Six years, four teams and one celebrity girlfriend later, the longest holdout in NHL history has drawn to a close. Mike Comrie and Kevin Lowe both did interviews after the signing talking about letting bygones be bygones. I thought Comrie did a better job of selling his love for Big Brother - Lowe still seems to be struggling with thoughts that maybe the war with Eurasia isn’t going so well.

Bizarre psycho-dramas aside though, it’s an interesting move and one that I sort of grudgingly support. The fact of the matter is, for $1.25MM, the guy costs basically next to nothing. If he did nothing more than sit across from Robert Nilsson and some of the other youngsters as a gruesome warning of what the future might hold although, in truth, Nilsson would probably be lucky to end up having Comrie’s career.

I’ve thrown together Comrie’s numbers for his career - Willis (he should just use that as his name on the internets, like Eklund) has more detailed stuff about the more recent years here - but it’s pretty interesting stuff.

Comrie1

Not included in the chart are Comrie’s shooting numbers and percentages. At ES, he isn’t really a shooter, with S/60 numbers ranging from about 6.7 ESS/60 to 7.7 ESS/60 over the past four years. His percentages have been off the past two years but the shots have still pretty much been there - I take that as an encouraging sign.

I’ll deal with the ES stuff below but Comrie’s PP numbers caught my eye - they aren’t that impressive. During the past season, Shawn Horcoff took a lot of criticism for virtually everything but he received special wrath for his lousy PP production. I wrote a fair bit about him because I thought a lot of it was undeserved. In April, I took a look at Horcoff’s bad season and wrote the following:

…his scoring rates aren’t really all that different except at ES G/60. Last year he posted 1.41 ESA/60; this year he’s posted 1.18. It comes out to a difference of 4 assists over 80 games or so. His PP G/60 rate is identical to last year’s - 1.62 G/60 both years. His power play assist rate is off slightly 2.44 PPA/60 this year to 2.72 PPA/60 last year. We’re talking about a net difference of just over one assist.

The goal rate though - that’s been the real trouble spot for Horcoff. Last year he put up 1.11 ESG/60, a fantastic rate. This year, he’s posted just .43 ESG/60. If he was scoring at the same rate, he’d have 21 ES goals this year instead of 8. There’s the big difference.

I was kicking the Comrie signing around with a friend and suggested that, at the very least, he could take some of Horcoff’s minutes on the PP. Looking at it, I’m not so sure that that’s a good idea - Horcoff’s been considerably more productive of late than Comrie has been over his career. Horcoff takes an incredible amount of heat for not being a useful PP guy; his last couple of years are significantly better than what Comrie has done in his career, even in terms of goal scoring, which is Comrie’s forte. I’m not sure that it makes sense to be diverting Horcoff’s PP time to Comrie. Horcoff might be a middling PP option but Comrie looks worse to me.

Somewhat strangely given his results, Comrie has consistently been a primary PP option on every team he’s played for except Philadelphia. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s only once played for a team that didn’t have a lousy PP - Ottawa was 14th the year he was there and he probably doesn’t deserve any credit or blame for that PP. I don’t think he’s going to be a positive difference maker on the PP.

Comrie’s strength during the course of his career has been his ES scoring. Over the course of his career, he’s scored 1.00/0.96/1.96 at evens, which is certainly respectable. I did a post looking at the percentiles of given scoring rates some time ago and Comrie comes off well on that basis for his career - if those numbers could be applied to his career, he’s an 80th percentile goal scorer, 50th percentile assist wise and 70th percentile in terms of scoring. I would expect that the percentiles for career scoring are actually lower than in the chart and that he’s a little better than that.

The reason Comrie isn’t a particularly valuable player is that he requires the softer ice time to get to those scoring levels. He was sheltered on the draws in both New York and Ottawa last season, with a easier mix of offensive and defensive zone draws than team average. Comrie isn’t going to be looking for Horcoff’s ES minutes. At ES, he’s been cast in a more secondary role, with his ice time in largely in the 11 to 13 minute a night range. Logic (and a look at his QualComp numbers) tells us that he’s not playing the tough minutes. The guys that he’s realistically competing with for ice time are the guys in spots 4-9 in the Oilers roster of ES forwards.

It probably gets a little narrower than that, as the Oilers need to shelter him; he’s realistically competing with the guys who need to be sheltered. Gagner, Cogliano, O’Sullivan and Nilsson are probably the four guys Comrie is battling for minutes; if he loses that fight, he’s probably relegated to playing against the other team’s fourth liners. His career numbers say that he’s a pretty good option for one of those roles, assuming that the last two years were just bad, injury plagued years. For comparison’s sake, here are the ES numbers of the four guys I think he’s fighting for minutes with, along with Marc Pouliot for fun:

Comrie2

Cogliano’s numbers are surprisingly Comrie-esque through two years - about the same level of goal scoring and the same level of assists, although Comrie would have a clear edge if not for the past two seasons. I have to admit, I’m not entirely sold on Cogliano - I don’t think he’ll ever be a guy who wins 45% of his draws and I’m not really sure about him as a winger. Maybe he turns into Butch Goring but having him turn out as a poor man’s Comrie wouldn’t shock me either. At present, I have a hard time imagining him turning into a tough minutes guy and I don’t know that he’ll ever be a soft minutes eater. Gagner’s obviously a much different player and one who’s on a different career path. He’s not going to be a Comrie-esque goal scorer, I don’t think, but he’ll be more of a playmaker.

O’Sullivan, Nilsson and Pouliot strike me as guys who might be begging for tryouts once their contracts expire. Both O’Sullivan and Nilsson had the good sense to have career years during their contract seasons; both regressed significantly last year. Nilsson’s a bit of an odd case in that he was in on 80% of ES goals scored when he was on the ice in 2007-08 and only 50% last year. Forwards are generally good for points on 65-70% of goals scored when they’re on the ice. Pouliot’s offence continued it’s laborious ascent towards barely acceptable but he’s still a ways off.

Those three guys have careers that might be in trouble because they simply do not generate enough ES offence to warrant a soft minute role. Scoring around the 50th or 60th percentile doesn’t cut it when the team is feeding you the easiest minutes. This is particularly true of the Oilers, who have a lot of money tied up in Hemsky and Horcoff, guys who will battle the opposition’s best to a draw but likely not more.

I don’t know the answer to this, but those guys are six years post-draft at this point. They haven’t really shown that they can consistently get it done against soft competition. At what point do you start to say “Hey, you know what - maybe these fellows just aren’t going to get it?” When you look at guys like Comrie and Petr Sykora, left begging for contracts…well, if you’re trying to identify fat on the Oilers roster, Nilsson and O’Sullivan, at a combined $4.95MM for middling performance against soft opposition kind of stand out. At least Pouliot is still cheap.

To me, if he’s healthy, Comrie seems like the most likely to guy to lead this particular group of forwards in ES scoring. His goal scoring is a dimension that the club lacks. He’s cheap. It’s a move that I can get behind, as long as the coaching staff doesn’t harbour any illusions that he should play a big role on the PP. The risk is pretty minimal. It may well be the best move that the team made this summer, even if it means that I can no longer bond with the Oiler faithful in Ottawa by booing him every time he touches the puck.