Archive for December, 2009

As everyone has likely heard by now, the general managers of the Washington Capitals and Columbus Blue Jackets (respectively George McPhee and Scott Howson) have combined to do the impossible: make a trade mid-season. The Capitals give up depth defenceman Milan Jurcina and team captain Chris Clark, while the Blue Jackets send way veteran role player Jason Chimera. Here’s the skinny on each player involved.

Jason Chimera

Cap Hit: $1.875 million until 2011-12.
Stats Line: 39GP – 8G – 9A – 17PTS, -7
Advanced Stats: 1.98 EV PTS/60, 43.1 ZS OPCT, -5.2 RCorsi, 97.9 PDO

Chimera is a pretty useful guy to have around. He’s first and foremost a great skater, and while he isn’t the kind of guy who bangs heads together he doesn’t have any trouble with physical play either. He can chip in a bit offensively, and he’s a veteran penalty-killer. He might be a little bit overpaid for what he does, but it isn’t by a lot and it isn’t a contract that’s going to hurt Washington in the long-term. They’ve taken on an affordable player signed for some length of time, and they’ve cleared a bunch of cap space while doing it.

As for what the advanced stats mean, the first number is Chimera’s even-strength scoring rate, which is very respectable. The second number indicates that he gets a lot of starts in the defensive zone, a factor which has drug down his relative Corsi number and his plus/minus. Relative Corsi indicates that the Blue Jackets were getting outshoit with Chimera on the ice, but given the number of defensive zone draws he was taking that’s not such a big deal. Finally, his PDO is the combination of his on-ice shooting and save percentages, and it’s a fair bit off of 100, indicating that we can probably expect his plus/minus to pick up a bit.

Chris Clark

Cap Hit: $2.633 million until 2010-11.
Stats Line: 38GP – 4G – 11A – 15PTS, -4
Advanced Stats: 1.64 EV PTS/60, 51.1 ZS OPCT, -1.4 RCorsi, 99.5 PDO

Chris Clark has always been an interesting player. The first mark against him is his salary; he parlayed a career-high 18.3 shooting percentage (career average: 10.6%) assisted by a bunch of power play time into a contract for a second-tier scorer, but the reality is that he’s far more likely to be a 30-point than a 50-point man. The fact that he was Washington’s team captain is a pretty good indicator of the kind of character he has a reputation for, and he’s a guy who doesn’t mind getting his nose dirty or going to difficult areas of the ice. Possibly of interest: Clark has only once been a positive plus/minus player over any season of his career; he’s minus-37 through a little over 500 games played.

Milan Jurcina

Cap Hit: $1.375 million until 2009-10, pending unrestricted free agent.
Stats Line: 27GP – 0G – 4A – 4PTS, even
Advanced StatS: 0.61 EV PTS/60, 49.2 ZS OPCT, -5.0 RCorsi, 100.4 PDO

One thing that Jurcina doesn’t bring to the table is offence; he’s never hit the 30-point plateau in junior, the minors, or the NHL. The 6’4″ rearguard will help fill the hole created by Rostislav Klesla‘s long-term injury, however, and he should fit the bill as a stay-at-home guy for the Blue Jackets. Jurcina generally racks up high totals in the shot-block and hits departments and this year is no exception; he’s among the Capitals’ leaders in both categories, although he’s spent some time outside the lineup. Another point of interest: in nine seasons in the QMJHL, AHL and NHL, Jurcina’s only been a minus player once: he was minus-1 as a rookie professional with the Providence Bruins in 2003-04.

Final Thoughts

I really like this trade for the Capitals. They clear up a bunch of salary, and this move combined with the banishment of Michael Nylander gives them room to add a legitimate player (or even two) at the trade deadline. Jurcina was mostly a spare part for the Capitals, and Chimera should be able to bring most of what Clark brought for a more modest price. I also doubt that the loss of their team captain will be a crippling blow to team chemistry.

I’m less fond of this deal from a Jackets’ perspective. They did need to add a piece on defence but I would have thought that swapping a draft pick for a guy like Jurcina would have been enough. I have my doubts that Clark will represent a substantial upgrade on Chimera. Not only that, but the team’s real problem, the problem that has them sinking down the Western Conference standings, is poor goaltending and this move doesn’t address that issue.

Further thoughts can be found at The Cannon and Japer’s Rink.

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I’ve never been able to figure out why the Sedin twins (still referred to as “the Sisters”, even by some Canucks fans) fail to get the respect they deserve. Together, they’re a force to be reckoned with, one of the league’s most potent even-strength duos. Last year, allowing for ice-time, both ranked in the top-12 of NHL players based on even-strength production and there’s no denying – either based on statistics or simply by watching them play – that they keep the puck in the right end of the rink and generate a lot of scoring opportunities.

I’ve also always been fascinated by comparisons with these players; the chance to study identical twins doesn’t come along very often in the NHL, and it’s an opportunity that should be taken. Vic Ferrari of Irreverent Oiler Fans ran two interesting posts at the start of last season on the twins, both looking at their numbers when apart (coach Alain Vigneault split them at times in 2007-08) as compared to when they were together, and both posts are well worth reading. In the first, Ferrari pointed to the difference in minutes they were playing – Daniel was getting a fairly even split in terms of territorial starts, and was doing it with Ryan Kesler and Alex Burrows, while Henrik was getting a bunch of defensive zone work with Taylor Pyatt and Mason Raymond. In the second post, he took a long look at the ramifications of those moves, which basically amount to Daniel racking up the goals and points while Henrik was out-shot and out-played.

Vigneault did something similar this season when Daniel was injured, putting Henrik out for far more defensive zone draws. With the two of them together, Vigneault did his best to get them out in the offensive zone, but with just Henrik he ran him pretty much even in terms of offensive vs. defensive zone starts. That’s unfortunate for my purposes, since it makes it more difficult to isolate the impact of Henrik playing without Daniel (since there are now more variables in play) but I think it’s still interesting to look at some numbers of Henrik vs. Henrik and Daniel together. All numbers at even-strength and courtesy timeonice.com.

Goals For/Against

Henrik & Daniel: +21/-8 = +13
Henrik alone: +13/-11 = +2

Corsi (shots made, missed and blocked) For/Against

Henrik & Daniel: +304/-205 = +99 (59.7%)
Henrik alone: +257/-238 = +19 (51.9%)

Those are pretty significant drops. The first is the actual plus/minus numbers with Henrik with vs. without Daniel, and while the two of them together were dominant, Henrik alone was simply good. The Corsi number is a fine indication of where the puck is at any given time; with Henrik and Daniel together we see it’s in the offensive half nearly 60% of the time, while with Henrik alone we see it’s still in the offensive half roughly 52% of the time.

The obvious conclusion is that both are very, very good hockey players. Together, they are one of the most dominant tandems in the NHL, whether they get credit for it or not. But even without his brother, and even playing tougher minutes, Henrik Sedin is a very good hockey player – a centre who helps drive the puck in the right direction. If the Canucks can ever solidify their bottom six, these are players good enough to help them contend.

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I mentioned last week how my opponent (Nathan Eide of Hockey Wilderness) didn’t seem to be paying much attention to his fantasy team, and that held up in a 10-1-2 romp. The sole point of redemption for his team (aside from the fact that I don’t have goal scorers) was one Dwayne Roloson, who has been very good for the New York Islanders this season and who won two games last week, with a 2.28 GAA and .925 SV%. Combine that with a relatively poor week for Marc-Andre Fleury (one win, 3.99 GAA, .905 SV%) and it was enough to deprive me of three points.

Category: Willis – Eide

Goals: 11 - 10

Assists: 21 – 6

Plus/Minus: +1 – -1

PIM: 16 – 13

PPG: 2 – 2

PPA: 10 – 2

GWG: 2 – 1

SOG: 94 – 63

Wins: 2 – 2

GAA: 2.85 – 2.28

Saves: 128 – 86

SV%: .928 – .925

Shutouts: 1 – 0

Transactions

A very slow transaction week for me was interrupted by only one move, a move that I didn’t especially want to make. Justin Williams, a late pick gamble on my part had been playing very well (on a line with Ryan Smyth and Anze Kopitar for a good portion of the season) and although he wasn’t setting the world on fire he did have eight goals and 24 points through 33 games. Unfortunately, Williams was carted off the ice on a stretcher on Saturday after breaking his right leg, so rather than wait for the team to put him on IR I dropped him and brought back Steve Downie, who brings a few things (powerplay goals and PIM) that I don’t have on the roster right now. I looked in vain for a LW (I only have two on the team) and will hopefully address that hole via trade, but none of the available free agents (Rostislav Olesz, Tanner Glass and Shawn Thornton were ranked highest, although I probably would have taken Robert Nilsson) were particularly inspiring.

Week 13 Matchup

My opposition next week comes in the form of Second City Hockey‘s fantasy team, a group that has struggled so far this season and sits just slightly below the middle of the pack. Last week I would have managed a record of 8-3-2 against them, surprisingly with my goaltenders as the weak point (SCH is running out a tandem of Tim Thomas and Chris Mason). With any luck I’ll be able to post something similar, as despite my strong run I’m still 10 points out of first.

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I know that in certain quarters it’s fashionable to view Jonathan Quick as a big contributer to the success of the Los Angeles Kings this season, rather than as a player holding them back. It’s gotten to the point where many suggest with a straight face that Quick ought to supplant one of Craig Anderson or Tim Thomas on the U.S. Olypmic team. With that in mind, I thought I’d pop up this handy chart of the league’s 10 wins leaders, along with save percentage (all numbers prior to yesterday’s games).

Rank	Name	Team	Wins	Save %	Shutouts
1	Martin Brodeur	NJD	23	0.921	3
2	Marc-Andre Fleury	PIT	22	0.911	0
3	Ryan Miller	BUF	21	0.935	4
4	Ilya Bryzgalov	PHX	21	0.926	5
5	Jonathan Quick	LAK	20	0.904	0
6	Evgeni Nabokov	SJS	19	0.924	2
7	Miikka Kiprusoff	CGY	18	0.928	3
8	Craig Anderson	COL	18	0.917	3
9	Roberto Luongo	VAN	17	0.917	2
10	Cristobal Huet	CHI	16	0.913	3

Quick is far and away the worst of the lot.

Also possibly of interest: Marc-Andre Fleury isn’t exactly lighting the world on fire. I know that he gets a ton of credit for being a part (along with Crosby, Malkin, Gonchar and the rest) of the Stanley Cup-winning Pittsburgh Penguins but the reality is that aside from an excellent 2007-08 he’s mostly been a solid starter behind a very good team, rather than an elite goaltender in his won right. He may develop into that – his results to date, and especially his consistency are strong marks in his favour – but I don’t think he’s shown enough to pass, say, Roberto Luongo.

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The most commonly heard narrative regarding the 2006 Edmonton Oilers is that they were a run-of-the-mill cinderella team, that their decline was inevitable, and that the only surprising thing about their performance since the lockout is the fact that they managed to get all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals. It’s a narrative that drives me a little batty, because it’s so obviously wrong. Consider, for example, that no team in the entire NHL allowed fewer shots than the 2005-06 Oilers. They had a splendid penalty kill, a capable power play, and almost always outshot their opposition.

They did, however, have an achilles’ heel: goaltending. Prior to acquiring journeyman Dwayne Roloson at the 2006 trade deadline, the Oilers employed the underwhelming trio of Ty Conklin, Jussi Markkanen, and Mike Morrison. That group combined for an .881 SV%, and the Oilers allowed 190 goals with them between the pipes. In contrast, Roloson managed a .905 SV%, a drastic improvement. It would have saved the Oilers 42 goals against over the course of an entire season; that many saved goals against would easily have vaulted them into the upper echelon of Western Conference teams. In short, there was one obvious, glaring probelm with that Oilers’ group and to claim that they were a middling team that caught fire is simply inaccurate.

I bring this up this morning to show how goaltending can hold a team back, and because there are two teams in particular that could benefit a lot from better goaltending: Columbus and Toronto.

The Maple Leafs are in a special position, because they already have a replacement in the system: Jonas Gustavsson. Of course, Gustavsson has missed time with injury, but the difference with him in net for the Leafs vs. the other goaltenders is remarkable. The Leafs have faced 1011 shots so far this season, let’s use that number as a baesline to compare the performance of Gustavsson vs. the other goaltenders.

Gustavsson: .906 SV%, 95 goals against
Other goalies: .875 SV%, 127 goals against

That’s almost a goal-per-game shift for the Leafs. Indeed, had Gustavsson started every game the Leafs would have allowed 17 fewer goals than they have with the current split. It’s not enough to turn things completely around, and with the hole the Leafs are in it probably won’t be enough, but this should have been a playoff-bubble team rather than a basement dweller, and that’s the performance we should expect from them for the remainder of the season.

Columbus is in a different situation, because neither of their goaltenders has shown an ability to be a reliable starter this season. At the start of the month we calculated the average NHL starter to have a .913 SV% and the average backup to have a .904 SV%. We’ll use the latter number as a point of comparison; in effect we’re showing the difference between what Columbus has now and the average backup goaltender.

Average backup: .904 SV%, 111 goals against
Current goalies: .891 SV%, 126 goals against

Of course the Blue Jackets’ numbers would have been even better with a legitimate starter, but even the simple switch to a capable backup would have resulted in a 15-goal improvement.

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Head coach Craig MacTavish and the rest of Team Canada start the Spengler Cup today, and although the’re likely to be overshadowed by the World Juniors, it’s still some very good hockey. The tournament has been running annually since 1923, and combines a lot of unique elements: history, European teams, and a chance to catch up with ex-NHL’ers now playing overseas.

There are a lot of interesting players on the roster; for anyone wondering ‘whatever happened to…’ it’s a great place to catch up. There are high draft picks on the team, guys like Alexandre Daigle, Ric Jackman, and Boyd Devereaux. There are players who were once counted on for NHL offence, like Mark Bell, Curtis Brown, and Brett McLean. Former Avalanche grinder Serge Aubin will captain the team, and he’ll get help from former Thrasher J.P. Vigier and defenceman Shawn Heins, best known for his 106.0 MPH slapshot (at one time the hardest shot ever recorded). The goalies are recognizable, for different reasons; starter David LeNeveu is a tremendous AHL’er and was once viewed as Phoenix’s goalie of the future, while backup Wade Dubielewicz‘s most recent claim to fame is being claimed from the Islanders by the Blue Jackets after being brought over from Europe midseason.

There’s going to be a lot of good hockey, and while Canada always seems to be competitive chemistry is a concern every year. Canada’s opponents are European club teams that play together all season, while the Canadians are tossed together from all over for the tournament. The teams – in particular Dynamo Minsk, who will have the Olympic starter for Team Belarus in net – are all highly skilled, making the task even more difficult.

As always, though, gold is the expectation.

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The New York Times Slap Shot blog isn’t happy with Mike Milbury. At issue was the discovery that deceased NHL’er Reggie Fleming suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a neurological disease associated with repeated head trauma. Unsurprisingly, Milbury viewed the life-altering head injury as less of a priority than keeping the game tough (scroll to the bottom for video):

We all know it’s a tough game. We want it to stay tough. We want some danger in the game, and it comes with a price… You wanna be a hockey player? There’s danger involved. There’s gonna be long-term problems.

While listing long-term problems, Milbury compared Fleming’s depression, alcoholism, memory loss, and the other effects of C.T.E to his own knee replacement. For the record, here’s how Fleming’s son described his father in later years:

“He’d get in fistfights with people on the street, and kicked out of the racetrack,” Chris Fleming said. “It just didn’t make sense, someone snapping so quickly and violently. Other hockey players didn’t stay like that. But he didn’t know how to react.”

In the 1990s, Chris Fleming said his father would ask him a question, hear the answer, and then five minutes later ask it again. This could happen three or four times as tension mounted.

It’s obviously not quite the same. Of course, the fact that Milbury didn’t have a clue what he was talking about was revealed when he started talking about players getting nicked once or twice and losing the ability to function; by definition C.T.E. is caused by chronic exposure to concussive and sub-concussive impacts to the head as opposed to the sort of one-off incidents Milbury describes. The Slap Shot blog does a good job of tearing into Milbury’s point, including the idea that the league is losing physical play. Following their supporting links, we eventually arrive at this rather interesting fact, courtesy of William Houston’s Truth & Rumours blog:

Campbell and his staff viewed some 1970s footage after which they concluded they’re likely to see more hitting in one shift today than in a full game from the 1970s.

(bolding mine)

That’s an interesting statement, and not one that gets mentioned all that often (although Elliotte Friedman does raise it in the video below). Generally, people like Milbury argue the reverse. Still, that wasn’t the most interesting comment that I heard in the CBC Hotstove segment. No, the most interesting comment came from Ron MacLean, who generally seems like one of the most sane and reasonable commentators in the game:

The thing that’s always amazed me is that in ’07 cycling was the number one cause of head injuries in the United States, football was obviously number two, hockey was way down at like number 15.

Milbury jumped on that statement, talking about how it “becomes more than it should” (just before he misunderstood the word “apologist”). I was interested enough to look up the study, because that sounded a lot to me like total number of incidents rather than per capita incidents. Sure enough, hockey ranked 15th in terms of raw numbers, but only by raw numbers. A better way to llok at things is on a percentage basis – for instance, the number of serious brain/spinal cord injuries per 100,000 participants. Fortunately for us, the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research keeps track of that particular stat, and here’s how hockey compares at the men’s high school level with other sports between 1982 and 2008:

Hockey: 2.36 direct injuries per 100,000 participants
Football: 1.78 direct injuries per 100,000 participants
Lacrosse: 1.28 direct injuries per 100,000 participants
Wrestling: 0.93 direct injuries per 100,000 participants
Baseball: 0.45 direct injuries per 100,000 participants
Track: 0.40 direct injuries per 100,000 participants
Swimming: 0.35 direct injuries per 100,000 participants
Soccer: 0.21 direct injuries per 100,000 participants
Basketball: 0.11 direct injuries per 100,000 participants

I went to the trouble of digging this information up because while it’s obvious to most anyone that Milbury’s blowing hot air, Ron MacLean is generally grounded, reasonable and intelligent. But his brief glance at the numbers gave the impression there was nothing to worry about, when it seems obvious to me that there is a good deal of reason for concern.

[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ29Prd_drY&feature=player_embedded]

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