[Wild About Numbers]: Jonathon Blum Has Shown So Far That He Belongs In The NHL

This season, Scandella and Spurgeon have been the most efficient defencemen in terms of scoring points at EV but both of them play fairly tough minutes. Prosser, Ballard and Stoner benefit from softer minutes but don't have the offensive ability to capitalise on it. Matt Dumba may have been able to play this role but he needed to go back to juniors to work on his defensive game.

With Clayton Stoner possibly done for the season and Keith Ballard nursing an injury, Mike Yeo has tried some interesting new deployments for his defencemen, pairing Prosser with Brodin and Blum with Scandella to start games but swapping them around during games so that Brodin and Scandella always end up with the brunt of the ice time at EV. That seems like a good system going forward (unless Yeo decides to get Folin into the mix which would probably mean Prosser sits). I'd like to see Blum get some PP time to try and ease some of the pressure on Suter.

-Here's a player usage chart showing the Wild's defencemen (Y Axis=Relative Quality Of Competition):

-Here's the same again only this time Y Axis=Quality Of Teammate:

-He is yet to score a point in his 9 games, but here is how well he has done at generating shots:

-Here are his on-ice stats so far this season:

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Follow me on Twitter for more Wild talk and thanks to Extra Skater, Hockey Analysis and Some Kind Of Ninja for the numbers used in this article.