Things I wrote on an airplane with no editor or fact-checking…
There was a lot of chatter about the contract that Josh Gorges just received from the Montreal Canadiens general manager Pierre Gauthier. For six years at a little over $23M, Gorges, now 27, will hold a cap hit of just under $3.9M, which seems like an oddball amount for a defenseman who is almost exclusively a defensive defenseman.
The perspective that needs to be had is that you aren’t getting a defensive defenseman for $3.9M if you’re the Montreal Canadiens. You’re getting a relatively young guy who has been very reliable in the last two seasons at shot prevention—a talent so widely under appreciated by fans and yet becoming valuable among hockey’s general managers.
Without using Corsi or shot differential numbers, I can offer this up. When Josh Gorges has been on the ice, the Montreal Canadiens don’t give up a lot of shots. You can look at any part of Gorges as to why this is, maybe say that he blocks shots, picks up his man well on a 3-on-2, or clears away a lot of rebounds. Whatever it is, it’s working, and it’s a talent that he’s nursed from his boyhood days right up into the professional ranks. You can be coached certain ways and the schemes change, but, overall, no coach is going to do too much to try and change what a player has been doing his whole life. A good coach will find out what a player does well and exploit it. I don’t follow Gorges, I don’t watch him every night and I don’t talk to him after every game to know exactly what he does so well, but I can step back and look at the numbers, and see that it works out.
Defensemen don’t typically break out and start playing with a comfort level until they’re around 25 or 26 years old, so we need to consider that if we look at relatively weak possession numbers for Gorges before that age. Over the last two seasons, when he’s been healthy, he’s played hard minutes for the Montreal Canadiens, and his team has had the puck more often than not when he’s on the ice. Let’s ignore that he has limited offensive instincts and doesn’t play very well on the right side of centre. But a defenseman’s job is first and foremost to get the puck there. If Montreal had even the mere illusion of good National Hockey League forwards, perhaps he’d get a few more assists and more recognition.
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I had very good seats to watch a pretty good hockey game between the San Jose Sharks and the Vancouver Canucks last night in Vancouver. I think any combination of Vancouver, San Jose or Detroit makes for a tremendous hockey game. They’re three teams with a continued record of success over the last few seasons and share a lot of similar traits. They all like to be puck-possession teams and don’t necessarily feel the need to be physical when the game situation doesn’t dictate it. I don’t think either team finished a check last night, instead they were working on moving the puck forward.
A guy I like to continually rag on is Antti Niemi, a quick-moving, moderately talented Finnish goaltender who started in Chicago when they won the Stanley Cup two years ago. He lets in some soft goals and is susceptible to allowing mid-range shots (which the Canucks love to take, and therefore beat him quite a bit when they get a lot of opportunities) but the amount of output that the Sharks get out of Niemi is quite comparable to the performances of bigger-name goalies. He won’t wow you with shutouts and he may let in a softie or two every couple of games, but he often keeps opponents to two or three goals and puts up quality starts. He’s a consistently above-average goalie who comes at a cheaper price tag than most others. What’s not to like about that?
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I picked up Logan Couture in a fantasy league the instant I saw that he had been dropped. I never remember in time to adjust my lineups, so I’m doing pretty awful in most leagues, but I always like making trades for players I think are going to do better.
For fantasy and playoff pools I always end up with the same characters for a decent amount of time. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s I always seemed to wind up with Michal Handzus or Marian Hossa on my playoff pool teams, and they always seemed to do well enough and I kept them there. That’s actually how I mostly know Handzus, and I thought it was an excellent signing for the Sharks this offseason simply for that reason.
Now, for pools, I seem to end up taking Ryane Clowe and Logan Couture. They are two of the league’s best-kept secrets who play both ends of the ice well and are consistently dangerous. People stray away from them because they aren’t household names just yet and because San Jose are perceived playoff chokers. I hope the perception keeps up.
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Goaltenders are so impossible to predict. I used to think that is was the easiest position to evaluate because there isn’t much more to look at than “does he make saves?” and “how many saves does he make?”. There is no way you can predict year-to-year what will happen with these guys, except with maybe what the top goalies do. A goalie with a true save percentage talent of .920 may go .930 one year and .910 the next, skirting the line between superstar and below-average on a year-to-year basis.
I think that’s quite something, and part of a reason why it’s probably better for general managers to stay away from long-term goalie contracts. You look at the criticism taken by Ilya Bryzgalov and Roberto Luongo for their long deals. I look at big-money goalies like Cam Ward, and see such a limited amount of production for somebody that the team has invested a lot of resources in.
Look at Brian Elliott in St. Louis. He’s been nothing this year, if not cheap and reliable, making up a lot of ground for Jaroslav Halak’s poor play in the early going of the season. Imagine, you have two goalies on your team, one where you give up a lot of resources in a trade and the other a bargain bin signing, and the bargain bin signing is the one with more starts and playing better. It certainly helps that St. Louis doesn’t give up a whole lot of shots against. They’re one of the more under appreciated teams in the NHL, and while I was against Davis Payne’s firing, I think that they’ve substantially improved under Ken Hitchcock.
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The question was posited on Driving Play in the summer and I keep thinking about my response in regards to what I thought about the Florida Panthers. I make fun of Dale Tallon for giving out what I believe to be ridiculous four-year contracts to mediocre players but his team is actually kind of good.
I can’t remember the exact wording of the question, but it was something to the like of whether it’s better to be a good possession team with no goaltending, or a mediocre possession team with good goaltending. The Panthers were going to be an interesting experiment in this regard. While Tomas Fleischmann, at his health, has no reason being signed for so many years, and Ed Jovanovski, at his age, has no reason to be signed for so many years, and Marcel Goc, at his talent-level, has no reason to be signed for so many years, I thought the team was reasonably well pieced together up front that they could scrape together being a team that consistently generates more shots than the opponent.
The trouble is in net. Jose Theodore is a total wildcard and the Panthers were losing one of the few goalies in recent years who had a consistent track record of success. Theodore has worked out and the team leads the Southeast Division, and the team was also 8th in the league in score-tied Fenwick at last check. They haven’t needed to be too, too reliant on Theodore and I think his save percentage has finally crept below .920 (towards a number we can more reasonably expect) which shows that they can win more games than they lose.
The better lab rat in the experiment were the Washington Capitals, however, who got awful goaltending in the month of November and early December and fired their coach despite continually controlling play with the score tied. All you really need is average goaltending if you’re a good possession team, and I think you can pick that up for cheap.
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I still don’t get the Pekka Rinne contract.
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I read an excellent piece by Toronto Maple Leafs’ Globe and Mail beat writer James Mirtle exploring Phil Kessel’s shy demeanour last week. For a player who is so important to one of hockey’s most important franchises, he doesn’t ever really speak all that much. On-ice, he’s noticeable, high-event, a game-breaker, everything you could ask in a superstar. But off the ice, he seems like an aloof character and you rarely seem him in post-game interviews.
If Phil Kessel were Russian, do you think Brian Burke would have traded for him? Do you think that maybe Toronto media would criticize the fact that he’s really quiet when they’re around? He fits the Russian superstar archetype quite well, I think.
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The Leafs should just put Mikhail Grabovski at centre with Phil Kessel. Kessel gets burned in possession and chances every single game that I take a close look at, and I don’t think it’s his doing. He’s too good a player to have to spend a lot of time trying to clear pucks out of the defensive zone and I’d rather that he get an extra rushing chance a shift, and Grabovski is a proven two-way centre who would be able to do that.
With the season Nikolai Kulemin is having, that second line that was so successful for Toronto last year just hasn’t met expectations, so I think it might be worth to split up both the first and second lines.
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Give Bryan Murray credit: he found a lot of young players who could score goals, and brought them in to Ottawa at the right time.
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I don’t get to vote for league awards, but if I did, halfway through the season you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that Ryan Nugent-Hopkins is the Calder Trophy winner over Gabriel Landeskog. Landeskog plays a lot of real tough minutes for the Colorado Avalanche, is wildly effective in them and is maturing into one of the better defensive centres in the league… at 18.
He doesn’t have the offensive numbers of RNH, but the Oilers are really helping their kid line succeed by giving them favourable matchups as soon as they can find them. The way I’d put it is that, when Edmonton plays Colorado, Tom Renney would want to keep RNH away from a guy like Landeskog.
