I’ve been hung up on the faceoffs in the games I’ve seen so far this year and last night was no different. I kind of had a sense that things weren’t going well when I was at the game in Buffalo, Stortini was taking draws and when I checked Lowetide’s site after the game, nobody seemed too aghast about it. When Stortini takes faceoffs with Cogliano and Moreau on the ice and it doesn’t draw a comment, you start to feel that maybe the fanbase is starting to feel a little beaten down by it all.
Watching the game tonight, the fact of Horcoff not taking faceoffs was pretty glaring to me as well. Since he returned from his shoulder injury, he’s been sharing his faceoff responsibility to Dustin Penner. Horcoff took 7 to Penner’s 17 in Atlanta, 10 to Penner’s 16 in Columbus, 15 apiece against Colorado and then 1 to Penner’s 18 tonight. This is shades of 2007-08, when Penner assuming some of Horcoff’s faceoff responsibilities was a harbinger of the end of Horcoff’s season.
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I’m not going to dig out the comment, but I said something at Lowetide’s site when Nikolai Khabibulin was signed about it being basically a guarantee of twenty games of a J4D goaltending duo. I think last night’s game probably counts as the first of these; tomorrow’s will be number two. The last time Khabibulin missed time with back spasms, he ended up being out for twelve games.
We’ll see if Devan Dubnyk plays. If I was in charge of the Oilers and I seriously believed in JDD, I’d be playing him as much as possible while Khabibulin is out. The Oilers need to get JDD into 15 more games in which he plays at least 30 minutes in order to avoid him being a UFA at the end of the year; they might as well take advantage of Khabby’s injury to do that.
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Watching Ethan Moreau look skyward as Jonathan Toews pumped home his second goal of the season tonight, I was moved to throw something at my television. (Kidding - I have crap that my siblings have left in my closet as they used YYZ as a hub on their way home from university in which I’m more emotionally invested than I am in this current edition of the Oilers.) Even though I’m not that invested, when taken in conjunction with Brian Burke’s Operation Truculence looking like an abysmal failure, I thought I’d take a look at some of the penalty data anyway though, so as to get a sense of the impact of thecaptainethanmoreau.
What I’ve done is this: I’ve gone through the Oilers’ gamesheets and sucked out the data for who took penalties and who drew them, ignoring the coincidentals. I’ve then thrown it all into a spreadsheet and pro-rated it over 82 games. It’s expressed in PIM, not total penalties, for those wondering. I then hung a value on it by charging players .2 goal differential for every penalty taken, which is the number used by Puck Prospectus (I’d take a shot at Will Carroll here but I’ve been instructed not too). My own research has come up with similar numbers. So, for example, in the VALUE column, that’s how many goal differential the player’s penalties can be expected to cost the team.
It’s about what you’d expect.
The totals for the forwards and defencemen overstate things to a certain degree. You can’t have 16 forwards playing 82 games. You can’t have 9 defencemen playing 82 games. There are a couple of points worth drawing out of this though.
First of all, the fowards overwhelmingly take their penalties at the offensive end of the rink. To the extent that thecaptainethanmoreau has been criticized for this, as opposed to the sheer volume of penalties that he takes, the criticism might not be entirely fair. It makes sense if you think about it - when the puck is in the other team’s end, that’s where the forwards (and particularly the wingers) tend to be most engaged in terms of pursuit of the puck. Similarly, the defencemen tend to take and draw their penalties in the defensive zone.
Second - and this is mentioned in the PPro article that I linked too - the forwards have a positive penalty differential by and large, while the defencemen have negative ones. When you’re looking at Moreau’s projected -4.5 goal differential penalty cost over 82 games, you need to keep in mind that the average forward is likely to have a number in the black. Zero isn’t the right measuring stick here - I don’t know quite what it is exactly, but it’s not that.
Three - I think that the criticism of Moreau is awfully warranted. If anything, the first 23 games have been worse than last year for him in terms of penalties taken versus penalties drawn. Gabe had him at 31/16 last year in terms of number of penalties - so far this year he’s a spectacular 9/3. This can obviously turn around with a couple of calls but it does seem to be a serious issue for him.
Four - I suspect that, perversely, Sam Gagner’s smurfitude probably helps him in this, as he’s more likely to go down from something another player (Dustin Penner) might fight through. Small players with some jam and some discipline may well add a bit of hidden value to their teams through this.
Five - The only guy with a real penalty taking problem amongst the Oilers forwards looks to be Ethan Moreau. It was the case last year and it sure looks to be the case again this year. The big question is how much value this sort of a problem takes away or adds to a player, relative to his value as a whole. I’ve talked before about the idea of marginal points in the standings and my suspicion that the contribution of the average player is vanishingly small.
If Moreau were to continue on the same track over the rest of the season and stay healthy, I’d be open to an argument that he was costing the Oilers as much as 6 GD relative to the average forward, which is two points in the standings. That is a TON of value for a third/fourth line guy to be giving up, let alone one pulling down the scratch that Moreau is pulling down. He does not seem to me to be a guy who’s so good that you couldn’t readily replace his contributions with someone who didn’t cost you the point or two in the standings.
I know you don’t put much stock into my Aggressive and Lazy Penalty Project, but I think your work here is useful to my project here and I was wondering if I could use this data in the future for my project? I also know I haven’t done up a post on this year’s value, that will come in the next week or two.
Lastly, I think these two projects demonstrate a few tendencies together:
1) you have Reddox rank highest among forwards for value. I also had him ranked very highly, because of his very low PiM/60 (1.24, 2nd lowest to Cogs) and a high ration of aggressive to lazy penalties (-0.03, hight then anyone not named Moreau or Zorg).
With your proof of Reddox’s mainly defensive zone penalties and a high value, I think this make a better case for a player that is smart with his penalties. Very smart indeed.
2) That for a rugged Dman, Strudwick spends very little time in the box. Pro-rated he has only 16 PiM, and this comes from a guy that fights . . . does he take any minor penalties? I think the ‘aggressive’ nature of Strudwick’s penalties also lead him to have a high offensive zone penalty numbers, in contrast to the rest of the Dman (put again, Peckham a rugged, fighting Dman has a even larger offensive zone penalty count).
Strudwick has many faults, but taking bad penalties it not one of them. He doesn’t draw many, but a value of -0.8 for a 7th defender that is suppose to a rough customer is a good number.
Very good work. If the Oilers like JDD, they have problems. I hear tell they had a team meeting to figure out why they are on a skid. I bet they didn’t come up with the answer that, “Our players are worse than their players and paid more.”
Time to start waiving if Katz is serious.