The Pittsburgh Penguins have been utilizing a top pairing of Kris Letang and Ian Cole so far in this regular season. This was after the team announced in the summer that the plan was to play Kris Letang with Olli Maatta as the top paring.

I was totally fine with the team amending their initial choice of Letang/Maatta. There was no harm in trying a Letang/Cole pairing. However, the Letang/Cole pairing has been terrible. It will become a problem if the team continues to use it on a regular basis.

Using a tool created by Emmanuel Perry I was able to look up the stats of defense pairings.

The line stats app has a brand new look. https://t.co/3CBHfZOHlo pic.twitter.com/D0uNBVsNta

— Emmanuel Perry (@MannyElk) November 5, 2015

What I found was that out of the 56 defense pairings who have played 100 min together this year Letang/Cole rank 48th in CF% (45.23). They also ranked 55th out of 56 in shot attempts against per 60 (64.8). That is dreadful for a top pairing. This pairing is not working on any level.

Brian Dumoulin is currently outplaying his role with Ben Lovejoy as evidence by his impressive 8.47 dCorsi. At this point I would see no harm in bumping him up with Letang to see how that works out. It won’t be much worse than the current situation and chances are it will be better.

Dumoulin-Letang
Maatta-Lovejoy
Scuderi-Cole

Olli Maatta and Rob Scuderi are struggling together and also need to be broken up. In 98 minutes together they have a CF% of 45.4%.

Last year Rob Scuderi’s numbers were boosted successfully by two players. The Penguins traded away the first player who played well with Rob Scuderi in Simon Despres. In 692 5v5 minutes together they had a CF% of 51.2% which was considered a success. Even with Despres out of the picture the Penguins still have another guy who found decent success with Scuderi. That player is Ian Cole.


Ian Cole and Rob Scuderi played 192 minutes together last year and had a CF% of 54.4%. It is no guarantee that the Scuderi/Cole pairing finds that kind of success again but you can’t say for sure unless you try it again.

As stated above it is OK to try different combinations with the defense pairings. The problem is if you stay with the unsuccessful pairings because the goaltending is top three in the league. The pairings aren’t good and if Marc-Andre Fleury slips up even a little bit the issue will be highlighted more than it has been. Get ahead of the problem before that eventually happens.

Thanks for reading!

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