mc79hockey.com

Per Staples:

…I’d say the expected return on a relatively proven Penner just heading into the peak years of his career is better than the expected return of all but the highest of draft picks.

If the Oilers don’t give up the highest of picks (top six) — and there was some reason to expect they would not when Lowe signed Penner — this deal works.

So it worked then, and it works now, and it will still work in June, come draft day, so long as the Oilers don’t utterly fall apart in the next few months.

The choice that Kevin Lowe faced last summer did not include the value of a first, second and a third round pick based on the Oilers standing with Dustin Penner in the lineup.

He was either going to have a first, second and third round picks, the value of which would be determined by the team that he iced without Dustin Penner, or he was going to have Dustin Penner. Saying that the deal was a good one because an Oilers team with Dustin Penner storms all the way to 23rd in the standings is insane because that was the never the choice that Lowe faced. I don’t even think that Penner has contributed all that much. Staples (and a lot of others) do.

If “Penner has made a contribution worthy of a top 10 pick and $4.25MM” is true, “There were really no other options available when the Oilers signed Penner” is true, “The Oilers are currently in 23rd place” is true, “The Blackhawks are one point back with two games in hand” is true, “The Panthers are two points back with a game in hand” is true, “The Sabres are three points back with three games in hand” is true and “The Oilers have an extraordinarily good record in one goal games” is true, does it not follow, as a simple matter of logic, that Lowe likely gave up “the highest of draft picks” in order to get Penner?

I don’t buy Staples reasoning about the value of a 6-10 pick in a deep draft but, on his own reasoning, I can’t see how the Oilers gave up anything but “the highest of draft picks”.

I’ve been called out over at the Staples Centre (nee Lowetide) as how to evaluate the success, or lack thereof, of the Dustin Penner signing.  David Staples has suggested the following as an indicator of its success:

…my suggested test is that Penner equals his offensive output from last season, that he’s a plus player in plus/minus, and that the Oilers draft no lower than 7th pick overall (I believe).

I’ve got all sorts of problems with this.  First of all, I should point out that Stapes threw in the caveat that his test was to be used if the deal was to be judged on July 1, 2008.  I don’t understand the need to do it then or what purpose such instant analysis serves; in my view, that’s like investing $21MM in a startup company and then evaluating your investment a week later.  I mean sure, you can look at the new information and decide whether it still seems like a good investment but it’s kind of a silly assessment to make - you don’t make investments in startup companies and expect your return a week later and, barring an extremely cynical take on the Oilers motives in signing Penner, I can’t see how they reasonably expected a return of any sort of value to them by July 1, 2008.  (If you’re wondering, the extremely cynical view was that the Penner signing was to fill the seats and keep the notoriously vicious Edmonton media at bay with respect to the Katz option - Penner’s gone 2/2 in that regard and, based on today’s news that Plan B has been abandoned, he’s now Katz’ problem).

Read the rest of this entry »

I pulled the following off the Hockey Analysis Group on Yahoo!

This email is only intended for those who seek to provide input into making this project better or more relevant. It is not intended for those who think this project is not worthwhile. (i.e., If this party is not for you, don’t come through the door!).

As some of you may know, I have been running for 5 years now a scouting project, seeking input from baseball fans:
http://tangotiger.net/scouting/scoutResults2007.html

I would now like to do the same for hockey.

In order to provide good results and good participation, it is important to limit the number of choices, as no one wants to fill out a survey that is too long (but also not too short that it captures only part of what is needed).

As it stands, here are the categories I’ve come up with. If someone wants to offer more relevant categories, or think that some of the categories ought to be dismissed for either lack of relevancy or difficulty in assessing, please do so.

GOALIES
Style
1. butterfly, standup
2. stays deep, challenges shooters, flops around
3. on shoot-ins: roams away from crease, stays in crease

Skills
4. side-to-side skating: how well
5. up/down: how quick
6. plays angles, positioning: how well
7. glove hand, blocker: how well
8. passing: how well

SKATERS
Style
1. defensive zone: pass puck, skate with puck
2. neutral zone: pass puck, skate with puck, dump and chase
3. offensive zone: pass puck, skate in, shoot puck
4. teammate has puck, player will: charge net, hang back, skate around to be open
5. team without the puck, player will: play the body, play the puck, block passing lane

Skills
5. skating start/acceleration: how well
6. skating straight away speed: how well
7. skating stop/reverse: how well
8. shooting speed: how fast
9. shooting accuracy: how well
10. passing accuracy: how well

For those who aren’t familiar with him, Tom M. Tango (possibly a pseudonym) is a sabrmetrician who has done work in MLB and does some consulting work for an NHL team.  I’m reasonably certain that he’s not Doug MacLean but that’s about it.  The Fans Scouting Report is a pretty cool thing and what intrigues me about this is the idea of being able to classify players into types.  If anyone has anything that they think should be added, feel free to add a note and I’ll point him to the comments thread.

Thoughts on a number of random topics:

-I caught part of Bob Stauffer’s show today and I have to ask: what’s the deal with emphasizing that Tom Mayson isn’t Joffrey Lupul’s biological grandfather (Stauffer always adds “…as has wrongly been reported elsewhere”, or words to that effect) every time Mayson’s name arises on the show?  His point is a great mystery to me.  I mean, for one, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it reported that Tom Mayson is Joffrey Lupul’s biological grandfather - that would be an awfully weird thing to report.  Is his point that we should discount the whiff of nepotism that came off of Lupul’s presence on the Oilers on the basis that nobody really loves their adopted grandchildren?  Of all of the points in the world to hammer home on separate occasions, that strikes me as a weird one.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following quote in Dan Barnes’ most recent story strikes me as being deserving of a followup:

What’s more, if EIG members meet Katz’s Jan. 31 deadline for acceptance of his fourth and best offer, the source said those investors will receive cheques, at $20,560 per unit, no later than the end of March. The quick turnaround is likely to placate those among the 34 investors who do not want the sale to become a sordid or lengthy process.

It will certainly appeal to Bruce Saville, a staunch Katz supporter and one of three investors holding the largest chunks of company shares at 9.14% apiece.

“I have been disappointed with the way the board has functioned for the last 10 years,” Saville said this weekend. “It soured me against continuing on and that’s why I want out. That’s why I support Katz.”

As I recall, Saville was a Slats man and when Slats left, he got a lot less involved but you’d have to wonder if there’s more to it than that. It doesn’t seem like something worth being pissed off about for ten years or anything. The team has done exceptionally well over the past ten years, I’d think, from an ownership perspective. I don’t think that they would have done significantly better with Slats running the show and while I haven’t exactly enjoyed some aspects of Kevin Lowe turning the Oilers management and coaching into Edmonton’s version of the Canadian Senate, they’ve had decent bang for their buck up until the past two years. Not to mention, it’s not like Sather was running a meritocracy or anything - it can’t be emphasized enough that the head of scouting was living in Mexico for a large part of his reign.

On the topic of Oilers ownership…this was not, to the best of my knowledge, reported anywhere, but they switched their form from a partnership to a corporation sometime in 2000 or 2001. As many reading this site will remember, one of the great advantages that Cal Nichols saw in the partnership form was being able to flow their huge depreciation losses on player contracts through and write them off against their personal income. I would think that this would be lost when they went to the corporate form. The obvious reason for switching from a partnership to a corporation is to minimize taxes - I would assume that these guys were paying a higher marginal rate on their personal income tax than the corporate income tax rate. Of course, we’re all told that the Oilers were making no money back then - those were the days of cash calls, remember - so I find the whole thing a little puzzling. I’ve had a decent suggestion from someone via email but I thought I’d open the floor and see if any other people could shed some light on why they would have done that and what, if any, inferences can be drawn about the Oilers as a business from it.

This is one of the more intriguing web sites I’ve ever come across.  Randy Newsom, a Cleveland Indians prospect, is selling off 4% of his major league earnings.  You can buy shares for $20 a share; your $20 gets you 0.0016% of his major league earnings.  Now, I don’t know that this is a very good deal - by my math, he needs to make $1.25MM in the majors before the investor breaks even and he’s a 25 year old AA reliever but it’s a very intriguing idea nonetheless.  How many Oilers fans would like to buy shares in players like Taylor Chorney, Rob Schremp and Slava Trukhno?  What’s 1% of Rob Schremp’s career worth as an investment?  It really is a cool idea.

Tip of the cap to Baseball Prospectus, who have a great interview with Newsom.

I’ve got some neat demographic data that I thought would be kind of cool to throw up. It stems from something that I first noticed in the early 1990’s - there didn’t seem to be the same volume of young players that there were when I first started following hockey. I’m a child of the 1980’s and it seemed that not only were there tons of actual young stars then but that there were just more young players making the NHL than there were in the 1990’s. I couldn’t figure out a reason for this and just kind of assumed that it was to do wtih the changing nature of the game - with weight training and an increased emphasis on defensive tactics, that the gap had increased between the NHL and junior hockey. That may well be the case but I’m no longer as sure that it’s the main reason for the changed demographics.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been quiet so far on the Alexander Ovechkin deal but there’s been a lot of good commentary on it - both Mirtle and Tom Benjamin have posts that are well worth a look. Ted Leonsis didn’t really alter his usual rate of Ovechkin related posting - there were about 15 posts in a three day span last week - but his site has a number of interesting posts on the deal that are worth checking out as well. I’m going to comment on one of those and then get into the deal itself. Per Leonsis:

Mainstream media is clueless. NHL teams aren’t worth what Forbes reports; they are worth MUCH, MUCH more. We would have to be idiots to do deals with players that are worth more than the team and we aren’t idiots. I am constantly amazed at how silly this cycle is: someone reports badly; someone comments on the bad reporting; there are now two sources out there; it must be true; so now it is fact.

I suspect that this is the first time, outside of negotiations with potential team buyers, that an NHL executive has said that Forves doesn’t give them enough credit for their financial strength. Something to remember when Bill Daly is poormouthing Forbes’ numbers during the next labour spat - the story of people related to the NHL about the reliability of Forbes numbers seems to change, depending on the story that’s needed.

Read the rest of this entry »

See below - now updated with stats for each player with and without the Fatal Five.

Per Tychkowski:

PLAY THE KIDS

It’s time to end the love affair with reliable defensive players. They’re a dime a dozen and judging by the 14th-place Edmonton’s 129 goals against, second most in the conference, they’re not all that reliable anyway.

The players who should be getting the ice time are the dynamic young kids who are going to be leading this team in the very near future. Sam Gagner, Robert Nilsson and Andrew Cogliano.

What’s the concern? That they’ll make some mistakes and the team might wind up in 14th, with the second most goals against in the conference?

Read the rest of this entry »

I’d rather watch an entertaining hockey team than an entertaining airing of local rivalries and grievances, but in the absence of the former since June of 2006, I’ll settle for the latter. Today’s chain of events was thoroughly entertaining and, in my mind, utterly ill advised on the part of the EIG. I mean, for one, Terry Jones was in Buffalo yesterday at the Winter Classic. That game ended at about 4:45 EST. I’ve got serious doubts that he would have been able to get back to Edmonton last night but, assuming that he did, he probably flew a red eye back to Edmonton. I’m not even sure that there are red eyes going that distance from east to west in Canada - if he left Toronto at 10:00 p.m., which isn’t unreasonable assuming an easy time at the Canadian border, he’d be landing in Edmonton at what, 1 a.m. or so? I suspect that Edmonton International isn’t even open at that time. I wouldn’t usually care about that sort of thing but when a guy describes me and my business partners as the greatest guys in the history of a given city, I’ll schedule press conferences when he’s damn well available. Hell, I’ll have the press conference in Buffalo if neccesary. Instead, it was the Dan Barnes, Robin Brownlee, Bob Stauffer, Bryan Hall and Bryn Griffiths show and those guys weren’t going particularly easy on the poor guy, although they did let him wriggle off the hook a couple of times.
Read the rest of this entry »