Rasmus Andersson got hit by a vehicle and still had a top pairing impact in 2022-23

No matter what anyone says I have nothing but respect for Rasmus Andersson after getting run over by a truck and then coming back and playing first pair minutes in a playoff drive for the Calgary Flames for over two months. Against the best competition In the world, nonetheless. As such he gets an A+ in the middle of this miserable season.

A career-high in goals at 11 and he only missed three games. Via Evolving-Hockey.com he also finished above 50% in Corsi metrics (CF%) and expected goals (xGF%). He also played more minutes per night than anyone on the team. He and MacKenzie Weegar really separated themselves as the top guys on the Flames blueline.

A little explanation of this graph – the farther right the box appears the more offence the grouping generated together. The higher the box is the less chances they allowed against. So ideal placement is in the upper right-hand corner – maximum offence and maximum defence coming together like a beautiful symphony of excellence.

The purple boxes show how Andersson worked in conjunction with other forwards – he found plenty of success with players at the top of the lineup but struggled with Milan Lucic, Trevor Lewis, Dillon Dubé and Elias Lindholm. Mikael Backlund, Tyler Toffoli, Andrew Mangiapane and Jonathan Huberdeau did the opposite and helped work really well with him on the backend.

The other thing we can dissect from this is that he played significantly better defence with Weegar than he did with Noah Hanifin. The offence was slightly less but the defensive impact was a full half goal per 60. I will put an asterisk here that Andersson-Weegar played 280 minutes together and Andersson-Hanifin played 974 minutes.

A significantly larger sample size.

All that to say – Andersson is a massive positive on the upper half of this roster. His offence is irreplaceable and he’s worth way more than his contract.