The Rise of Marco Scandella

Marco Scandella has quietly been working his way through his career with the Wild. That is all starting to change as we are starting to see a real emergence in Scandella's game. Signs of his emergence have been trickling in for a few seasons now and everything is starting to come together for the young defensemen. This season, Scandella has been one of the best surprises on the Wild's blue line, and it's easy to see why.

In the 2013-2014 season, Scandella's usage on the ice brought him some relatively tough minutes. With a larger share of his zone starts coming on the Wild's end of the ice, and against a slightly above average quality of competition. Scandella was relegated to protecting the Wild's net more often than not, and although he did not overly excel at this, he was not terrible either. His game grew as the season progressed and we all started to take notice.

Although a slightly under 50% Corsi for at 5v5 close in the 2013-2014 season, he was still able to keep the opposition from sticking the puck in our net more often than not. The corsi numbers here are slightly skewed with the majority of his starts coming in the defensive zone as well. But you can easily see, the emergence had started. He was handed some relatively tough minutes, and although we can see from the numbers he tended to struggle at times. For the most part however he was able to secure the puck and move it up the ice for some quality offensive chances.

Scandella's numbers so far this season are fantastic. They will almost certainly will regress a bit as the season goes on, but in 10 games this season he is just 1 goal shy of tying his season high of 3 goals, which he has done twice in his career, and at the pace he's going it's unlikely to stop there. With how Yeo has the defense jumping into the play, look for more scoring threats coming from the blue line this season.

Scandella has slowly, but surely advanced his game and become a stalwart on the blue line for the Wild. Looking at the evolution of his game over the course of his career you can almost watch him growing all over again.

Marco Scandella has come out of the gate firing on all cylinders. He's seeing another increase in TOI in games which is only to the benefit of players like Ryan Suter who will get even better when their work-load starts to decrease. He's seeing time on the PP unit as well as time on the PK. Scandella has become a jack of all trades for the Minnesota Wild blue line, and it has become a real exciting time to follow his career the last few seasons.