Marcus Kruger gets rare chance to take on an offensive role

The modern age of hockey has brought with it a slew of new-fangled analytics — mathematical mouthfuls such as score-adjusted 5-on-5 Corsi For, expected Fenwick shooting percentage, and support-neutral winning percentage.

But the so-called “fancy stats” crowd has yet to come up with a term for taking a hit to make a play — holding on to the puck just long enough to draw an extra defender and get violently smeared into the boards, but not before making a sneaky little pass to a suddenly open linemate.

Maybe it should be named the Kruger.

“He’s a fun guy to play with,” Patrick Kane said of Blackhawks center Marcus Kruger. “He works so hard, he gets pucks back, and he sacrifices his body for you to have time and space. I feel like whoever’s playing with him is going to have a good chance to get opportunities to score.”

Kruger has made a nice career for himself — not to mention a nice $3.083-million salary — on the strength of his defense, his penalty-killing, and his ability to withstand punishment in the most physical areas of the ice along the boards and in the corners. But creating opportunities to score has never been his strength, nor his role. Aside from an occasional period or two on Kane’s line in the years before Artem Anisimov arrived to fill the long-vacant No. 2 center spot, Kruger’s job has been exclusively defense-oriented.

That’s changed with Jonathan Toews (back) out of the lineup. Kruger will be on the second line alongside Ryan Hartman and Marian Hossa for the second straight game Friday night against the New York Rangers. And while Kruger’s clearly never going to be a finisher in this league — he had no goals last season, has two this season, and never has scored more than eight — he’s proven over the last couple of weeks that he can help generate some offense in other ways. First, he helped lift Richard Panik out of a prolonged slump on a surprisingly effective line with Dennis Rasmussen. And in Kruger’s first game with the red-hot Hossa, the veteran Slovak had two goals.

“I like playing with him,” Panik said. “He gets his job done. He’s always in the right spot and helps out the ‘D’, so he ends up with the puck all the time in the D-zone, and we end up in the O-zone creating chances.”

Kruger played a season-high 14:54 against Arizona on Tuesday, and had more offensive-zone starts (six) and neutral-zone starts (six) than defensive-zone starts (one) — only the third time that’s happened in the past two seasons. Just four games earlier, Kruger had two faceoffs in the offensive zone, and a whopping 19 defensive-zone draws. He’s also had eight shots on goal in his last four games — more than he had in the previous nine games combined.

But second line or fourth line, offensive zone or defensive zone, Kruger said nothing changes. He shrugs off the idea that he’s making a concerted effort to be more offensive the way he shrugs off those bone-rattling hits along the boards night after night.

“The mindset is the same,” he said. “But obviously, you’re aware of who you’re playing with and their strengths. You try to play good in both ends, but yeah, playing with Hossa is pretty great.”

Kruger’s fate will always be to play a defensive role. In fact, at the start of the season, Joel Quenneville wanted to move Hossa down to Kruger’s line to create a monster checking line. Instead, at least for a couple of games now, Kruger has moved up to Hossa’s line — a rare opportunity to make scoring goals the priority rather than simply preventing them.

“When you’re watching the game, he might not stand out as an offensive guy,” Kane said. “But as players, we realize that time and space that he creates from being out there, and the way he works.”

NOTE: Brent Seabrook will miss Friday’s game. He left Tuesday’s game with an upper-body injury. Quenneville said he’s day-to-day. Toews will miss his eighth straight game Friday, but Quenneville wouldn’t yet rule him out for Sunday.

Email: mlazerus@suntimes.com

Twitter: @marklazerus