Of Course It's Jeff Petry's Fault

It's January, so in Edmonton that means it's time for the annual sacrifice of the sports writers' scapegoat.  One of Edmonton's most popular and least-talented beat writers has recently made disparaging statements towards Jeff Petry, indicating that this year's lottery team will be Petry's fault. I'm not going to link to nor quote his statements because he doesn't deserve pageviews or followers and if you follow or regularly read his work, I encourage you to stop.

In suffering the blame for this season, Petry will join an illustrious group of players joined together by 9 seasons of scapegoating, including, but not limited to:  Kyle Brodziak, Devan Dubnyk, Tom Gilbert, Ales Hemsky, Shawn Horcoff,  Ethan Moreau, Dustin Penner, Joni Pitkanen and Sheldon Souray.

Taken from this post, below is the deployment and results chart for the Oilers' defensive corps this season. Full-sized image here.

An intelligent writer would view the above data with an eye towards the events that have occurred on the ice this far this season and reasonably conclude that Jeff Petry is the only Oilers blueliner beating the minutes assigned to him.

A less-than-intelligent writer would ignore what's happened on the ice this season and blame Jeff Petry for the Oilers' woes.  Let's see how the rest of the media pool lines up this spring.

Explanation of the axes and plot:

The horizontal axis shows qualcomp, specifically Corsi relative quality of competition taken from the venerable and terrifying Gabriel Desjardins' behindthenet.ca. The vertical axis shows Corsi relative quality of teammates, also from Desjardins' behindthenet.ca.  Both of those values are taken from here.  The bubbles are color-coded: blue means the player in the bubble has a positive zonestart-adjusted Corsi, red a negative. Finally, the size of the bubble indicates absolute value zonestart-adjusted Corsi.  Zonestart data is taken from here.