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Dallas Stars 2022-23 Player Grades: Luke Glendening

Credit: Tim Heitman / Dallas Stars

It’s the offseason here at Defending Big D, which means it’s the time for Player Grades!

We’ll be going through each player on the Dallas Stars roster and giving a general breakdown of how their season went in Victory Green. At the end, I’ll assign my personal grade for their 2022-23 performance, and y’all can can offer up your own grades and analysis in the comments below.

Before we get started, a couple of notes:

  1. We’ll only be looking at Stars currently on the roster who played at least 20 games (regular season + playoffs) for the team.
  2. Grades will be based on both a player’s regular season and postseason performances for Dallas specifically. Since the team had a deep playoff run, that will factor a bit more into the ratings, but we’ll try not to overreact to a single games/series.
  3. These grades are my sole opinion, and are not reflective of the Defending Big D staff as a whole. Except for the ones you disagree with – those aren’t mine.

Luke Glendening (No. 11)

Regular: 70 GP, 3 G, 3 A, 6 P, -9, 50 PIM, 12:04 ATOI All-Situations; 47.2 CF%, 45.3 FF%, 96.9 PDO Even-Strength
Playoffs: 17 GP, 2 G, 1 A, 3 P, -5, 2 PIM, , 11:26 ATOI All-Situations; 42.7 CF%, 42.1 FF%, 94.1 PDO Even-Strength
Contract Status: UFA

At first glance, Luke Glendening’s season stats are rather similar to fellow fourth line forward Joel Kiviranta’s: in the regular season, he also had 70 games played, a small amount of points, a lot of penalty minutes*, and posted a -9 with just over 12 minutes of ice time per game. Come the postseason, he also saw a (slight) uptick in scoring (at least in terms of points per game) and a reduction in penalties taken, although his posession metrics, like Kiviranta, took a hit.

*Note: Kiviranta had 40 PIM in the regular season, not the 10 mistakenly listed in his player grade

There are some key differences in the statlines, however, the first of which being the aforementioned posession stats. Whereas Kiviranta was towards the bottom of the pack, Glendening was dead last in both CF% and FF% for both the regular season and postseason. And that’s not just among the forwards – the only skaters who ranked lower were Denis Gurianov, who was traded mid-season, and Riley Tufte, who appeared in just three regular season games.

The second difference is their time on ice. Sure, the total average time for the regular season was almost identical. But when you take a look at time spent on even strength, Glendening played almost a whole minute less per game, ranking below even 13th forward Frederick Oloffson. Come playoff time, unlike Kiviranta, Glendening’s total ice time dropped by nearly 40 seconds, and he played just 9:17 per a game at even strength.

Now, you might turn around and say, “Well, Glendening isn’t on the roster for his 5-on-5 play – he’s there to eat up minutes on the penalty kill.” And that’s true – his 2:16 ATOI for the penalty kill led all forwards on the team this regular season. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he did a good job eating those minutes – his CF% Rel on the PK was a -4.2, second worst out of the regular penalty killers ahead of only Ty Dellandrea, who played the second most penalty minutes out of forwards.

(Oh, and before you argue that his possession metrics are so bad because he’s going up against the opposing team’s top power play unit, Jani Hakanpää and Esa Lindell, the team’s leading penalty killers, had a 3.3 and 0.6 CF% Rel respectively.)

All of those stats come together to support what we (or at least I) saw on the ice: that Glendening was a liability, mostly at even strength, but even on the penalty kill, his supposed forte. And to be honest, the coaching staff probably came to the same conclusion, hence his decreased ice time towards the end of the season as well as in the playoffs, coupled with some healthy scratches.

If there was any saving grace for Glendening, it was his faceoff skills.  He posted a 59.0% in the regular season, second behind only Jamie Benn, and a 60.0% in the postseason, third behind only Benn and Radek Faksa. The Stars’ were a fantastic in the circle this reason, and he was a big reason why. It was, perhaps, the one thing that led Pete DeBoer to keep slotting him into the lineup.

But at the end of the day, almost all of the Stars’ were above 50% on faceoffs. And even if that was an area they struggled, faceoffs are, in my opinion, just too niche of a skill to justify consistent playing time, especially when contrasted with his other shortcomings.

Like with Kiviranta, I think expectations are important when evaluating fourth line forwards. Yet even so, I think Glendening fell below such expectations, especially when comparing his performance this season to his previous.

Final Grade: D+

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