Thursday, April 11, 2013

Blinded by Flash


I figured I would elaborate a bit on this post. To repeat the message of it for a second, my belief is flashy goal scoring wingers are the most overpaid/overrated position in the NHL. Why does that happen? In short, their contracts get inflated for two reasons:
  
the positive part of their game is the most easily recognizable – be it stickhandling, shot, skating etc. and easily quantified by statistics, 

 the negative part or the part that is often lacking is however easily dismissed or overlooked – the lack of boardwork, lack of winning puck battles, poor defensive zone game, perimeter only positioning etc., none of that shows up in statistics (save for advanced stats but there is still progress to be made even there especially on the defensive side of game)

It is human nature to put excessive importance on point 1. It's far more breathtaking watching a succesful dangle rather than 5 board battles won. And then you have the fact that point 1 is far easier to quantify with traditional statistics.  



I'd like to focus now a bit now on concrete examples. First let's take a look at some of the highest cap hits among forwards and identify the type of wingers I wrote about, for the lack of a better term let's just call it the "flashy winger" position. There can be some debate on who qualifies or not for that, but I will try to to name some players I think most people would agree fit the bill.
Cap hit rank among forwards
Player
Cap hit amount
8.
Dany Heatley
$7,500,000
9.
Marian Gaborik
$7,500,000
15.
Alexander Semin
$7,000,000
21.
Ilya Kovalchuk
$6,666,667
31.
Mike Cammalleri
$6,000,000














Of course there are other potential candidates to point out with similar cap hits in excess of 6 million, for example some would argue Patrick Kane is another "flashy winger", but I did not include him for the reason that I feel he provides an additional dimension in being both a playmaker as well as possessing an excellent shot.

Now consider the following metrics:
First to spare you an enormous table, you would have to go all the way back to 1995 to find a winger winning the Conn Smythe trophy, and that winger was quite different from the type we're talking about here, it was Claude Lemieux. You would have to go futher back to 1982 to find another one in Mike Bossy.

Now let's take a look at the way coaches shell out ice time to their forwards (we know goalies and defensemen play more due to the nature of the position so that would be rather unfair to compare). We're going to take a look at some Stanley Cup champions' playoff statistics and analyze them.

2012 – Los Angeles Kings
The most noticeable winger on that squad was Dustin Brown, who is far from the protoypical flashy winger and whose cap hit is only $3,175,000. He was tied for first in points (PTS) on the team with Anze Kopitar, and was second among forwards in time on ice (TOI). Jonathan Quick was the Conn Smythe winner.

2011 – Boston Bruins
Another team like the Kings notorious for not spending on that type of winger, the closest was Phil Kessel whom they traded to Toronto. The most noticeable winger was Brad Marchand, another winger far from the prototypical flashy winger, another small cap hit. He was 3rd in PTS, Milan Lucic received the most TOI among wingers and ranked 3rd among forwards. Tim Thomas was the Conn Smythe winner.

2010 – Chicago Blackhawks
Chicago is the first team with a somewhat of a fit in Patrick Kane. Kane was 2nd in PTS, 2nd among forwards in TOI, Jonathan Toews was the Conn Smythe winner.

2009 – Pittsburgh Penguins
Pittsburgh is another team who didn't invest in a flashy goal scoring winger. I don't think there is any need to further look into Pittsburgh when Bill Guerin received the most TOI among wingers and we know the team boasted Crosby, Malkin, Staal down the middle. Conn Smythe to Malkin.

2008 – Detroit Red Wings
Another team without a flashy goal scoring winger, their most noticeable winger was Johan Franzen – a power forward with skill, lower cap hit, 3rd in PTS among forwards, 3rd in TOI among forwards. Conn Smythe to Zetterberg.

I'm going to stop here because as you can see this excerise goes on for a long time without much of a change. While these metrics are not perfect, they do tend to give you the general idea that highly skilled wingers just aren't that important, so it makes me curious why year after year we see the obscene contracts (the latest being Semin) handed out to them. 



I can think of three ways to better allocate funds rather than engage in seemingly endless stupidity of reckless spending on flashy wingers:

Option A: If you really feel like you need that highly skilled winger, I suggest going for a slightly less statistically impressive options and have more money to allocate to C/D/G. Bobby Ryan has a cap hit of 5.1 million, Jeff Carter 5.27 million, Tanguay 3.5 million, Parenteau 4 million, Whitney 4.5 million, S. Kostitsyn 3 million, Vrbata 3 million, Havlat 5 million, C. Stewart 3 million, then there's J. Lupul at 4.25 million etc. Now some of those of course are more attractive than others, but there's really no need to spend 7.5 million on Gaborik or Heatley (heck who wouldn't take Bobby Ryan at 5.1 million over them).

Option B: Go after all around wingers with slightly worse numbers, these guys are cheaper and you'll find a boatload of them playing a prominent role on recent Stanley Cup champions. Again more cash to spend on C/D/G. Some names: Dustin Brown, Justin Williams, Brad Marchand, Milan Lucic, Johan Franzen, Jason Pominville, Loui Eriksson etc. Some guys mentioned here could also be in option A and the other way around, again this is a bit of a gray area (B. Ryan, J. Carter, Pominville and Eriksson could really go either way for example) but I'm trying to give a general idea behind it.

Option C: If you really want to pay a winger make sure that not only is he highly skilled but that he boasts a full all around game as well. Examples: Rick Nash, Zach Parise, Marian Hossa, Thomas Vanek etc.

Now any combination of these three options is fine, but it' still somewhat interesting seeing GMs shell out money to players like Semin, Gaborik, Heatley etc. year after year despite there being no track record of that ever working. It is far more prudent to spend less on wingers in general and spend your money on C/D/G, but this holds especially true for the flashy wingers with attractive traditional statistics, best avoided as their market value seems to be significantly out of whack with their overall contribution to a winning team.




Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Vancouver Canucks: Unlucky or Not Good Enough?



The Vancouver Canucks are one of the best regular season teams in the past couple of years if not the best one, they also went to the finals in the 2010-2011 season and came within a game of winning it all, eventually losing to the Boston Bruins in game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals. The Canucks are far from a poorly managed team, that said we will still try to take a look at why the Stanley Cup has eluded them despite being a very successful team.

The first thing that should be mentioned is that it is entirely possible that they just weren't lucky enough, in hockey as in any other sport but possibly even more so games tend to sometimes come down to bounces and puck luck, over the long-term that luck tends to even out, however when you're in a short format competition in the style of NHL playoffs a couple of bounces or injuries going your way or the other can make a world of difference. The other thing that should be mentioned - in the salary cap era it is near impossible to stack teams the way you could when spending wasn't limited (think of the pre-lockout Detroit and Colorado teams) and even then, luck always played a role. It is safe to say it is impossible in the present day to build a Stanley Cup winner, you can only build a Stanley Cup contender and hope that the team goes all the way in one (or more) of the years.

While it is entirely possible the Canucks just didn't have the bounces go their way, we are going to play a bit of a devil's advocate here and discuss the option B – the team just wasn't/isn't good enough. With that said let me introduce you to the player usage chart:
 



To give you a quick explanation of what it means – the higher the player is on the y axis the tougher competition he plays against, the further right on the x axis the more of his shifts start in the offensive zone. Now I want you to pay attention to where the Sedins and Malhotra are on the chart. What you will notice is that the Sedins didn't quite get the toughest minutes on the team in the form of quality of competition, but what's especially interesting is the fact that the Sedins started nearly 80% of their shifts in the offensive zone while Malhotra took barely any at all. In 2011-2012 season there was no other team with such extreme zone-specific player deployment (if you want to check out other teams' charts, they are all available in the link posted below the chart). In fact this has been a staple of the Canucks for years.

Under the chart we have Scott Cullen's take:
"That doesn’t mean they are incapable of starting in the defensive zone or facing more difficult competition, but head coach Alain Vigneault is putting them in the best position to be successful and there is little evidence that it would be better for the Canucks to have the Sedins doing more heavy lifting while giving Malhotra, Lapierre or Pahlsson more offensive zone starts." (source: http://www.hockeyanalytics.com/Research_files/Player_Usage_Charts_2012.pdf)

I have bolded the part that I find particularly interesting. While that kind of player usage has clearly worked for the Canucks in the regular season, the bolded makes me question whether it is the Sedins that can't handle a more all-around role or is it the supporting cast in question that can't handle anything more than a shutdown role? To elaborate, if we believe the Canucks regular season record is indicative of their talent level as one of the best if not the best teams in the league, then why are they afraid of playing power vs power matchups all over the ice instead of using this kind of specialization? Surely the better team would come out ahead in such a match-up? 

Why not try the old hockey cliche of outplaying the guy on the other team, meaning let Henrik Sedin outplay Kopitar/Toews/Datsyuk/etc. on the whole ice, and so on down throughout the lineup line-by-line. Surely that is a reasonable proposition if you have confidence in the Canucks being the best team in the league as their regular season record suggested over the last couple of years? Unless you're trying to hide something behind the specialization? Maybe Henrik Sedin isn't as good of an all around player as a guy like Kopitar or Toews is? Or maybe the Canucks supporting cast isn't as good as the supporting cast of Chicago or LA? If that's the reason, then it might be time to re-evaluate whether the Canucks truly are the best of the West and what to do to fix it. Certainly abandoning their specialization approach for a power vs power approach would if nothing else help illuminate any deficiencies, and just maybe if there aren't any the Canucks go on and win the Cup. Why not give Henrik Sedin the opportunity to match up against the West's best centers on the whole ice without being sheltered, and so on down throughout the lineup? I can hardly think of a better motivational tool than the idea of outplaying the guy playing the same role on the other team in every facet of the game. If the Canucks are truly as good as their record indicated in the last couple of years, they should come out ahead more often than not. If they aren't, this approach will at least expose the holes instead of hiding them behind specialization.

To be fair to the Canucks while they still employ the same type of player usage this year, their numbers seem to have normalized a little bit. Henrik Sedin now starts 69% percent of his shifts in the offensive zone and Maxim Lapierre took over the Malhotra role with only 25% of his shifts starting in the offensive zone. The Sedins also rank a bit higher relative to the team in the quality of competition they are facing than they did in past years. That said the approach is still the same if a bit more mild. The Canucks also added Derek Roy, with Sedin/Kesler (if healthy)/Roy down the middle that should make them even more comfortable in taking the power vs power approach if they so desire.

To finish it off, while it is entirely possible the Canucks simply didn't have enough bounces go their way to win the Cup so far (it is hard after all to criticize a team that came within a game of winning it all as recently as the Canucks did), a different approach might help illuminate the issues if there are any or maybe even prove fruitful enough to finally win that Cup.