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I figured that over the course of the summer, it’d be interesting to take a look at teams and identify what’s wrong with them and what they need to do improve on their season next year. Up first, a team that nobody seems to care about anymore: the Chicago Blackhawks. The Hawks are one of the more incompetently run teams in the NHL; it’s a close race historically between Chicago and Boston for which team has more contemptible ownership. Both teams were once strong franchises that have since fallen into disrepair, in large part due to managerial incompetence. The Hawks have an absolutely terrible GM in the person of Dale Tallon and continue to have guys like Bob Pulford floating around in the background, no doubt serving no good purpose.

The Hawks were part of the soft underbelly of the Central Division this year along with the Jackets and Blues. Unlike those teams though, the Hawks were a team that put up really good stats in many ways and was absolutely horrific in others. The Jackets and Blues were mostly just horrific. It’s instructive to compare the three because they’ve been lumped together all year long by everyone looking at the Central Division. Just for fun, I’ve also tossed in Nashville because I think that the Predators are not a particularly good team. I think that if Chicago went about addressing three specific areas, they could have a respectable and competitive team on their hands.

Even Strength: In a story that should sound very familiar to Oiler fans, the Hawks got a terrible save percentage from their goalies this year. Unlike the Oilers, who made a sensible decision at the start of the year with goaltending in pursuing a low cost duo signed for short terms, the Hawks went out and spent $27MM on a four year deal for Nikolai Khabibulin. This was madness. While Khabibulin was coming off of a season in which he won the Stanley Cup, he was hardly the reason for that-he wasn’t anything special over the course of the season for the Lightning.

This leads to a rather frustrating problem for the Black Hawks. I’ve put up the Hawks rates in the ES categories along with those of the other three Central teams that I’ve mentioned. If you didn’t look at the goals against, you’d think that the Hawks were the team out of the four that made the playoffs as opposed to the Black Hawks. Chicago was significantly better than Nashville in terms of both SF/60 and SA/60. They were virtually tied in terms of GF/60; both were basically average teams. Note that in each of these three categories, the Hawks and Predators are much better than the Jackets and Blues.

Despite their mammoth advantage in SA/60 though, the Hawks were one of the worst teams in the league at preventing goals while the Predators were one of the best. This difference comes entirely from the difference between the two teams in save percentage at ES. Keep in mind that save percentage for the league as a whole at ES was .915. The Preds put up a stellar .933 at ES compared to the Hawks abysmal .900. Had the Hawks enjoyed the same level of goaltending at ES as the Preds, they’d be 56 goals better. That alone wouldn’t be enough to make them into a playoff contender (they finished -70 on the year) but it’d be a huge start. Hell, even league average would have made them 25 or so goals better. While the Hawks produced similar results to the Jackets and Blues at ES this year (note in the table that they were 27th, 28th and 30th in ESGD/HR respectively), Chicago went about achieving this much differently. The fact that their problems can be isolated to a single player makes them more readily addressed I think. Given that the readership here is largely Oiler fans, I don’t think that I need to make the case about the trouble bad goaltending can cause too forcefully.

Power Play: Here, things aren’t quite so rosy for the Hawks. To be blunt, Chicago sucked terribly on the PP in 2005-06; they were far and away the worst in the league in every category that matters. A quick note about the style that they employed before I look at the numbers. Despite having played as a defenceman, Trent Yawney looks to have been pretty aggressive at employing a forward instead of a defenceman on the PP; the Hawks scored about half of their PP goals with 4 forwards on the ice.

Despite Yawney being at least partially in accordance with the dicta of the number freaks, Chicago was just fugly on the PP. The most “impressive” stat is probably their GD on the PP of 3.84, easily the worst in the league. The Kings, who were the second worst team in the league in this regard, put up 4.45 GD/HR on the PP. I’ve got no idea how the Hawks can fix this-it looks like an incredibly difficult problem to resolve to me.

If you look at the guys who the Hawks were running out on the PP this year, it becomes clear what their problem is: none of these guys are very good on the PP. A terrible PP in 2005-06 was entirely predictable. I’m sure that the Hawks would love to point to the injuries suffered by Aucoin and Ruutu as an excuse but given that Aucoin is nothing special in terms of his career numbers on the PP and that Ruutu is so young as to have an almost meaningless track record (he put up 3.73 pts/hr in 2003-04), this seems like thin gruel to me. This team was doomed to have a bad PP from the day that they stepped on the ice.

This is a problem that’s probably a lot harder to fix than their ES GD problems. They can go out and try to buy some better players to fix this but it may well be difficult to find good PP players who are both hideable at ES and willing to come to Chicago without being paid a ton of money. Chicago has a problem when it comes to handing out large piles of money-they’ve got a lot tied up in Khabibulin, Lapointe and Aucoin. One definite consequence of the new NHL is that absent someone willing to take your mistakes off your hands, it’s a lot harder to recover from the types of error that those players represented.

Penalty Kill: This is like writing a repeat of the comment about ES. Chicago did an excellent job at keeping the shots against down on the PK-they were second best in the league at doing so. They got burned on the save percentage though; as at ES, they were well below the league average in terms of their save percentage, coming in at .851 in a league with an .861 save percentage against the PP. It’s possible that this wasn’t a goaltending problem though but rather a proclivity for taking penalties that put them into 5 on 3 situations, something that I’ll discuss below.

Once again though, the big difference between the Hawks and the Predators is the save percentage. Chicago was the far superior team in terms of shot prevention, they just let more shots into the net. Again, there’s a significant difference between the Hawks and the Jackets and the Blues, who’ve got more serious problems.

Discipline: This isn’t something that generally bears mention but Chicago has a real problem in this regard. In an average game, they spent about 2.5 more minutes killing penalties than they did on the PP. This is even more fantastic when you consider that Chicago was terrible at putting the puck in the net on the PP-they must have had a serious disparity in terms of penalties drawn to penalties taken. Chicago was second only to Nashville (WTF?) in terms of time spent on the PK-Nashville was at least drawing penalties as well as taking them.

I generally think of discipline as being something that a coach can instill. I’d want to see a breakdown of the Hawks penalties before really getting into this but if a lot of them were just penalties of aggression, then you’ve got to think that it’s a habit that the team can break if it becomes a priority. I’d guess that this would probably have the dual effect of not only reducing the amount of time that they spend killing penalties but also increasing their save percentage against the PP by cutting down on their 5 on 3 time.

Realistically, there’s too much here for Chicago to fix overnight. If they somehow fixed the goaltending-they need a goalie that Khabibulin hasn’t been in four years-and dealt with the discipline, I think that they could be a fringe playoff team. The PP is going to have to get better though and if they want to make a serious move. As I said above, that’s going to be difficult to fix.

If the Hawks are contending for a playoff spot next year, my guess is that the story will be not just some surprising performances on their own team but the continued problems of the Blue Jackets and something going terribly wrong with Tomas Vokoun. They’re in a better position than St. Louis but I think that they’re probably going to be looking up at Columbus, Nashville and Detroit next season.

With what sounds like an Elmo mandated week until the next Oilers game (Elmo apparently likes spending weekends in late June inside watching hockey), I can go back to my raison d’etre for this place and start talking about numbers as opposed to streams of consciousness about the spectacle that is Rem Murray. I expect my hit count to fall sharply and spectacularly. First up, some discussion of the PP.

RiversQ asked in the comments to a post a while ago about the possibility of throwing up the PP goal differential/60 stats. The idea here is that this is the best measure of how good a team’s PP is. PP% includes all of those 10 second powerplays and doesn’t factor in shorthanded goals allowed, while a pure PPG/60 measure fails to account for shorthanded goals as well, which means that it ignores the fact that those goals hurt a team just as much as goals allowed at ES or on the PK.

For most teams, there isn’t a significant difference between their ranking in terms of PP% and their ranking in terms of PPGD/60. The notable climbers; that is teams whose PP’s were better than you’d think from the PP% stat were the Oilers and Flyers. Pittsburgh and Nashville were the teams heading the other way; power plays that were seemingly good were not nearly as effective as they looked because of the amount of shorties allowed. I was at the PIT-EDM game this year and am not at all surprised that Pittsburgh gets hammered on this. Although I didn’t mention it in my featured comments at BoA, I remember thinking at that game that I’d never a seen a team give up more hideous rushes to the other team while shorthanded than the Senators.

Shorthanded goals against are pretty fluky events I think. I’d take the PPGD/60 numbers as a better indicator of what happened this year but I’d probably look more to the PPG/60 numbers as being indicators of general PP ability. I definitely prefer seeing this stuff presented on an hourly basis though as I think it’s easier to understand-I can wrap my head around the idea of a team scoring 6 goals/60 more readily than the idea of a team scoring at a 20% clip, particularly when you know that there are 10 second PP’s in there.

Also interesting to me is that there isn’t a whole heck of a lot of difference between the PP% ranks and the PPG/60 rankings. I’d guess from that most teams have similar distributions of the point at which they score on the PP: eg. with 1:45 remaining, 1:15 remaining.

Anyway, interesting stuff to me. It’s kind of interesting to see what teams are where-I’m surprised that Edmonton had the best PPGD in the division this year, if I was guessing, I’d have figured them for third at best. As always, the Central Division is just utterly terrible-three of the seven worst teams? Unbelievable. Chicago is just in a completely different dimension of terrible.

I was looking at some rate stats last night and came across some interesting points. One of these was the fact that Florida led the league in ESS/60 this season and had the second worst ESSA/60. This a) surprised me and b) seems like a smart move in terms of coaching. Almost every night of the year, Florida is going to have better goaltending than the guys on the other side. Playing a game that has a ton of shots each way is a point in their favour-the bigger the role played by the goaltender, the better the chance that Florida is going to win the game.

Florida was -25 at ES in 2003-04 as they took 27.66 ESS/60. This put them at 18th in the NHL in ESS/60 and allowed 33.50 ESS/60, the worst rate in the NHL. This year, they were +15 at ES, a huge turnaround.

How did they do it? Well, they still gave up a ton of shots against at ES, allowing 34.07 ESS/60. They took a lot more shots this year though at ES, taking 35.33 ESS/60. As I noted above, this was good for the league lead. Based on the fact that they were bad at this last year, I dont think that this is a case of a friendly scorekeeper or anything.

It’s particularly interesting in light of the fact that they hired Jacques Martin to coach their team for the 2005-06 season. Martin came with a reputation of being a coach who prefers to see a very defensive game-the Senators ranked ninth in ESS/60 in 2003-04 despite probably having the best collection of offensive talent in the NHL. Of course in Ottawa, Martin didn’t have the best goalie on the ice most nights. I, like virtually everyone else in North America, didn’t see much of the Panthers this year, but I’d be very interested to know if Martin made a decision to pursue more of a high shot game this year because of the goaltending advantage. It seems to me that if you were coach of the Panthers, in order to maximize the Luongo advantage, this would be the route to go.

Jeff J. at Sisu Hockey stepped all over a post I’d written and not yet posted with his excellent post about the strength of the teams who made the conference finals this year in comparison to previous Cup champions. I have a bit of a disagreement with him though on the strength of the Hurricanes, who I don’t think are a particularly strong team.

As has been mentioned frequently, the Hurricanes put up an impressive points total this year during the regular season, totalling 112 points. This total is a bit deceptive though-the Hurricanes are not a 112 point team in the way that they’re generally thought of. The Hurricanes were tied with New Jersey for third in the league this year in points gained from overtime losses and shootout wins with 14. Additionally, their +28 goal differential didn’t really support a team gaining the number of points that they gained before OTL/SOW were added-they were 9.2 points better than their goal differential suggests that they should have been this year by my math. There’s an extra factor that needs to be considered as well-Carolina played a pretty soft schedule this year, tied with the Rangers for the second softest schedule in the league behind the Red Wings. In most seasons, they’d be considered a weak finalist.

Regardless of who wins the Cup this year, they aren’t headed to the Pantheon of Great Champions. This is much more of a 1993 or 1990 type season, when the winner is a complete shock. I’d be hesitant to pin this on the new CBA though-it could well be an aberration. It’s been getting more and more difficult to repeat as Stanley Cup champion as time has passed-the last team to repeat was the 1997-98 Detroit Red Wings. I kind of think that the league is just in a cycle where there aren’t a lot of elite teams at the moment. In any given season between 1995-96 and 2003-04, there were three or four elite teams in the NHL. This year there were only two in the Senators and Red Wings. The question going forward, I think, will be whether we see a clump of elite teams form as in the 1990’s or whether the current situation with few elite teams and a relatively easy path for underdogs to the Finals becomes the norm.

Whenever you look back at a lengthy playoff run by your favourite team, there is a series that doesn’t stand out as being particularly compelling. If this is that series for this year, it wasn’t a particularly bad series as far as these things go-it still had some entertaining moments despite being thoroughly bland up until the third period of G3. I watched the game in a group last night, which destroys my ability to catch much of interest but I figured I might as well throw up that which I did note.

Two good Gretzky related moments tonight. He hasn’t lived in Canada since 1988 but still makes a ton of money off of endorsements here. He doesn’t miss any tricks, singing along with the anthem and getting caught on camera doing so. The other entertaining moment was a capsule of everything thats been wrong with this team for the past 16 years as Bob and Harry ignored what was happening on the ice for five minutes to chat with Gretzky. This included ignoring a penalty taken by Stoll. It’s got to be a bit frustrating sometimes playing for the Oilers-no matter what you do, you can’t escape the shadow of the teams from the 1980’s.

I heard a spectacularly good line tonight that needs to be passed along. After the game, the Oilers who didn’t dress showed up on the bench. Todd Harvey was wearing a suit that clashed with his shirt and a tie that worked with neither. The reaction was swift and accurate: “Todd Harvey looks like a couch from the 70’s.”

Not that it matters now but if I was a conspiracy theorist, I might have wondered from last night’s game if the NHL had a preference in terms of a winner. Its either that or the referees are completely and utterly incompetent. There were softer hooking calls made in less important areas of the ice than the one Todd Marchant got away with to give Rob Niedermayer the great chance in the third. There were just a lot of soft calls on the Oilers in general.

I will continue to insist that the Ducks weren’t really that good. In my favour: Rem Murray played more than 10 minutes last night and was +1. WTF? I’d like to know what was up with Stoll too, something that the coots in the booth couldn’t be bothered to mention. Stoll hardly played after the middle of the second. I assume he sustained some sort of injury but I’m not sure.

I thought that Dvorak had a nice game last night although upon my arrival at Ben Wicks, I immediately got into a fight with Chris! about this. Still, Dvorak was +2 and he had several good shifts where the Oilers maintained puck possession. For a guy making $1.6MM this year and who’ll be cheaper in the offseason, I don’t get the dislike even if he screws up goalmouth chances.

Stoll AND Samsonov were both under 5 minutes of ES time. Very strange. I wonder if futzing with the rotations is the reason why the Oilers kept getting those ridiculous too many men on the ice penalties?

I like post-game, when MacT was talking to Friedman and he got asked about the Ducks claiming to be inside Roloson’s head. The Oilers kind of sucked it up in terms of responding to the nonsense coming from the Ducks dressing so it was cool to get to see MacT laughing at it now. Good times.

Man, did Joffrey Lupul ever piss away the “hometown kid makes good” angle and turn into a whinging crybaby. Not a good week and a half for Mr. Lupul.

Western Conference Champions! (Since when do they hand out hats for that, by the way?)

Peter Mansbridge wrote a letter to the Globe in response to William Houston’s criticism of Bob Cole, which was discussed at Covered In Oil. Mansbridge wrote

When I was in Afghanistan in March, a Canadian soldier watching an NHL game on a special satellite feed in the dinner tent said something like this to me: “Bob Cole’s voice makes me feel so much closer to home.”

Mr. Cole is an icon in our business and that soldier, like a lot of other Canadians I’m sure, hopes his voice will be there for many years to come.

I’m not sure in what capacity Mansbridge is writing (Personally? On behalf of the CBC? In his capacity as an independent journalist?) but I can’t help but notice that he avoids the real issue, which is Cole’s incompetence, a point that is beyond debate. Cole’s friends (of which I assume Mansbridge is one) would be better served in telling him that it’s time to retire before someone from CBC makes the decision for him. This is exactly like in the Godfather Part II, when Tom Hagen goes to have a talk with Frank Pentangeli. Pentangeli realizes the appropriate course of action and all is well.

I should say something positive about Cole so I’ll point out something that he does do well: the moment when it becomes clear that disaster is inevitable and the season/tournament will lie in ruins. 1998, 2006; those were great calls of failure at the Olympics. I assume his skill comes from having gained so much experience calling Leaf failures.

Medical information of the day, courtesy of the Edmonton Sun: “Horcoff also broke a blood vessel in the corner of his left eye. It’s the result, Horcoff says, of pressure on the eye from excessive vomiting.”

Radek Dvorak is a pretty interesting player. Opinion is wildly divided on him. Sacamano and Mike W. love the man. The “”number freaks” (term courtesy Sacamano) at Irreverent Oil Fans love him.

Your average Oiler fan though, even the ones who seem to know their hockey, loathe the guy. They look at his abysmal scoring numbers this year and generally craptacular goal production and conclude that he sucks. Comments like this:

This guy has zero value other than a fourth line RW when Laraque isn’t bringing it. The fact that he drew in over Peterson AND Harvey? A crime. He doesn’t even deserve to be in the lineup ahead of Winchester.

aren’t uncommon.

The Laraque argument can be dispensed with pretty quickly I think. Although Dvorak didn’t play any time on the PK last night, he’s been one of the Oilers big time eaters on the PK. If Dvorak can even match what Laraque does in terms of outscoring at ES, I’d rather have him in the lineup. As it so happens, Laraque was EV+14 EV-19 this year and Dvorak was EV+36 EV-40. I would be stunned if the difficulty of the minutes that Laraque played was anywhere near the difficulty of the minutes that Dvorak played. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realize that big slow fourth line guys get sheltered by coaches as much as possible.

The Oilers basically had 10 forwards who played the bulk of the games this year and who were with the team all year. The chart at left breaks down the GF/60, GA/60, goal differential/60 and pts/60 for those 10 players. Dvorak falls solidly in the middle. Dvorak wasn’t the best Oiler in any of these areas. He ranks 6th in GD/60 at ES and 7th in pts/60. It seems to me though that you’ve got to do some sort of accounting for the quality of opposition. It seems insane to me to think that Stoll and Torres could have been playing against good players at ES and put up the numbers that they did. Torres in particular looks like a defensive horror show from time to time.

I really think that the assessment of Dvorak comes down to how much faith you have in the idea that there are different qualities of opposition out there and that it’s easier to put up numbers against some of those guys than others. Even if you come to the conclusion that they all played against the same quality of opposition though, I don’t see how the conclusion can be reached that Dvorak is anything but a 6-8 forward on this time who has additional value because of his ability to kill penalties.

Dvorak was one of the best on the team in 2003-04 by the measure of GD/60. According to the number freaks he played hard minutes that year and this year. The GA/60 for Dvorak was up a lot this year, rising from 2.04 GA/60 to 2.88 GA/60. The GF/60 when he was on the ice was off slightly from 2.95 GF/60 to 2.59 GF/60. It’s obviously more of an offensive hit and less of a defensive hit when you factor in the fact that goal scoring was up at ES this year. I think you need to consider the general incompetence of the Oiler goaltending at ES though as well-they were well below average this year, after being average in 2003-04.

What about the offensive drop this year? It’s a little concerning because the real dropoff is larger than it appears due to the increased scoring this year. His shots/60 at ES were down from 8.7/60 ES minutes to 7.5/60 ES minutes. His shooting percentage at ES was almost unchanged; it fell from 5.8% to 4.7%; one more goal at ES and it would have been as close to bang-on as possible.

Another interesting point about Dvorak’s season is that things changed after he suffered his groin injury. Through December 3rd, he was EV+18 EV-18; a decent performance for a team with goaltending as bad as Edmonton’s. He still wasn’t scoring many goals at ES; only 2 in 356.9 minutes or .34/60 but he was piling up the assists with 11 or 1.85/60. You can see from the chart up above that he ended up falling well off that upon his return. He was getting his shots before he got hurt as well: 9.75 ESS/60. After the groin injury, he was nowhere near the same.

So what’s the verdict on Dvorak? If he’s still facing tough opposition, I figure he’s a useful part of the Oilers lineup. If anyone knows of a post or comment about this, I’d like to see it again. I’d probably bring him back next year as well-he’s not going to be too pricy, I don’t think and if he’s healthy, he looks like he’s pretty useful. Even now, I’ve got no doubt that I’d rather have him dressed than any of the rotating crew on the 4th line.

Tom Benjamin and Avi Schaumberg have each offered further comments on the Brad Richards contract. It seems to me like the issue comes down to how much you think NHL revenue will grow by. Benjamin makes the point that the revenues aren’t likely to grow much more than the rate of inflation from here on out. While I can see the attractiveness of his position, I have a hard time thinking that the NHL revenues will grow that slowly-I recall reading in the past that MLB revenues have consistently risen well above the level of inflation, even before they entered the Age of The Publicly Funded Stadium. The NHL isn’t MLB but it’s a similar industry.

I guess whether or not you think that this is a smart contract in large part comes down to what you think of Jay Feaster and his ability to guess where NHL revenues are going. I don’t think that he makes a lot of big mistakes-St. Louis is the only really glaring one that I can see. If he figures, based on what he knows, that NHL revenues will rise to a level that this contract is worth the risk, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s a bit of a risk though and possibly an unintended consequence of the new CBA-building a team by paying an amount that’s such a high percentage of your payroll that you can’t possibly win at the start of a contract and then filling in when the contract becomes less expensive in relative terms. You can’t afford a lot of screwups, that’s for sure. Feaster already has one albatross on the roster in the St. Louis contract. Tampa Bay really can’t afford a second.

I took an income tax course this year and one of the arguments that the prof made for increasing the tax burden that falls on the wealthy is that the market doesn’t do a particularly good job of distributing wealth based on merit. In a related story, Doug MacLean probably makes six figures. He was on OTR the other day citing Adam Foote’s magical role in changing the atmosphere in the Columbus dressing room as proof of his value. It’s a good thing he was effective there (although it’s funny that that impact apparently didn’t kick in until after Rick Nash came back and Sergei Fedorov was acquired). Somewhere in the range of 230 or so players played at least 200 minutes of PP time this year. The second worst PP pts/hr was Ruslan Salei at 1.72. The worst was Adam Foote at 0.96 PP pts/hr. Foote was actually closer to the number put up by Ilya Bryzgalov (.50 pts/hr) than he was to Salei’s number.

I don’t know if Columbus signed Foote thinking that he would help their PP but to play him as much as they did is simply insane. Foote was on the ice for 36.3% of Columbus’ total PP time this year. He’s never been a good PP player-he was putting up 2.59 pts/hr over the past few years in Colorado where he got to play with a bunch of great PP players.

There’s a great baseball writer in Kansas City by the name of Joe Posnanski. Reading his slow descent into insanity as the Royals have made irrational decision after irrational decision has been one of the few redeeming graces of that franchise these past few years. For the sake of Columbus Blue Jackets fans, I hope that there’s someone similar writing about hockey in Columbus.

I’ve largely avoided the Calder Trophy debate but the odd time I’ve chimed in, my position has been clear: I’m not sure who’s been the better player this season but I’d rather have Crosby in the long run because of the age difference. Something that I haven’t seen mentioned but is worthy of note: Crosby’s rates kick ass on Ovechkin’s both at ES and on the PP. The Ocho played an extra 21 minutes at ES than Crosby did but scored fewer points than him. In terms of their rates, Crosby scored 2.84 pts/60 to Ovechkin’s 2.68. On the PP though, things really got interesting. Crosby has OV in terms of pts/hr by 6.14 to 5.73. OV got an extra 85 minutes of PP time though, giving him the points edge. If the Calder is supposed to go to the best rookie, I’m not quite sure why one guy getting more ice time than the other is all that relevant, once you’ve cleared some sort of threshold level.

To be honest, I’ve gotten a bit irritated with the Ovechkin cabal who collectively seem to take any positive mention of Crosby as being evidence of a Canadian Media Conspiracy against Ovechkin, one that is possibly being run out of the commissioner’s office. I’m sure that if the voting is even close, there will be some of them complaining about OV not getting the love he deserves despite having the clearly superior season. It’s not that crystal clear to me though that he did-he certainly wins the prize for being the most exciting rookie and he’s a hell of a lot more interesting to listen to than Crosby, who suffers from the same problem that afflicted Wayne Gretzky-he’s so terrified of saying the wrong thing that he says nothing at all.

A loosely related trio of business of hockey stories:

I’m not an economist but people like Steve Kouleas and various CBC employees seem to feel qualified to offer an opinion on the lockout and it’s effect on the Oilers so I will as well. First though, I want to draw some attention to a comment made by a poster at Covered In Oil:

Can anyone explain to me why more-than-a-handful of fans in Rexall boo’d the presence of The Commish - Gary Bettman when his name was put on the jumbotron?

If anything Oilers fans should be demanding he get early consideration for the Conn Smythe.

If it weren’t for Bettman and him digging in his heels for a salary cap, the Oilers wouldn’t have Peca, Pronger, Spacek or Roli and the owners would be actively searching for a sugar-daddy to bail them out and move our team to Omaha.

The comment wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy but for the fact that the guy who made it is Scott Hennig, Alberta Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. I’ve linked to some of their work in the past I think-something in relation to the old Alberta player’s tax.

I can handle Kouleas et al. pouring the credit into Bettman’s lap-I don’t expect any better from them. A guy like Hennig though, I’d expect him to look more closely at the facts. The Oilers payroll dollar wouldn’t go nearly as far as it did this season but for the 24% cut in player salaries that the CBA contained. This wasn’t something that Bettman & Co. were looking for-it was something that the PA came up with. Without that, UFA players may well have been cheaper this year but the Oilers wouldn’t be reaping the benefits of having a bunch of their existing contracts rolled back. Would it still have worked out, just with different names? Maybe. Who knows.

Anyone who paid the slightest bit of attention during the lockout knows that the odds of the Oilers moving away from Edmonton right now (and even before the lockout) had to be low. The team was doing quite well with the rising dollar and if you read between the lines in the NHLPA’s December 9, 2004 proposal, you would learn that they were a mid-market team in terms of revenues. There are only so many cities out there. Edmonton might not be a team in a market like Carolina, where the owner stands to reap a significant capital gain if he can develop a solid market for hockey but it’s a pretty mature market, one that reacts having a .500 team by selling out 30 games.

There were other ways to achieve what the NHL claimed to want to achieve, which was an environment where people who made good business decisions could make money that wouldn’t have cost the NHL a season. You’d have to be an especially naive sort of person to fail to see that low budget teams frequently made the SCF and Conference Finals under the old system. I’ll wait to see how the league unfolds as time goes by and the salary cap increases before joining our public watchdogs in worshipping at the alter of Bettman.

I didn’t see this story on any blogs this year, which surprised me because I figured that some people would be on this like stink on a monkey but Bloomberg franchise values were way up this year than they were in the past. Kings President Tim Leiweke was quoted in the article as saying that the Kings are worth at least 50% more than they were when the agreement was finalized.

A good story at Sports Matters on the Brad Richards contract. Avi Schaumberg argues that the deal makes sense because if the cap goes up, the price for elite talent will rise as well. It seems tough to argue his position. A couple of points he didn’t pick up on. I believe that the salary cap has an escalation clause built in that guarantees a 5% increase in the cap (and presumably the maximum salary payable). Avi’s argument is premised on revenues increasing by 7.3% annually and Feaster being confident in that happening-I think that he is secure in thinking that the cap will increase by at least 5% annually.

Unstated but something that I think is inarguable is that Richards would have gotten the max whenever he went to market. Assuming that he’s an elite NHL centre, we know that those guys got $9MM in the old NHL when they became free agents. Richards presumably would have got more. If the old market valued the players properly (which is doubtful, but pretend with me for a minute), Richards does come at a discount.

Essentially Avi’s argument is a short term pain for serious long term gain. This addresses Tom Benjamin’s main concern I think, which is the idea of tying up too much payroll in one player. If Feaster has concluded that he can’t win in the next year or two but can win by essentially borrowing money from this year’s budget to spend a year or two in the future, then I think that this contract is defensible-certainly more defensible than the St. Louis contract.

One thing that I think Avi, Tom and I would agree on:

I believe Tampa’s math [about how the salary cap will escalate]. And all those who do should be very, very worried for small market contenders like the Oilers.

Maybe me and Avi are a little more worried about the Oilers than Tom but the point stands. And that’s why I wouldn’t be joining Mr. Hennig and nominating Bettman for the Conn Smythe just yet. These types of run happened in the old NHL and our guys like Stoll, Hemsky, Smyth, Horcoff etc. are going to become free agents a lot sooner now than they used to.

Maybe G3 got Sacamano’s blood pressure up. What a gong show in the third. Some comments:

Interesting contrast on Pronger’s goal between Anaheim’s defensive play and Edmonton’s. Two guys had a chance to block that shot and didn’t, instead stepping out of the way. I have a hard time believing that that shot would have even gotten to the Oilers net. I’m not one to festishize shot blocking and things of that nature but the simple truth is that shots that are blocked before they get to the net can’t go in. The Oilers allowed 11 shots/60 fewer than the Ducks against the PP this year; presumably blocked shots are part of the reason for that.

It didn’t look like Shawn Horcoff was playing very much in the third period but he was still getting more ice time than Hemsky, who didn’t get a shift after the Oilers made it 2-0 (which really is incredible-was Hemsky not out for the 5 on 3?). I can’t believe that Rem Murray would be getting shifts in a one goal game on a team with a healthy Horcoff, Peca and Stoll. Jason Smith didn’t have a game between 3-0 and 4-1 either. You can probably get a very good idea for who isn’t healthy just by looking at the shift chart.

MacT talked about getting fresh legs onto the ice for G4; presumably he means legs that aren’t attached to someone infected with the avian flu. It’d be nice if Bob and Harry would comment on this sort of thing during the game instead of blathering on about Jimmy Hoffa.

MacT had an interesting discussion about cutting back some of the guys who weren’t feeling well and going with Murray/Laraque/Petersen. If the Oilers had run into this flu against Detroit or San Jose, they would have gotten absolutely destroyed. If you watched those series and compared how out of place they looked on the ice there to how good they looked tonight, this should be obvious.

I’m not quite sure what they were talking about with Laraque post-game; it was referenced as a “thumbs up on the Jumbotron”, which isn’t what I saw. I had no problem with his raise the roof type gesture. The guy’s excitable.

This series could be closer right now but Anaheim’s really got no one to complain to about it. They’ve been a team that takes penalties all year long. That flurry of penalties there in the third just looked like a young team having a brief and deadly meltdown.

Jordi Weidman tops Scott Oake in the “Douchebag Question” Category, asking Toby Petersen if he realizes that everyone across the country is asking who this Toby Petersen guy is. Way to hammer home that as soon as everyone is healthy, Toby Petersen returns to obscurity and life in the American League.

The bit before the game where Lorieau shut up and the fans sang the anthem…awesome. Cherry was talking about Bryzgalov not being prepared and showed that clip of Bryzgalov kind of looking around and smiling during the anthem. With respect to Cherry, he’s just wrong. I took that as being Bryzgalov reacting to the fans-I suspect he was pretty amazed by the whole thing. What’s really unbelievable to me is that Edmonton is doing this with 6 PM start times; I can’t even imagine what would happen if they were getting their traditional 8 PM start times and people had another two hours to get jacked up (read: “shitfaced”) before the game.

In terms of Oilers fan highlights during the playoffs (liquor related category), the guy who was caught cheering a goal in G4 with a beer in one hand and a rye and coke in the other has yet to be topped.

I’m most impressed with Selanne’s grasp of English idioms. He was talking about how the Ducks offence is like a ketchup bottle-they just need to keep squeezing. I have a hard time believing that there’s a Canadian somewhere in Finland dropping idioms about cooking a reindeer in a sauna.

I don’t really know anything about Finland.

Lots of video of the anthem but unfortunately no one posted anything from the DiPenta-Moreau fight. The fight itself was a bit of a dud but there was a nice little bit of awesome in the background. The clowns on TV didn’t really explain it (I’ve never seen two TV guys more out of their depth than Cole and Neale doing a game where they don’t know the teams and there’s a ton of stuff happening) but both Peca and Lupul ended up in the box after that fight as well. If you watch the background of the fight, you see Lupul skate into the screen and then a stick just reaches out and smacks him. A love tap more than anything but Lupul went down like he’d been shot. Funny stuff-if anyone seems some vid, let me know.

Advice for Steve Kouleas: You’re not an economist. Enough with the salary cap talk. You don’t have a clue as to what you’re talking about. Much as I’d like to forget it, I’m sure that I saw a Calgary-Tampa Bay Stanley Cup Final in 2003-04. Why is it that only the Oilers were rendered unable to advance to the Finals by the lack of a salary cap?

Also stop screaming. I love your show but dial it down a notch. You can’t possibly be as excited about the Oilers run as I am and yet I’ve had several conversations with people about their Stanley Cup chances without screaming.

High class entertainment: A woman who looks like she came directly from the hockey wife/girlfriend factory walks behind Weidman. Kouleas makes a somewhat less than classy reference to it. On the upside, he did manage to refrain from whistling or having his eyes bulge comically from his head. Everyone’s a little loopy with this Oiler run.

Who had the best off-day for the Oilers? My pick is Shawn Horcoff despite being pretty sick with the flu. With the news that Brad Richards signed a new 5 year deal for close to the max, Horcoff probably made a couple of million dollars.

Richards has generally had more favourable conditions in which to

put up points than Horcoff over the past few years: he’s played more

minutes on the PP and at ES. Over the past three years, excluding

empty net and penalty shot points, Richards has scored 90, 79 and 74

points. Horcoff has scored 71, 40 and 33 points in those same

seasons. If you apply Horcoff’s scoring rates at ES/PP/PK to

Richards ice time, you come up with 89, 62 and 54 points. I’m happy

to conclude from that that Richards is the better player and with

the age difference, that he’ll be the better player going

forward.

I’m not sure how much better Richards is or will be than Horcoff

though. Brad Richards has generally been an EV outscorer; he was

EV+63 EV-51 in 2003-04 and EV+51 EV-45 this season. Horcoff was

EV+46 EV-47 in 2003-04 and EV+60 EV-62 this season. If you factor

in the goaltending, this season would put them even closer than it

appears.

Richards was eligible to be a UFA next season, as is Horcoff. Even

if you factor in the ages, you have to wonder just how much Horcoff

would be looking for to sign long term. $4MM per? $5MM? This will

be an interesting negotiation to watch-the Oilers probably don’t

want to take Horcoff to arbitration if they’ve got any ambition of

getting him signed to a long term deal. I’m not sure that they’ll

be willing to pay enough though for Horcoff to pass up his

opportunity to be a UFA. It’s an awkward situation in some

ways-Horcoff doesn’t have the track record of counting stats but his

rates have been decent to good and improving all the

while.

I’m doing some messing around with ES points rates as part of

something that I’m working on and I’ve come across some interesting

stuff that I thought I’d point. Jarome Iginla had his worst ES

pts/hr since the NHL started recording this stuff in 1997-98. Iggy

put up 1.69 pts/hr at ES this year; his 1997-98 was his only lower

season at 1.58 pts/hr. He was shockingly consistent between 1999-00

and 2003-04, putting up between 2.24 and 2.35 pts/ES hr in four of

those seasons. 2001-02 appears to have been something of an

outlier; he clocked in at 2.82 pts/ES hr that year.

RiversQ said in one of the comments that these rates are pretty

consistent; it looks to me like he’s right. Laraque is pretty

consistently 1.4-1.5 pt/hr guy. Even this year, where he was

criticized as being bloody well useless, he put up 1.57 pts/hr. His

ES ice time was down over 100 minutes from his previous low in the

last five years though; probably as a result of the way that the NHL

shifted time from ES to the PP this season. I’ve kind of wondered

for a while if part of the reason for the Oilers decline at ES this

year is because their fourth line has been better than other team’s

fourth lines the past few years and fourth lines saw less ice time

this year.

Lots of press for Rod Brind’Amour this year. You’d almost think

that he got his game back. Brind’Amour’s 1.52 pts/ES hr was

completely in line with his numbers from the past five years.

Brendan Morrison put up 1.88 P/ES hour this year. That’s just

slightly off his numbers for the past few years: 2.21, 2.11, 2.06

and 2.03 pts/hr. He had a ridiculous year in 2001-02 putting up

2.92 pts/hr.

Horcoff had a mammoth jump this year, moving from 1.54 pts/ES hr in

2003-04 to 2.44 pts/ES hr this year. I don’t know how you tell

whether that’s for real or not-on the one hand, I’ve heard a lot of

discussion about how Horcoff is an immensely hard worker and I know

he had a good year last year overseas. He’s been fantastic in the

playoffs as well. On the other, the smart bet when guys have

seasons unlike anything they’ve ever done before is to bet against

them doing it the following year. Tough call to make.

Funny point. I saw Columbus GM Doug MacLean on Off The

Record the other night defending the Fedorov deal on the grounds

that Rick Nash posted a vastly improved +/- this season. I took him

to be implying that Fedorov had solidified the back end. Here’s the

interesting part. In 2003-04, Nash was on the ice for 3.17 GA/60 ES

minutes. In 2005-06, he saw that number improve by a .09 GA/60 ES

minutes. That’s right — the Jackets managed to drop the rate at

which they get bombed when Rick Nash is on the ice to 3.08 GA/60!

The difference was almost entirely offensive. This year, the

Jackets put up 4.00 GF/60 when Nash was on the ice, compared to just

2.13 ESG/60 when Nash was on the ice in 2003-04. Nash’ points/60

were up by 1.30 from 1.62/hr to 2.92/hr. I don’t know whether

that’s all Fedorov or what but it’s interesting to me that they

didn’t really get all that much better defensively. If it is

Fedorov and all they’ve done is ramp up the offensive level, that’s

fine and well but you’ve got to wonder about paying a guy $5MM per

who needs a $6MM centre to pull him along. If it’s Nash driving the

bus, you’ve got to wonder about paying Fedorov $6MM per.

Last two: Teemu Selanne and Andy McDonald. Selanne hit 2.91 pts/ES

hr this year, his best season since 1997-98 when he scored 3.04

pts/ES hr. He hasn’t even been within .5 pts/hr of the season he

had this year since 1999-00. Unreal. Andy McDonald hit 2.88 pts/ES

hr this year; his average for the past three seasons was 1.53 pts/ES

hr. Anaheim is so screwed next year. And hopefully this one

too.