Spurgeon Proves Good Things Come In Small Packages
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- The Wild lost Thursday night, snapping a six-game winning streak. Still, if you're looking for a reason behind their recent surge into the playoff picture, Jared Spurgeon is a good place to start.
He has scored five points in the last eight games, as he's set career highs for scoring this season. Spurgeon leads all Wild defenseman in goals, and is second in assists and total points. He's second on the whole team in plus/minus. He's a top penalty killer and plays more minutes than anybody but Ryan Suter.
The list of things Spurgeon can do for the Wild is indeed a long one.
"He's a gritty guy," interim coach John Torchetti said. "For a little guy, he's in a lot of battles."
He's doing all of it at a position where size has always been, literally, a pretty big deal.
Spurgeon is undersized for an NHL player, but he's downright tiny for a defenseman. The average NHL defenseman is 6 feet, 1 inch tall and 206 pounds. At 5-foot-9-inches, and weighing 176, Spurgeon is the smallest defenseman in the NHL.
"I think being smaller, you have to be 'positionally' a bit better. If you're bigger, you can always get back, but if a guy gets around me, it's a bit harder for me to get the body position back," Spurgeon said. "I like to think that I'm a good-positioned player, and my skating too. Growing up, when you're smaller, you have to be a good skater playing against the bigger guys."
In other words, Spurgeon isn't so good in spite of his small size, but rather because of it. His attention to positioning is probably why his advanced statistics -- things like puck possession and scoring chances that the Wild put a lot of stock in -- are so strong.
"To be honest, I don't even understand half that stuff. You just go out to play the game, and the way you learn it and the system we have in place, you just try to stick to that, and the teammates around you help a lot as well," he said. "So if they're in the right position, you have to be in the right position to help them out too."
