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Before I discuss the topic of this post, I just want to note how asinine the Fanifesto on the Official Blog of the St. Louis Blues is. I take it that only the first chunk of material there was written by the Blues PR department and the rest is contributed by the fans. I can’t explain this one:

Brett Hull goes into the Hall as a BLUE. No ifs, ands, buts, Stars, Wings or Yotes about it.

Yeah, that’d be awful if he was wearing a Stars hat or something. It’s also worth noting that the Fanifesto has the tired “It’s a sweater, not a jersey” line…and then proceeds to use jersey elsewhere. Do as I say, not as I do, I suppose. My contribution to the Fanifesto is my favourite though:

With Canadian Olympian Eric Brewer on the point, we will have a power that scares the other team.

I mentioned this in the comments to a previous post, leading Vic Ferrari to note:

…[Mike] Kitchen seems to have Brewer sussed a little quicker than our boys did. After being given oodles of PP time in October ‘05, Brewer fell behind people called Wideman, Dallman and Weinrich for PP time on the point in St Louis. Ouch!

It sounded interesting to me, so I went to take a look and see how it all went down. It turns out that Vic was holding out on us - the use of Brewer on the PP was actually much more interesting.

He gets top two minutes on the PP for the first three games. I suspect that this was the end of the “Brewer as PP QB by coach’s decision” phase. By the fourth game, it looks like the Blues coaches might be on to Brewer’s trouble on the PP - he falls to third amongst Blues defencemen in PP ice time.

Brewer is pretty solidly a third option at this point. It looks like the Blues decided after their fifth game that they couldn’t tolerate Andy Roach, which is the only reason Brewer was even able to maintain that position in the lineup. Otherwise, he’d be a fourth place option. Hilariously, Bryce Salvador slides past Brewer in the eighth game of the season. I think it’s fair to say that the Blues coaches saw Christian Backman as their best choice on the PP at this point of the year and everyone else sort of filtered through the other spot.

Disaster strikes. Christian Backman is injured in game 9! Now, I’m speculating here but I’d guess that there was also a conversation between Larry Pleau and Mike Kitchen following this game that went something like this:

Larry Pleau: So Mike, do your wife and children like St. Louis?

Mike Kitchen: They love it. My wife’s always worried that I’ll get fired mid-season and spend a season out of work.

Larry Pleau: Nice to hear. I’d hate for her to have to experience that. By the way…did you know that I traded Chris F. Pronger for Eric Brewer and it makes me look really bad when the guy I got in return isn’t getting PP time? My wife always worries that I’ll look bad because of a trade that I made. I hate to see my wife worried…

Mike Kitchen: Gotcha.

Enter Eric Brewer, PP QB. Brewer played 45.59 minutes on the PP during the Blues’ tenth to fifteenth games of the season. That’s Kovalchukian ice time on the PP. The Blues scored 5 PP goals in those 6 games, 3 with Brewer on the ice. Brewer had no points on the PP. Their scoring rate of 3.95 PPG/60 when Brewer on the ice during that period was absolutely horrible. So look what happens in their sixteenth and seventeenth games of the season. In game 16, Dennis Wideman - playing his second NHL game - gets 10.82 minutes while Brewer clocks in at 0.25. In game 17 Backman makes his return and Brewer falls to fourth on the PP depth chart, playing 0.9 minutes.

In Game 18, Brewer trashes his shoulder and he misses a ton of games. Upon his return, he was pretty consistently the third option on the PP for defencemen. He went through another brief spell as the Blues top defencemen in terms of PP ice time in the middle of the season but was basically the third man behind Eric Weinrich and Dennis Wideman most nights. It’s going to be interesting to see where falls this year - I’ll go out on a limb and guess that he ends up second on the Blues most nights in PP ice time behind Dennis Wideman. I’ll make a further guess that he’ll have few points and the Blues will have a bad power play. It’s pretty startling that Brewer couldn’t be the number one PP guy on that team - if you can’t be the PP QB for the worst team in the NHL, how in the name of god can you get so much time for a mid-level team a few years earlier?

There’s a really good story on TSN.ca right now, about NHL players leaving for more money in Russia. It’s by CP, with no byline but I suspect that it’s the work of Pierre Lebrun, one of the better hockey writers in the country.

Essentially, Tampa Bay and the Islanders have had players make the decision to go to Russia for (possibly) less money. Eugeni Artuhkin of the Lightning and Denis Grebeshkov and Sean Bergenheim of the Isles have signed contracts elsewhere and won’t be back. The reactions of their respective GM’s make for an interesting contrast. First Jay Feaster:

“We have Ryan Craig sitting there in our locker-room, he signed a $495,000 (two-way contract) and he scored 15 goals for us last year, so it’s a little tough to accept that for some inexplicable reason that Artukin ought to be making $750,000.”

Inexplicable? According to the article, Russian tax rates are 13% plus teams generally throw in cars, apartments and perks. It may well be that the guy can make more money over there. As my Uncle Ed would say if he followed hockey, the fact that Ryan Craig scored 15 goals and makes $495K on a two way deal is interesting, but irrelevant. Jay Feaster may have got Martin St. Louis, Vincent Lecavelier and Brad Richards to help him put on a financial straightjacket but if Artukhin can get offers elsewhere, he either needs to find room for him or he should move it. It’s very unbecoming of him to whine about it. It’s business.

Garth Snow provides an excellent contrast and shows what I think is a far more appropriate response to this:

We like Sean Bergenheim. We offered him a one-way contract and the opportunity of a regular spot in the National Hockey League. He has played 46 NHL games over two seasons, so we feel our offer was more than fair. If Sean’s decision is to play in Russia for what he feels is a better deal, that’s his call. He’s still a part of our future.”

Denis is a good prospect who took what he thought was a better opportunity to play at home for a year. We wish him well and hope to see him back here soon.

Can you spot the difference? Hard to believe that the one guy is a seasoned executive and the other guy is fresh off opening the door for Messrs. Bergenheim and Grebshkov.

This whole thing was an obvious consequence of the NHL’s decision to cap payrolls. Once there’s a limited amount of money and it starts to flow to the stars, teams are going to cheap out at the bottom end. That’s going to lead to a lot of guys re-evaluating the need to switch countries to play hockey. You can argue that the game is better off anyway, and that may well be a reasonable argument, but this should hardly have been an unforseeen consequence for Jay Feaster, something that leaves him indignantly sputtering to reporters.

This fake Blues blog is pretty much the awesomest thing on the Internet these days. They haven’t taken kindly to the criticism of the fact that it’s team run:

So, many of you Sherlock Holmes super-sleuth Blues fans have figured out that the Blues are actually the ones behind TheBlueRevolution.com. Congrats. Gold star for you. I can’t imagine what could’ve tipped you off. Was it the “Copyright © 2006 St. Louis Blues” line at the bottom of every page on the web site? Or, maybe it was the link on stlblues.com. I just don’t know how you did it. Oh well, our Da Vinci Code has been cracked. We’ll have to deal with it.

So much for fan friendly. I’m waiting for BlueRev to post a video of him and his buddies kicking in the door to some loser Blues forum guy’s basement apartment and beating him up. It’s rare that you see an official NHL site that’s so caustic in their comments about hockey fans.

Now, far be it for me to suggest that they’ve ever written anything misleading but reading quotes like “I’ve heard that there is a press conference with the new owners either today or tomorrow at the Missouri Athletic Club. I’m going to go down there and see if I can get in,” you’d think that they had nothing to do with the Blues. But that’s neither here nor there. Their post acknowledging that they’re the St. Louis equivalent of Jim Matheson contains this as well:

Will we get there [winning the Stanley Cup] this season? I doubt it. But it could happen.

They’re going to have to watch out - I think that that slogan is already copyrighted in Toronto. Still though, brave of the owners to sanction such a statement. If anyone knows of an email address for one of the Blues media relations guys, feel free to pass it on. I assume that that’s the official line since it comes from the official blog, but I’d be happy to confirm it.

As noted by Lowetide, Guy Flaming’s Top 20 Oilers Prospects is up. I’ll second everything that Lowetide said about the time put into it - Oilers fans are lucky that they have someone doing that. The thing that always drives me nuts about it is a) the overrating of nearly every prospect there - oddly, it seems like all of Hockey’s Future’s writers struggle with understanding what exactly constitutes a prospect and what exactly the odds of a prospect amounting to something in the NHL are and b) the way that quotes from unnamed Oilers sources are presented without the slightest bit of counterweight (you’ll see what I mean below). The highlights:

Oilers scout on Rob Schremp
Having seen Robbie on the internetin the playoffs, he’s definitely gotten stronger and his body is becoming muscularly defined.”

Have the Hot Oil girls had that much of an influence on Oiler reporting?
“Cogliano’s off-season endurance was clearly not up to par at the prospect camp where he was seen cramping up the first few days but there were few players as muscularly defined.”

This is a good thing?
“We’ve just seen Matt Greene evolve into the player that he’s going to be for a lot of years,” smiled one Oiler scout.

Spot the problem
“I think if he goes to the ECHL it will be a good thing for him; the ECHL is a really good league for goalies,” said one Oiler official. “Mike Morrison had nothing but good things to say about that league because you get lots of ice time, you see a ton of shots, you get to work on technique and you get to become a workhorse by playing so much.”

Yep, that’s right…if everything breaks right, Devan Dubnyk is the next Mike Morrison. He could someday challenge to be somewhere between the second and fourth goalie on Phoenix. MacT could call him off the bench for shootouts. Sacamano could swoon at whatever accent he develops in South Carolina. Of course, the Oilers don’t have an ECHL affiliate right now - even odds that the next Top 20 update features a quote like:

“I think that the Quebec Senior Pro League really is a good thing for Dubnyk. You remember when Conklin broke his hand fighing Pasi Nurminen? He never was the same. He just lacked experience fighting, I think,” said one Oiler scout, who then resumed huffing paint.”

Less snarkily, the ECHL alumni list isn’t exactly full of elite NHL goaltenders. David Aebischer, Byron Dafoe, Johan Hedberg, Olaf Kolzig, Manny Legace and Tomas Vokoun are the best to come out of that league. Aebischer played 27 games there at the age of 19. Dafoe played 10 games there at the age of 20. Hedberg has 2 ECHL games to his credit. Kolzig played 35 games there between the ages of 20 and 21. Legace played 3 games in the ECHL. Vokoun played 35 games there at the age of 19.

I’m fine with the Oilers decision not to have an AHL team - it’s a financial move that probably makes a lot of sense. The only people who are really upset about this are the people who care about the Troy Bodie’s of the world, guys who are a long shot to top out as fourth liners because those are the guys who lose out. It’s a decision that has the hallmarks of a business decision - it’d be nice if the Oilers could acknowledge it as such.

Anyway, good stuff from Flaming and the quotes from the Oilers scouts are always good for a laugh. I don’t follow the prospects closely enough to bitch about the rankings of certain guys but I’d be very surprised if Rob Schremp is in the mix for the Oilers this year.

As in all other areas, the NHL is laughably bad when it comes to their collection and presentation of the faceoff data. In terms of collection, they don’t bother indicating where on the ice a faceoff was taken, outside of the zone. Given the difference that the hand you shoot makes in winning draws and the different things you can do depending on what side of the ice you’re on, it’s relevant information. They also don’t bother to record whether it’s EV, PP or PK. Again, this would be interesting to me. The Oilers were absurdly good at preventing shots last year on the PK. Was winning faceoffs a reason for this? It seems plausible but I can’t check it out one way or another.

I’ve looked through their site and I’ll be damned if I can find any useful presentation of the date either. I went through and collected it and I’ll be making a series of posts on the topic over the next week.

First up is the distribution of faceoffs in the offensive/neutral/defensive zone. I’ve put up the list, along with teams ratios of offensive zone to defensive zone faceoffs. There’s something obvious that should jump out at you - 13 of the top 15 teams made the playoffs. Just 3 teams who finished outside the top 15 managed to make the playoffs. Notable in their presence in the Top 15 are the Canucks and the Leafs; notable by their presence in the bottom end of this list are the Sabres, Habs and Predators.

It seems to me that the faceoff ratio probably serves as a decent proxy for the amount of time a team spends in each end of the ice. It’s not going to be a true indicator of their strength at any particular facet of the game obviously - it’s susceptible to being altered by teams that spend disproportionate amounts of time on the PK as opposed to the PP. To offer an example here, New Jersey spent about 160 more minutes on the power play than they did killing penalties. Their appearance high on this list is undoubtedly at least in part a function of that. Of course, the flip side to that is that spending vastly more time on the PP than they do killing penalties is something that has been a team strength for the Devils.

In any event, I’m intrigued by a couple of teams. Vancouver, Toronto, Nashville and Minnesota. Vancouver is a team who many people had labeled as a Cup contender last year but they never really went anywhere. They spent pretty equal amounts of time on the PP and the PK, so it wasn’t driven by that. Oddly, the Canucks weren’t that good at getting shots, nor were they very good at preventing them - they were below league average in both categories. I can’t explain the seemingly favourable distribution of faceoffs and then the shots slanting the other way. It’s possible that it was just a year when there were a lot of shots missing the net but that seems like a stretch. I know that the Sedins are known for their cycle, cycle, cycle…nothing happens approach - I suppose it’s possible that they’re driving this and the Canucks have bigger problems elsewhere.

Toronto? Again, hard to explain. The Leafs had a very hard time getting shots at ES last year - only Minnesota had a worse ES/60 rate. The Leafs were middle of the road in preventing ES shots against (way to go spend on defencemen JFJ) so I’m not sure why they come out so well in this.

Nashville. The Predators are a pretty interesting team. Entering the playoffs last year, I was squarely in the camp of those who figured that the Preds were grossly overrated, entirely the product of their division. The Predators ranking in this stat isn’t that surprising to me. It’s just another in a slew of stats that says that the Predators were not that good. For what it’s worth, in their games with STL, CHI and CBJ, the Preds had a much more reasonable .96 ratio of offensive/defensive faceoffs. Their ratio outside of those games was .86. Yikes. The closer you look, the less the Predators look like a good team. In the beating that San Jose laid on them, the Predators ratio of offensive to defensive zone faceoffs was 0.66. This was not a a particularly good hockey team last year. No matter how you look at it, it really looks like their equation was goaltending + liberal helping of Central Division teams + smoke + mirrors + beatings of the Flames. Oddly, the Hockey News has them second in the conference this year; I’m sure that Mirtle won’t make a similar mistake in McKeen’s.

Now Minnesota. Minnesota was a team that I kind of figured was a hard luck team last year. +14 and no playoffs? That’s rough. Why, my favourite team struggled to +5 and then made some things happen in the playoffs. As with Nashville, the Wild rode excellent goaltending. They’ve strengthened their team. It should emphasize what a tightrope they’re on though - it looks like they are really highly dependent on the goaltending. They’ve added good players this summer but they’re like Nashville in that the slightest falloff from their goaltending would leave them with serious problems.

Up next: faceoffs and home ice advantage.

From Globe and Mail sports media guy William Houston:

The CBC’s current deal with the NHL probably includes a right of first negotiation. That means the CBC would have a window in which it could cut a new deal without facing a competing bid.

If that failed, the NHL would go to the marketplace and solicit bids from other broadcasters.

If only Bell Globemedia had someone, anyone, with a public platform who could broadcast the fact that they’re interested in paying a large whack of money for the NHL’s TV rights.

I don’t actually think that there’s anything wrong with this because it’s a legitimate story and the conflict is disclosed. I just find it hilarious that Houston’s column simultaneously serves the needs of Bell Globemedia.

As for the story itself, it’s pretty interesting. I don’t think that the money is as crazy as it first seems. First of all, the total for the rights in question is now $92MM. Bell Globemedia is offering $140MM annually. That includes rights that no one owns at the moment, the “new media” rights. It’s not at all clear what is included there but it’s probably worth noting that Major League Baseball has made a killing from their own entry into the new media market with MLBAM. If Bell Globemedia wants to gamble that they can do something similar, the amount that they’re willing to pay might not be nearly so surprising. The fact that CBC is rumoured to be making $30MM in good years from the English language rights alone suggests that the rights fees should increase substantially. I can’t believe that CBC will let themselves get outbid on this - there are too many people within the organization for whom the loss of the NHL rights would spell the end of their careers because that would pretty much wipe out CBC sports. I hope that the league does take some steps towards developing the new media stuff with Bell Globemedia though - the content that MLB provides on their website blows away that provided by the NHL. It’d be a good thing for the NHL to make steps to provide better content.

Update: I was surfing the Star TV critic’s blog, following a link from delusional no-name Colby Cosh relating to a different matter. She has her own take on the possibility of Bell Globemedia getting the NHL rights. It could be argued that it demonstrates the problem with William Houston reporting on this story - he’s afraid to point out the awful implications of this scheme:

…it’s highly unlikely CTV would pre-empt its lucrative U.S. simulcasts during play-off season, especially when the games coincide with all those season and series finales. So the games would have to move to TSN or other specialty channels, where many Canadians can’t receive them.

Does BGM really want to force old people on fixed incomes to shell out more for cable?

A further update: Zerbisias really is everything that’s bad about current media. Here’s what she wrote in the comments to her own post:

I think it [CBC] should have Saturday night Hockey Night in Canada because that is a Canadian tradition. As for the other games, pfffft.

We already know that she doesn’t think CTV would carry games on other nights because they’ve got the American programming to consider. Presumably then, the result of her proposal would be games getting shunted to cable. Does BGM Antonia Zerbisias really want to force old people on fixed incomes to shell out more for cable?

Lowetide is right. The St. Louis Blues are quietly having an excellent summer.

It hasn’t been all good - they put together a blog for marketing purposes and then tried to make it look like it was assembled by fans. Diabolically, they’ve since abandoned it (it hasn’t been updated in 20 days), so as to make it look even more like a real blog as opposed to a marketing scam. A cunning move from the boys in marketing.

The truth is, the Blues are unlikely to be competitive next season. They finished -89 last season and when a team does that, it’s usually because they’re so full of holes, they just can’t patch them all in a single offseason. They’re bound to spend at least $28MM on their payroll. Keep in mind, they had Doug Weight for most of last season and were horrible. They’ve made four other additions of note - Bill Guerin, Martin Rucinsky, Jay McKee and Manny Legace.

The key thing for me is the contract length. Weight is signed for two seasons. Rucinsky is signed for two years (but to a contract that is favourable to a cash rich, cap poor team). Guerin is signed for one. Legace is signed to one. McKee…well, he got too many years and too many dollars. Not good work there. It’s also worth noting that Keith Tkachuk is in the last year of his deal.

Look at the haul that the Blues got for Doug Weight last year - a first, two fourths and some cheap warm bodies. He was essentially being acquired as a third liner and PP specialist. I’d guess that Tkachuk could net at least that at this year’s trade deadline and Guerin slightly less, depending on how his season goes. If Legace has a good year (as I suspect he will), he’s going to be enticing to any team that is desperate for a goalie and willing to overlook last spring (Detroit will probably end up qualifying on the first count…the second, not so much.

St. Louis’s payroll is at about $34.25MM right now. They’ll be in a nice position to dump salary come the deadline and they could reap significant rewards for doing so. I don’t think that this is by design, to be honest - I still don’t think this team has the horses to make the playoffs, let alone make a move if they got there but they’re acting like they do. If I was running the show, the budget might be a bit lower - I’d have probably passed on Marty Rucinsky and Jay McKee.

Jim Matheson has reported that they’re looking at Radek Dvorak; that would be a mistake. Legace should drive them forward in terms of no longer sucking in net (they were Oilers-esque last year at ES) but it’s not going to be enough - even as bad as their division is, I see them going .500 in the division at best while getting smoked outside the division. They could be a lot better next year and still be a bad team. They’re well positioned to be a stronger franchise at this time next year than they are now though, if Pleau plays his cards right at the trade deadline. It could be even better without Rucinsky and McKee but the bar is low - they’re in a division with teams run by Doug MacLean and Dale Tallon.

One of the interesting sub-plots that I’m looking forward to following next season is how Alex Tanguay makes out with the Flames. My initial reaction was that this was a great move for Calgary. No matter what, I think it will work out as a net positive for the Flames because they were trading from a position of organizational strength (they’re absurdly deep on defence) to address an organizational black hole (scoring goals). Truth be told, I can’t see them as anything but a better team because of the trade. I wonder just how big of an impact that Tanguay is going to have though.

There are some interesting numbers here. Calgary was a terrible offensive team at ES last year, just horrible. They scored 2.04 ESG/60, “good” for 29th. The team that finished in 28th (Minnesota) scored 2.19 ESG/60. It doesn’t sound like much but over the course of the Flames season, that’d be a nine goal difference; good for another win and half just by getting to 28th. Disgusting. Colorado, on the other hand, was very, very good. They scored 2.99 ESG/60. Obviously, Alex Tanguay was a big part of that, piling up 47 ES points, including 19 goals. He broke the 3.0 ESP/60 barrier, hitting 3.02 ESP/60, which is just phenomenal.

Three points I want to make. First, Tanguay had an ES shooting percentage of 22.4% last season. Of guys who played their entire year on one team and took at least 85 shots (as did Tanguay), no one had a better ES shooting percentage. Only 11 of them even managed to beat 15.0%. Now, maybe Alex Tanguay is just a natural goalscorer. It’s possible. Strangely though, the man is not a shooter. He took just 5.64 ESS/60. That’s the 14th lowest figure for guys who took as many shots as he did. I don’t see enough Avalanche games to know how he scores his goals but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that he was either a) extremely lucky or b) got a ton of high percentage shots.

Second interesting fact. Tanguay played in an offensive environment last season in which his team scored 3.92 ESG/60. Jarome Iginla, to name his most likely linemate, played in an offensive environment in which his team scored 2.12 ESG/60. He’s going from one extreme offensive environment to another.

The real question here is whether Tanguay was a product or creator of the environment in which he accumulated his totals. He’s one of those guys who’re hard to judge because he’s played so much of his career surrounded by Hall of Fame offensive talent. Contrary to the rather hilarious conventional wisdom (circa about 20 seconds after this trade was announced) at Calgary Puck, Tanguay wasn’t riding with the Colorado players who you’ve never heard of last year. Of the 61 EV goals that he was on the ice for, Sakic was on the ice for 35 of them. It’d be nice if the NHL offered a handy breakdown of TOI with certain players so that we knew how it breaks down timewise, but we can safely say that Tanguay spent a significant amount of time with Joe Sakic. We know that Joe Sakic’s been an offensive star since Alex Tanguay was about 10 years old.

Unfortunately, there’ve been no good studies about who drives the play and how, or if, that can be discerned statistically. Have a quick peak at Milan Hejduk’s ESP/60 numbers since 1998-99 though. In 98-99, he scored 2.06 ESP/60, 99-00 he hit 2.04 ESP/60, 00-01 was 2.34 ESP/60, 01-02 was 1.58 ESP/60, 02-03 was 3.10 ESP/60, 03-04 was 2.44 ESP/60 and 05-06 was 2.19 ESP/60. If you adjust for scoring levels, his two worst seasons are easily 2001-02 and 2005-06. Why were those years notable? Well, he was missing a rather decent centre. In 2003-04, he was on the ice for 65 ES goals, of which 52 saw either Forsberg or Sakic on the ice with him. With Forsberg’s departure and the impact of coaching decisions, he was on the ice with Sakic for only 22 of his 51 EV+ events this year. The rest of the time, he was riding with a far less star studded cast.

The Flames have bet $15.7MM over 3 years that Tanguay was as much a creator of the environment in Colorado as he was a product of it. There was an awful lot of money wasted in baseball on guys coming out of Denver with inflated numbers; if Alex Tanguay puts ES points on the board in the coming season at a similar rate to that achieved by Hejduk last year, the Flames are going to be severely disappointed. It’s going to be interesting to watch.

Item

On July 9th 2006, Havlat was traded to the Chicago Blackhawks with Bryan Smolinski in a 3 -way deal, which also involved the San Jose Sharks getting Mark Bell for Tom Preissing and Josh Hennessy. Preissing and Hennessy were then, along with Blackhawks prospect Michal Barinka and Chicago’s 2008 second round draft pick, traded to the Ottawa Senators for Havlat and Smolinksi.

Foreshadowing

The National Hockey League and the National Hockey League Players’ Association would both benefit greatly if they were able to make the league more competitively balanced. It would not only help the overall product of the game but also create more interest in the National Hockey League cities that currently have perpetually losing teams. In the end, a more balanced league would also help generate more revenue for NHL teams, and in turn, its players.
-Thomas Preissing, Determinants of Competitive Balance in the National Hockey League

I’ve got some doubts about the work but if there’s another NHL player who’s ever mulled over the Herfindahl-Hirschmann Index, I’d be shocked.

Props to Tango Tiger for digging this up. I wonder if he discovered it through a work connection…

Given that I’m something of a hockey geek and I’ve got a pile of stats on my computer (they’re slowly moving towards the public domain…) I like to take a look at comparisons of certain players who one might not think are readily comparable. Today’s comparison? Ryan Smyth and Radek Dvorak.

Between 1997-98 and 2003-04, Dvorak played 6877.43 minutes at ES. Smyth played 6717.03 ES minutes. Over seven years, that isn’t much of a difference. Dvorak scored 88 goals in that time, 0.77/60 at ES. Smyth scored 91 goals, 0.81/60. We’re talking a tiny difference - over the course of a 1000 minute ES season, it works out to 0.67 goals; we’re talking less than a goal’s worth of difference. Dvorak had 144 assists; 1.29/60 at ES while Smyth had 139 assists; 1.24/60. There’s not a hell of a lot of a difference here.

Last year, they were very similar players at ES again. Dvorak was a little banged up and played 834.73 minutes while Smyth played 961.72 minutes. Dvorak was uniformly derided for a terrible year - he scored only 0.36 ESG/60 while Smyth scored 0.87 ESG/60. Dvorak did better with the assists though, accumulating them at the rete 1.37 ESA/60 while Smyth got 0.94 ESA/60. It works out to 1.73 ESP/60 for Dvorak and 1.81 ESP/60 for Smyth.

In terms of outscoring, Dvorak was -0.29 G/60 while Smyth was -0.37. In fairness to Smyth, he looks to have played slightly tougher minutes but he did have at least one significantly better defensive player with him than did Dvorak.

Smyth enjoys a big edge in PP productivity but other than that, these guys are remarkably similar players in terms of their stats for the past eight years. How Radek Dvorak is still unsigned for next year is a mystery to me - it just makes no sense. There are a ton of teams out there that he could help by eating ES minutes and yet he’s still nowhere. I don’t get it.

In fairness to Smyth, he had a bad year at ES last year. I’d rather have him than Dvorak because of his health and PP value but I believe the difference between him and Radek Dvorak to be a lot smaller than people would imagine.