I was recently in Chicago and Milwaukee, on a quick road trip with a friend to see Wrigley Field and Miller Park. Outside of Wrigley, there’s a statue of Harry Carey. How do you end up with a statue honouring a broadcaster as your most significant tribute to a person related to the club in the area of the stadium?

It’s easy. You alternate between bad decisions and ones aimed at maximizing short term revenue for years and years that result in you not having anyone worthy of such an honour since Ernie Banks (a statue for Ron Santo would be a bit much). The Cubs are a money making machine, more concerned with making decisions that maximize their returns in the short term than with doing what’s necessary to build a team that can succeed in the long term. With the Oilers decision to sign Sheldon Souray, I think that it’s getting increasingly difficult for anyone to maintain the position that the Oilers aren’t willing to make decisions that maximize their possibilities for this year at the expense of their opportunities in the future. This might be defensible if they were maximizing their chances at a Stanley Cup but they’re not. They’re maximizing their chances at a first round playoff appearance and a five game loss to Detroit.


I first wrote about why I’d be leery of signing Sheldon Souray at the behest of The Score, back on February 2, 2007. While that was in the context of Montreal taking a run at re-signing him, my comments then pretty much reflect my thinking now:

If there’s one thing that we know about NHL GMs, it’s that every year, there are a couple of guys who are thrilled to buy at the top of the market. Heck, there are some who apparently operate completely autonomously from any concept of the market - see John Ferguson Jr. trading an excellent prospect and giving a three year deal to a goalie coming off a season in which he was arguably the worst in the NHL. Sheldon Souray has been kissed by the gods this year - nothing in his past indicates that this is his real level of performance. To buy now is to buy at the absolute top of the Souray market. For a team that has a disturbingly high number of guys who could be nicknamed “Wasted Money”, they can’t afford to have Souray making what he’ll make and producing like a merely good offensive defenceman.

I’m going to explain in greater detail why the Souray signing is such a bad idea, but first, I want to point out something that I wrote here back on December 27, 2006.

Watching TSN tonight, they had a poll on who should be the leader for the Jack Adams at the moment. Guy Carbonneau was their leader. It’s a ridiculous choice - I’m sure that this will irritate Canadiens fans but they’re simply not that good. If Sheldon Souray and Saku Koivu are both true talent 8.0 PPP/60 players, I’m Doug MacLean. They aren’t. Sad for Habs fans, but true.

When I wrote that, the Canadiens were 22-9-5. Despite their fine record, they had a razor thin margin for error, as their goal differential came nowhere near supporting their record. Their absurd PP numbers (along with a fantastic PK) were part of that - when I wrote that, they were scoring 9.5 PPG/60. They went 20-25-1 for the rest of the season, getting less lucky at turning their goal differential into wins and stopped getting the results that they had on the PP and PK. Their PP fell to scoring 8.6 PPG/60, a very good number to be sure, but given the rest of the flaws that the team had, not enough to cover up for it. Souray fell from 3.8 PPG/60 and 5.0 PPA/60 through that game to 2.3 PPG/60 and 4.0 PPA/60. Now that second set of numbers is fantastic as well - if he does that in Edmonton, I’ll be considerably happier with his signing but I think that it’s nuts to expect that. I don’t bring up comment on the Habs to toot my own horn but to make a simple point - when a team or player is doing something that completely defies all logic and their own history, as with the Canadiens success on the PP and PK and their temporary immunity from the laws of goal differential, predicting that they’ll go in the tank is like shooting fish in a barrel. Keep that in mind for when I discuss Souray’s PP numbers below.

Starting with ES, here’s Souray over the past few years:

As a fun* contrast, here are Jason Smith’s numbers at ES the past few years:

(i screwed up Smith’s 3 year S/60. Obviously, it’s somewhere in the range of half Souray’s. Otherwise though, the resemblance is uncanny.)

Keep in mind, with the exception of last year, Smith’s been on the ice against the opposition’s elite - everything that I’ve seen suggest that Souray, while not hidden, wasn’t seeing that kind of competition. The offence of Jason Smith with somewhat lesser defensive skills against weaker opposition AND at 2.5 times the price? It’s like a bad joke.
Another fun* thing to consider, when eyeballing those ES- numbers are the ES save percentages: Edmonton’s over the past 3 years was .909; Montreal’s? .922. That’s a large difference over three years - Souray had a considerable edge. Assuming for the sake of argument that the ES save percentage when Souray was on the ice was .922, the difference between that and a .909 ES save percentage is 25 goals. That’s a 0.5 ESG/60 swing in a bad way. While Montreal’s forwards may have been ES zeroes, Edmonton’s, by and large, aren’t much better at the moment, particularly after you get past the top 5 or 6 guys. Reasonable expectations would have the goaltending being worse in Edmonton than it was in Montreal. Reading some of the talk about this move, I’ve seen some reference to Souray filling Smyth’s role, in terms of being the local boy making $5MM+. Lupul might be a better reference point - the local boy making way too much money and posting an astonishingly bad ES- number.

What about the PP? That’s where Souray really gets it done, right? Right?


Well sort of. Remember what I said above about things that are out of step with career norms and common sense as to what’s sustainable? How predicting regression there is like shooting fish in a barrel? That pretty much sums up 2006-07 on the PP for Sheldon Souray. The Habs PP production with him on the ice was up by about 50%. It’s all shooting percentage though - look at his shooting percentage in 06-07 on the PP and compare it to his previous years. The Habs had an unreal year shooting percentage wise on the PP as well - 15.9% in a league where 13.5% was the average, which put them second to San Jose. Edmonton was at 13%. In 2005-06, when he had far more normal numbers for a good PP defenceman, Montreal shot 13.5% on the PP. Those extra 2.5 shots going into the net out of 100 add up to an awful lot of points being available - over 540 shots, like Montreal took last year, it’s an extra 18 or 19 goals.

These three seasons I’ve shown are really the only three worth mentioning with Souray - prior to 2003-04, he had all of 160.05 PP minutes over 5 years, so I can’t really go further back and mine some more data on his PP trend. Given that 17% is a clearly unsustainable PP shooting percentage for a defenceman, that he has no appreciable playmaking skill at ES, that his numbers spiked with an increase in shooting percentage and that 20 of his 29 PP assists were second assists, I’m pretty comfortable in saying that people shouldn’t focus on his peak season as being a good indicator of what he really brings to the PP. If he hits 4.0 PPP/60 next year, with 1.5 PPG/60, that’s probably a pretty good season.

Of course, I don’t know that that distinguishes him all that much from what Jarrett Stoll, Dick Tarnstrom and Joni Pitkanen could accomplish. I’m not going to run down Souray’s shot or the fact that he’s a goal scorer on the PP, if not one of the level that he achieved this year. I’m simply suggesting that when you’re a team that’s going to struggle to make the playoffs, pissing away $27MM for five years on a guy who’s good but not great on the PP doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. Doing so when you’ve got other options available just doesn’t make any sense - unless you’re desperately trying to ensure that you’re within sniffing distance of a playoff spot into March so that you can sell the future in May.

PK numbers:


PK numbers shed the least light of all the numbers, I think because they’re so goalie dependent - Edmonton’s penalty killing went from meh to fantastic after Roloson was plugged in for Conkannen last year. Souray’s numbers are nothing to complain about but with that said, he’s been fortunate to play in front of fantastic goaltending on the PK for a few years now in MTL. If past history is any predictor here, he’ll be in front of good PK goaltending in Edmonton and likely have respectable numbers but the Oilers are already paying Roloson that - Souray would be more of a passive beneficiary if I’m right about the goaltender dictating a lot of the PK results.

I understand the argument that Souray is likely going to be a better option than Tom Gilbert, or whoever else now gets bumped out of the lineup and into the seventh spot. I’d suggest though, that at some point over the next five years, the Oilers are going to wish that they had that money available to spend, either on a free agent of their own, of somebody else’s or a trade opportunity. They’re going to look at what success, in the loosest sense of the word, they’ve enjoyed with Souray - by the way, if you can’t be elite with Ryan Smyth eating up that chunk of your payroll, how in god’s name can you do it with Sheldon Souray - and regret that they can’t trade in the near playoff miss of 2007-08 for better odds of making a real run in two or three years. As for the money that they’re spending this year on him, if they couldn’t find a better way to spend it than Sheldon Souray, I’d rather that they kept their powder dry and had Souray’s dollars available for the inevitable opportunities to improve the team that will arise over the next five years.

I should also add that I understand the justification that the Oilers need to do something for the fans given all the noise that they’ve made about fixing the team over the past few months. Listening to Bob Stauffer’s show today, I don’t think it can be denied that the fans in Edmonton are reacting in a generally positive manner to this move. At some point though, in November or December, when the PP is in the middle of the league at best, the Oilers are struggling to stay in the playoff hunt and Souray is getting bombed at ES…people are going to start noticing that the team isn’t really much better. I know that there are a lot of Edmontonians who think that people should stop harping on the Pronger and Smyth deals - the reason that it’s hard for me to do that, and presumably for others as well is that the fallout for those deals continues to land. If Lowe isn’t under huge pressure to make something happen, he doesn’t make this deal. If the Oilers don’t deal Pronger for crap, they would have likely been closer to the playoffs at deadline time, if only by virtue of the fact that Joffrey Lupul wouldn’t have been killing the team. If they weren’t so far out of it, Smyth wouldn’t have been traded. If Smyth hadn’t been traded, the ugly finish to the season likely wouldn’t have been so bad and Lowe wouldn’t feel a gun to his head to make something happen. I’d like to stop talking about the Pronger and Smyth trades at some point but I can’t help but think that they’re still relevant in that you can’t understand what the team is doing now without pointing to those trades. I can’t see that changing until Lowe no longer runs the team and there’s a terrifying statue of Rod Phillips next to Gretzky outside of Rexall.

*by “fun”, I mean “horribly depressing”