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Where does Mathieu Perreault’s strong possession numbers come from?

Here at Arctic Ice Hockey, we have praised Kevin Cheveldayoff for his three year signing of Mathieu Perreault as possibly surpassing Michael Frolik for the Winnipeg Jets' top non-drafted pickup.

Perreault has dominated soft minutes in the past, posting a production rate among the elites and a Corsi% far superior to the average NHL player with similar usage.

So, what has made Perreault so successful?

Microstatistics have been a recent venture by the hockey analytical blogging community to try and answer this. Zone entries were the first microstatistic to be tracked and studied for its influence in possession metrics such as Corsi.

Corey Sznajder has been heading a project tracking microstatistics for every NHL game. He plans to eventually make this data open to the public, but until then we highly recommend you supporting his project if you are into helping out this sort of thing.

Total Entries Carry-ins Dump-ins
# Shots For SF/entry % with Control Carries SF SF/Carry # SF SF/dump-in
Perreault 102 61 0.60 56% 57 42 0.74 45 19 0.42
Team 2378 1113 0.47 48% 1144 752 0.66 1234 361 0.29

Team data is for all non-Perreault entries so to exclude Perreault from affecting both samples, with the exception of the "Perecentage with Control" section where Perreault's sample is included in both. Dump-ins do not include those for whole-sale line changes.
Thoughts:

* Perreault is superior to his team's average without him in essentially each category.

* Perreault has a superior carry-to-dump ratio, which is something that the analytical community has been promoting for quite some while.

* Perreault's decision making on whether to carry or dump-in seems accurate, as his entries with control and shots per entry are far better better than his team's.

* Perreault's shots per entry for dump-ins is something interesting to watch out for this season. It could be a sample bias issue, but despite being a low dump-in attempt player (indicating he does it as a last resort) he has very high shots per entry production.

Any questions or thoughts? Feel free to post them below.

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