Tim Gleason, Alex Burrows, Todd Marchant, Kris Letang, Jussi Jokinen, Andrew Ladd and Dave Steckel. What do they all have in common? For starters, each is a second-, third- or checking-line player for his respective team. They all play defensive supporting roles alongside established superstars such as Eric Staal, Daniel Sedin, Ryan Getzlaf, Sidney Crosby, Jonathan Toews and Alexander Ovechkin. Most importantly, and unlike their All-Star teammates, they've all been overtime heroes so far in the 2008-09 playoffs. Is this just a statistical aberration, or does a team's overtime fate rest on the shoulders of the second-liners?
Examining the game summaries of this year's overtime playoff games, it's clear that in regulation time, coaches generally will roll all four forward lines and all three lines of defensemen, giving preference to their top units and perhaps half-shifts for their fourth line. In overtime, most coaches will play only their top two or three lines. Defensive players will continue to see plenty of action, especially if they can score, whereas coaches are far more careful about playing their more one-dimensional players. So which players are seeing more ice time in overtime?
Based on their ice time in regulation and the length of the overtime, we can compile a list of players who got the most extra playing time in the extra frame. Given the relatively small sample size, it's more important for us to consider the types of players that appear rather than the specific players themselves.
With the exception of players such as Getzlaf and Sedin, there are not a lot of superstars getting increases in playing time in the extra frame, because they presumably already are playing as much as possible in regulation time. That's why you see Francois Beauchemin on this list instead of Anaheim's top two defensemen, Scott Niedermayer and Chris Pronger. The players who see increases in ice time in sudden-death overtime are the second-liners in whom their coaches have the most confidence defensively yet who remain offensively capable of exploiting a lucky break.
Because of the method used, the above analysis is dominated by teams that have played a lot of overtime this year, like the three-OT marathon between the Detroit Red Wings and Anaheim Ducks. Instead, let's see which players had the highest percentage increase in playing time in the extra frames -- either regular top-liners being double-shifted, or else third-liners getting regular shifts. We would expect to see the same types of players on this list as the first: skilled, two-way second-liners.
Many of the increases here can be explained by the shortened benches in overtime. For instance, defensemen Marc-Edouard Vlasic and Rob Blake of the San Jose Sharks both played a regular shift in regulation time, getting just under a third of the ice time. In overtime, with the benches shortened, they each saw almost half the ice time. Alexander Steen of St. Louis and Chad LaRose of Carolina fall into similar categories, but as forwards. The remainder of the players averaged fewer than 10 minutes of ice time in regulation but played regular shifts in overtime. Still, these are the same types of players we saw on the first list, players the coaching staff believes first and foremost are not likely to make mistakes yet who are in a position to take advantage of any opportunities.
We can recognize a potential overtime hero by examining the common characteristics of the players we've come across so far. Next time we watch an overtime game, we'll be on the lookout for players who fit the following mold.
Although individually unique, together these 10 seemingly random players paint a relatively similar portrait of what it takes to succeed in overtime. Most of these players throw at least a couple of hits per game, and some go beyond that: Gleason and Darren Helm are in the league's top 10. Gleason ranks sixth in blocked shots, and Steckel is third among forwards. Speaking of Steckel, he and Marchant are two of the playoffs' top faceoff men and, amazingly, six of these 10 overtime stars are in the top 30 in takeaways, including Steckel at third overall. All but three of these players are remarkably disciplined and therefore very unlikely to take a costly overtime penalty.
There are many different ingredients in the recipe of a Stanley Cup champion, but to succeed in the Cup playoffs, you need players who can rise to the occasion in sudden-death overtime. In that extra frame, you might find that successful teams are relying more on the defensive checkers and grinders such as Marchant and Steckel than on the established stars. In the end, there's a reason everyone's name is carved on the Stanley Cup, because you won't win anything without your third-line overtime heroes.
Robert Vollman is an author of Puck Prospectus.