Ryan Suter Named NHL Star of the Week

Ryan Suter was named the NHL’s second star of the week. Suter recorded five assists over the three games played in the last week. That led all defensemen for the week and was second among all skaters. He did that in the three games immediately following his two-game absence due to the mumps.

Suter played, as usual, a ton of minutes over the week, logging 33:47 of ice time — his second highest mark of the year — against Arizona on Saturday.

Through all situations and despite of playing tons of minutes, Suter had a 3.4 P/60 for the week (all situations). Suter, interviewed by Kevin Falness, joked that the league “must not have been watching the games” to give him the honor.

Part of that joke might be that the team didn’t play their best hockey over the last week and Suter definitely wasn’t at 100%. He lead a big comeback against the Islanders in many ways, but his possession numbers were down and he didn’t look like himself up and down the ice.

He finished the three-game stretch with a 44.3% Corsi For (too small a sample-size for this to mean anything other than simply being a reflection of how he did play). That’s significantly lower than the 55% Corsi For he has on the season. He was nonetheless indispensable for the Wild though.

The interview linked above is worth a listen to hear him credit the mumps for his honor and when Falness suggested that he doesn’t really like these kind of honors he responds that yeah, “it’s more of a pain in the butt, you have to talk about it.”

Tyler Ennis, who also had five points (1-4-5) was named the league’s number one star and Henrik Lundqvist, 3-0-0 with a 1.30 goals-against average, .951 save percentage, was named the number three star of the week.