I'd like to be excited about tonight's game -- first game of the rest of the season and all, see if Stajan and White are any good (not too worried about Hagman), etc.

But this Kotalik thing is hanging like a dark cloud. In a rather stunning development, the MSM, bloggers, and commenters seem to be unanimous that acquiring Ales Kotalik makes no goddamn sense whatsoever.

The only thing close to a defense of Sutter I've seen was Puck Daddy Hisself last night: a 1998-era "Since Olli's leaving you might as well get something for him" argument that I couldn't disagree with more. I dislike Jokinen a LOT -- I often recall an old Cosh 'joke' about once being ready to shoot Igor Ulanov and bill Igor's parents for the ammunition -- but there's no way that Kotalik + Higgins is a big upgrade over Jokinen + Prust for the remainder of this season.

And as for the two seasons after this one, well,

[$5.5M cap space] >>>[ $2.5M cap space] + [Healthy Scratch on one of the few teams that has as much trouble scoring as Calgary]

So anyway, uh, Go Flames!

The die was cast at the end of June 2009. Darryl Sutter may have hoped that paying both J-Bo and Dion $6.5M/yr for years to come was a good plan, but it wasn't; 50+ games this season have shown fairly clearly that it wasn't; and fortunately for we Flames fans, Sutter has acknowledged that it wasn't and acted.

I'm not at all excited to see Phaneuf go. And Stajan, White, and Hagman don't make anyone's hearts skip a beat. But this was a necessary move. I'd say there's very little doubt that it makes them better right now, and it gives them the opportunity to be better in the seasons going forward.

The only way this trade could have been better is if it was basically straight up for a quality young forward (Perry, Semin, that type of thing), but Phaneuf just hasn't been good enough lately to make something like that happen.

It's probably about the best move Sutter could have made. Yes, it was to clean up his own mess, but the alternative to that -- not cleaning up his own messes -- sucks much worse.

For quite a few years, Brent Krahn was the Flames' most important goalie prospect. I often used to think -- as recently as the 06/07 season -- that it wouldn't be so bad if a little injury gave him the opportunity to show his stuff for a couple of weeks, or that maybe the big club should install him as the backup and give him periodic starts. He wasn't setting the minors on fire or anything, but at least then we'd know what we had, right!

But seeing the Oilers for the last couple months now, I have a good idea how that would have went.

As I just tweeted, I propose that Saturday night's Battle of Alberta -- where the combatants have a combined 21-game losing streak -- be dubbed, "Keenan and MacT Appreciation Night". Any chance this catches on?

Johnson wouldn't even acknowledge that ten consecutive losses constituted a slump. Trying to keep his poise as everybody around him lost theirs, Johnson commented: "You say to yourself, let's go back to the time when we were successful. What did we do differently? For the six weeks when we lost only two games, we were getting some breaks, we were getting some timely goals, and our goaltending was outstanding. Now, all of a sudden, we're not getting many goals, our defense is too tentative, and we're not getting good goaltending. We're in a slump because people keep telling us we're in a slump. People tell you you're playing badly and after a while, you start to believe it. People tell you you're playing great and you believe that, too. What do we need? We need to recapture the winning feeling. And the only way to do that is to win a game."

The wisdom of the late Badger Bob Johnson, coming just before rock bottom: the 85-86 Flames 11th straight loss, to the Hartford Whalers(!) at home (!!) by a score of 9-1(!!!).

The Flames have problems, and they're not a great team, but, they aren't this bad. They just aren't. Their best game of the season was the game before this losing streak started, a shootout win over the Canucks in which they led 33-11 on the shot clock late in the 3rd. Their 2nd best game of the season was probably the game after that -- Loss #1 of this streak -- where Craig Anderson robbed them blind, over and over.

I think GlenX needs a couple of skill plays to go right for him, to get the Scoreface back. Hopefully David Moss -- playoff bubble be damned -- will take the time to heal properly, so that he can be the dominant-looking player he was last season and right up until he left the lineup in October. Because since he came back, he's been a shadow of himself. But also, they need another good hockey player up front.

**Which reminds me: the #1 Google result for 'Trade Phaneuf' is this post from November. Not much to apologize for there, although time seems to be indicating that JBo is not actually in the same league offensively as Phaneuf.

**Kovalchuk: it really seems to me like the Blackhawks are the sensible place for him to go, for all parties. The conventional wisdom seems to be that teams who are interested in him for the long term will be willing to part with more than teams who are 'merely' interested in a rental, but I'm not sure of this at all.

Chicago has a cap problem for next season. If we make the reasonable assumptions that (A) Brian Campbell is untradeable, and (B) cutting Brent Sopel isn't gonna get it done, cap-wise, then we are stuck with the reality that, at some point, the Hawks are going to have to get rid of a good player who is worth his contract -- a guy they don't want to get rid of. So think of it this way:
- they can't afford Kovalchuk next season
- they can't afford Kris Versteeg next season
- they have a better chance winning the 2010 Stanley Cup with Kovalchuk than Versteeg

That's it. Maybe it's Versteeg, Buff-lynn and a pick; maybe Barker, Skille, and a pick; maybe a veteran D comes along with Ilya; who knows. From the Thrashers side, they get an young yet established quality NHL player on a reasonable deal, in addition to the usual 'popcorn in the pot'. Which really is not a very likely return from any other suitors.

As for Kovalchuk himself, it's a great situation. He's auditioning for a mega-contract on a good team with good teammates, and he doesn't have to deal with serious* questions about whether he'd like to stay or get out there as a UFA. (*Of course they'll come up anyway, especially if he and the Hawks have success, but his rental-ness under this scenario could not be more clear.)

**Steve Tambellini Likes Assessing is my favourite post I've read in a while. T-Bone, then Willis:

"The first step is getting through this period as far as the assessment of people who truly want to be an Oiler and get to the next level. That involves an evaluation of character, skill, talent, courage, everything.[...]"

...when Steve Tambellini talks about assessing the players he has, it’s either a null statement or the mark of a fool; he’s been assessing what is essentially the same roster for a season and a half now. If he doesn’t know what he has after more than 130 games of failure by his organization, it’s just one more indication that he’s woefully unequipped to be the man in charge of an NHL franchise.

A related thought: expressions of confidence (extreme confidence!) are intended as reassurance, but do they ever, in fact, serve to reassure? "Oh, they're extremely confident, well then, I'll relax now. Nothing to do but sit back and wait for the multiple Stanleys."

**I was going to write something a bit lengthier about Blair, Laraque, et al, but there's really just the one point I wanted to make.

Georges Laraque's biggest problem, when being considered by the likes of Jeff Blair, is that he enjoys the celebrity and notoriety that comes with his job. He doesn't begrudgingly put up with it; he doesn't quietly accept it as "part of the package". He is a genuinely nice, generous person who, for his own reasons, finds the reality of people bugging him for his time, money, and autograph to be a feature, not a bug, of being a recognizable pro athlete. He likes the attention... he must be a phony! Sure, he does a lot of charitable work, but he thrives on the recognition... so it doesn't really count.

I think that's what's going on with Blair's critique. He's like the self-styled environmentalist who worries more about your take on catastrophic global climate change and the bags you take to Safeway than your actual impact on the planet. Or the zealot who's more interested in having you accept Jesus as your personal saviour than in influencing your behaviour or choices in any way. There's a proper way to behave, you know.

**I think that tonight Calgary beats Phoenix, the Oilers beat St. Loo, and both teams roll into Saturday's final BoA of the season on winning streaks. Go Flames.

Three years and one week ago, on January 2nd, 2007, the Flames played the Canucks (in Calgary). In that game, Alexandre Burrows burned Kipper pretty good on a deke, and scored his 1st goal of the 2006-2007 season. In January. It was his 39th game of the season; his first goal in 48 games.

I like that Burrows a lot more than the one who scores a hat trick every game. Come back, please, starting tonight (8PM MT, HNiC). Go Flames.

"I think what people really mean when they say 'I don’t go by numbers,' is 'I don’t go by YOUR numbers.'"

--Joe Posnanski

Sounds about right.

(Inspired by discussions here)


Looks solid, no?

**Check out this quote from the Associated Press recap of last year's New Year's Eve tilt:

“We played a pretty good game with the exception of our inability to be able to kill a penalty,” Edmonton coach Craig MacTavish said. “That’s killed us all year long. It killed us again tonight. We’ve got to find a way or find some new guys who can kill penalties.”

How's progress going on that, er, Coach?

**Olympic roster (Canada, Men's) thoughts:

• Brodeur, Luongo, Fleury: sure. I'd actually take Roloson instead of Fleury -- the guy has played well, consistently, for a season and a half now -- but since he's never going to play, why does it matter?!? *COUGH* Conkannen
• There seems to be an awful lot of disagreement as to who the "locks" are on D. My must-haves are Pronger and Keith, and that's all. Maybe Niedermayer, just because the guy has led as charmed a hockey life as has ever been lived.
• Past that, I'm fairly agnostic on who makes up the rest of the main six. Boyle is a nice player, but not indispensable and certainly not underrated. Bouwmeester can do a lot, but isn't the best at anything (apart from maybe high-minute fitness, which just isn't a requirement for this position). Weber's solid. Phaneuf and Regehr both have their charms. I like Seabrook, but I'm not at all convinced that a dozen players, including all the guys above, couldn't look as good or better playing with Keith. Etcetera.
  
• Iginla, Crosby, Nash, Heatley, Getzlaf, Thornton, Perry, Toews, and Eric Staal are on every list, yes? I'm OK with all of them (I wouldn't have Toews as a "must", but whatever).
  
• That leaves four spaces, where the choices seem to include: Marleau, Carter, Mike Richards, Brad Richards, Morrow, Doan, Patrice Bergeron, Mike Fisher, Ryan Smyth, Lecavalier, St. Louis, Penner.
• The idea, I certainly hope, is to select the 13 best outscorers, subject to some minor positional adjustments. Helpful hints for choosing should be: (1) if a West and East player seem equivalent, the WC player is probably better; (2) all else being equal -- including the 2-way thing -- take the goal scorer
• I think my picks are Carter, Morrow, Doan, and Smyth. Carter because of the goals, and the other 3 because they have long records of being tough WC players. It's tough leaving the other players off, excepting Penner & Fisher (maybe if they were 22 and having these "breakouts"), and Vinny and M.Richards (I don't like them).
• Lastly, Bruce Boudreau talked me into taking Mike Green as the 7th D. He offers something that no one else can, so why the hell not.
  

**The Flames aren't in a very good place right now, but I'm trying not to get discouraged. My happy thought in this regard, at least as it concerns making the playoffs, and apart from the happy news that Brent was willing to bench Jokinen in the 3rd the other night, is basically this:

Moss, Glencross, and Bourque have all looked pretty limp in the last month. Not hapless, exactly, but they're just not creating chances. Since all three have a fairly good track record of doing so, I think that has to change. Though I wouldn't count on Dawes being any better than he has been, even recently (the dude is a nice player for a waiver pickup), he's due for a couple more burst. Boyd is due for a burst. Bouwmeester is due to demonstrate some of the offense that makes him worth $6.6M/yr, rather than $4.4M/yr. Conroy, despite playing well and being a crucial member of the team, hasn't scored a goal yet. He's probably due. Etcetera.

In other words, I'm not saying that the Flames are snakebitten -- I'm saying that they can be better offensively (though not miles better), and probably will be any day now.

Today though? Um, uh, errr.... well, why the hell not. Though I feel the Lowetide superstitions with equal ferocity, I think the Oilers are headed for a bit more... shame.

Calgary 5 (Moss x2, GlenX, Conroy, J-Bo) Edmonton 3 (Souray, POS with two late ones)

Go Flames.

Slightly different presentation today. Notes:

• You don't need to apply much of a "strength of schedule" adjustment to state that, based on performance to date, the eight worst teams in the NHL are all in the Eastern Conference. (And that, as such, every team in the West has been good enough to make the playoffs in the East.)
• Buffalo has more clearance on 9th place than Chicago
• How can Carolina be that bad when they play so many games against other bad teams?

These are interesting. I don't know who sponsored the survey, and who else it has been sent to, but these three questions were sent to me by someone who had taken the survey. The survey was administered by a company named e-Rewards, a company out of Texas. The only information provided was as follows:

"Topic: Study About Consumers
Research Sponsor: A Valued e-Rewards Partner"

That's it. I'd be interested in hearing what others think of the questions. I think a large number of them are pretty leading, but I also haven't seen the entire survey. Maybe it balances out.


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Labels: New Arena

"We're still far from having a hockey team," Charest warned.

"We would need a multi-purpose centre and I believe in that project because a city of Quebec's size needs a multi-purpose building."

But one prominent sports economist suggests that if the project were truly smart economics, private investors would already be lining up to build the arena with their own money.

Michel Poitevin, head of the University of Montreal's economics department, notes that the Montreal Canadiens were purchased, and their Bell Centre was built, without public funds. So was the city's Saputo stadium for the Montreal Impact soccer team."

Bold mine.

Labels: New Arena

So, if the Flames beat LA tonight (830PM MT, RSN West), they move into 1st place in the West by this measure. If they beat LA and the Caps lose in Tampa (Ovechkin messes with their chemistry!), they move into 1st place in the NHL.

Which is really not where I thought the Flames would be 10 weeks into the season; not before training camp, and certainly not after watching their first half-dozen or so games in October.

Kipper's results this year have been shocking in their excellence. If we're lucky, it's because some nagging health issue resolved itself with rest over the summer. If we're unlucky, he's Jose Theodore in the spring of '08. Olli Jokinen's enthusiam for shooting the puck in the last week or two has also been enjoyable. I still think he stinks all things considered, but right now he's providing *something* for the money.

One of the posts I didn't write this summer was that the Flames have too many Europeans -- the joke being that they only have two, but those two individuals were the worst value for the dollar. The fact that this observation is N/A right now, particularly with respect to Kipper, goes most of the way towards explaining 18-7-3.

Calgary 2 (Moss, Phaneuf) Home of the Bodybag 1 (someone called Meat Train?!?). Go Flames.

The best news for Lowe is that in lieu of results, Lowe loves excuses so she's got one right off the bat before camp even starts.

The bad news is that run of luck last year with the injuries and such doens't seem to have abated. Of course Lowe made a lot of his own luck by leaving the team so fucking thin with the Pronger and Smyth disasters.

I dunno, anytime you read LT and he's talking about how pivotal a player Sanderson is, well then it's not a good day. But Lowe's contract still hasn't been renewed so maybe if we suck for '08 and that leads to his dismissal, it will be best for all concerned.

That's the inimitable Dennis King, on the 5th day of September, 2007.

I have no idea if Darryl Katz has the management skills, or organizational know-how, or whatever to turn the Edmonton Oilers into a decent hockey organization. I would submit, however, that he misunderestimated what he was getting into when he bought the place. Evidence supports, though does not prove or disprove, the following:

1. He had an "End Of History" mentality about fan support. As in, it would/will never be an issue again.
2. He didn't think that this organization needed "managing", in the same way as the rest of his empire.
3. His financial justification for purchasing was that a (mostly) publicly funded arena was a very sweet deal, and pretty close to a slam dunk.

Kevin Lowe was not one of my boyhood/yuppiehood idols. But if I bought the Oilers (and he didn't have a lengthy record of failure) I would certainly assume that he knew more about assembling a successful hockey team than I do. At the very least, I would know, for a fact, that he knows more about hockey than I do.

So I think what I'd do at that point is this: (1) assure him that he had complete freedom to run his hockey operations in accordance with his own philosophy, and (2) have him explain to me in a fair bit of detail what that philosophy is.

And then (3), which is the key: I'm going to have to sign off on any moves with financial significance. Look, per (1) I have no interest in interfering with your philosophy, Kevin. Just explain how various moves fit in with that philosophy, and I'll sign off. If they do not, I won't.

I'm seriously not trying to be snarky here either. I think I'd give the guy (say) $120k earmarked for two assistants. "I'm a businessman, so I like numbers. Here's salary for two people, to help you provide them. If you like, you can use them exclusively to support your own point of view and defend it to me."

Dunno. Things are changing. The appetite in Edmonton for a tax-subsidized downtown megaplex is waning, without question. While I've met a handful of people in Edmonton who think a downtown arena would be something they'd like, I haven't met one who sees it as a civic imperative. (And I actually know quite a few people who think in these terms.)

I'm probably underestimating Darryl Katz' intelligence, but it sure as hell looks to me like he bought a business that had permanent popularity and was about to win the lottery; now, he actually has to figure out a way to maintain revenue, possibly without the giant novelty cheque. For the Oilers' sake, he'd better show more in the next 2 years than he has in the last 2.

I'm having some problems with my site at the moment - I've got my tech guy (or, if my mother is reading this, my "brother") on it but I had a quick post that I wanted to make, so I thought I'd avail myself of Matt and Andy's hospitality and post it here.

There's been some discussion at Lowetide's site about the EV PTS of the various centremen on the Oilers. Brule is doing quite well with 13 so far, followed by Horcoff and Gagner with 7 apiece and Cogliano with 6. Leaving aside, for a moment, the question of whether or not it's fair to call Brule and Cogliano NHL centres, there's a point about points that I thought was worth making.

One of the goals of a hockey team is to score as many goals as it can. The other goal is to allow as few goals as possible. Goals are the currency of the game. Once a goal is scored, we retrospectively allocate credit for it by assigning the players involved. As David Staples has pointed out when responding to the (vociferous) criticism of his errors system, we only allocate credit for the goals are scored and then draw our inferences about offensive ability or performance from that. It strikes me as fair to say, when looking at only a single season, a person could well be misled.

I figured I'd take a look at this in a couple of different ways. I scraped behindthenet.ca for the 5v5 information for forwards who played at least 40 games in 2007-08 and 2008-09, which gave me a list of 302 guys. I then took a look to see whether or not points/goal had any repeatability. It certainly doesn't seem too - see the chart at left, although there's a caveat to that, in that it seems to me that a lot of the players who are recognized as "star" players seem to have some repeatability in this department. I suspect a lot of the real goons fall into the same category.

For example, Crosby's been in on 92%, 86% and 84% of Penguins even strength goals during the past three seasons. This makes a certain amount of intuitive sense to me - guys like Crosby, who control the game and have the play flow through them, likely drive the offence to a greater degree than your average player. If you could somehow drop him into an even better league than the NHL, in which he was an average player, presumably his "share" of the offence would fall.

Extrapolating from this idea a bit, I thought I'd take a stab at classifying offensive performance into four groups from 2007-08 based on two values: on-ice shooting percentage and points/goal. The average shooting percentage for my group of players was 8.35% in 2007-08 and they averaged points on 69% of 5v5 goals scored while they were on the ice. I classified the players into four groups +S%/+pts/gl, +S%/-pts/gl, -S%/+pts/gl and -S%/-pts/gl. I'm using "+" to mean above average there and "-" to mean below average. There's a graph at left setting this out.

My theory, to the extent that I have one, is this: offensive numbers drive salaries in the NHL. Most players put up a significant portion of their offence at even strength, which makes sense, as that's where the game is (largely) played. If salary is driven, to an extent, by the events of the most recent season, a general manager trying to make the best use of his salary cap dollars should try and avoid signing players to contracts who are coming off of seasons in which they fell into the +S%/+pts/gl grouping, unless those players have a rather strong record of belonging there. For the record - twenty guys fell into that group in both 2007-08 and 2008-09 - the list is:

Sidney Crosby
Evgeni Malkin
Henrik Sedin
Jason Pominville
Mike Ribeiro
Mike Cammalleri
David Booth
Andy McDonald
Marc Savard
Ales Hemsky
Niklas Hagman
Alex Ovechkin
Pavol Demitra
Joe Thornton
Vincent Lecavalier
Ilya Kovalchuk
Daniel Paille
Jarome Iginla

If you were to screen that list for the guys who don't play very much, you'd end up with a pretty solid list of hockey players, guys about whom the general consensus would be that they drive offensive results.

Here's the key chart - it compares the offensive performance of my four groups between 2007-08 and 2008-09. There's something interesting at work here, I think. Note the difference in point production for the first two groups in 2007-08 and 2008-09 - almost half a point per 60. Most people I know would consider that to be significant. The difference in goal production though, is miniscule - an extra goal every 20 hours, an amount of time virtually no forward will play in the course of a season. In 2008-09, things turned around - the second group, which had the lower pts/gl ratio in 2007-08 outscored the group with the higher ratio that year and saw an extra 5v5 goal scored for every ten hours or so that they were on the ice.

If goals scored was what you cared about, you'd do as well picking guys who had above average on ice shooting percentages on the basis of their on-ice GF as you would their points. The difference in the lower two groups persisted - the -/- group actually fared worse in on-ice goals in 2008-09 than they did in 2007-08, although they closed the gap in terms of points a bit.

What can you take from this? Well, if I was a GM, I'd tread carefully when signing guys coming off seasons in the +/+ quadrant, particularly if they wanted +/+ dollars. Unsurprisingly, there are a couple of examples of these guys in Kevin Lowe's current crop of contracts, most notably in the form of Shawn Horcoff and Robert Nilsson. Patrick O'Sullivan got paid coming off of a +/+ quadrant season as well. I've argued extensively elsewhere that Horcoff is not that badly overpaid but it seems reasonable to expect that Lowe should have known that he was looking to sign Horcoff at the worst time possible from the perspective of maximizing the value from his contract.

The broader question I think, is to do with how we should weight and think about points. Much was made of the offensive talents of the Oilers defenders last year. It was sold as a strength of the team, while the forwards were perceived as disappointments. Tom Gilbert, Sheldon Souray and Denis Grebeshkov were all over 1.18 ESP/60, fantastic numbers for defenders and likely above the 90th percentile. Lubomir Visnovsky was at 0.93 ESP/60, also an excellent number and likely above the 80th percentile for defencemen. While Grebeshkov and Gilbert had impressive GF/60 numbers though (3.26 and 3.02, respectively), Souray and Visnovsky were nothing special (2.50 and 2.64, respectively). The question that comes to mind - and I don't claim to have an answer for this - is whether they really had fantastic seasons at ES or whether the peculiarities of how we credit players for offence somehow assigned too much to those guys, leading us to be impressed by numbers that don't tell us anything.

To bring this back to my initial point, the wonderful thing about baseball statistics is that the components of runs - walks, singles, doubles, triples and homers - are easily tracked. It's harder to do in hockey. We trust that individual statistics accurately reflect the offensive contributions made by a given player but I'm not entirely certain that they do, or, to be more precise, that they can be trusted without slicing the numbers and looking at them in different ways.