

And as we’ve seen during his three games with the Blues, his play has potential. He hasn’t scored a goal backhand while falling over for us yet, but we’ve got faith that will come. The problem appears to be that he’s simply not getting the chances he needs to score.

Rattie has been sitting on the third line with Lindstrom and Jaskin, getting fewer than 10 minutes a night and almost no looks at the net. While I cannot argue that Rattie deserves to be on the first or second line above Oshie and Tarasenko, his position on the third line isn’t helping him any.

Run The Numbers

The majority of his starts are in the defensive zone, meaning that he first has to battle up the neutral zone before he can even register a shot on goal.

We can make a direct comparison to Ryan Reaves, as they are both playing the same position and Reaves has registered two goals in the past four games, one of which Rattie was present for.

All stats taken from war-on-ice.com

Rattie takes far more defensive starts than Reaves, registers roughly the same amount of time on ice per night* and maintains a higher Corsi for %. Reaves averages around 10 minutes per night, but spent more than 12 minutes on the ice against Carolina and Washington. He scored against Carolina.

For you non-statisticians, from Hockey Prospectus:

"Corsi is essentially a plus-minus statistic that measures shot attempts. A player receives a plus for any shot attempt (on net, missed, or blocked) that his team directs at the opponent’s net, and a minus for any shot attempt against his own net."

Essentially, Corsi for is basically a gussied-up plus-minus stat. Rattie’s higher Corsi for % maintenence means he and the teammates he takes the ice with do a better job of defending the net as well as a better job of putting shots on net. And he has done this all without scoring a single goal during his three games with the Blues.

In comparison to his second- and third-line right wing counterparts, however, Rattie’s Corsi for % is, if not significantly lower in the case of T.J. Oshie, it is low enough to warrant being kept on the third line.

That makes this game against Buffalo of import to Rattie’s development on the Blues.

Give the third line more playing time tonight, Hitchcock. Let us see what he can do.

As I talked about here, St. Louis is in need of a goal-scoring winger. Tarasenko is hugely beneficial to the Blues, but there’s only one of him. Sadly, Bettman has not made a provision for cloning in the CBA just yet (though I’m sure that’s coming soon). Rattie is on an AHL contract, and likely won’t affect the Blues’ salary cap hit this year. If we can push him to a higher level of performance, all our injury-related woes won’t magically disappear but he will certainly ameliorate some of the issues created by one of our top defenders going down for who knows how long.

Pushing Rattie to perform will show us what kind of player we’ve called up. And with luck, both for Rattie and the fans, maybe it will be enough to earn him a promotion for a game or two.

Next: Trade Talk: What Next For The Blues?