kipwinger

So Pulkkinen currently has more goals than 5 of our top 6 forwards...and Jeff Blashill is keeping the same lines together tonight. Good call.

I'm not suggesting that your facts are wrong. I'm saying that, in general, negative corsi tends to yield more goals against over a full season regardless of what happened in our instance last season. Not much different that saying good corsi numbers tend to be associated with playoff teams. Sure the Avalanche made it two years ago with terrible possession numbers, but that's generally an anomaly. My only point is that if you can ice a roster that would likely yield better possession why wouldn't you? And I think we can.

I'm not convinced that over the long haul of a season the negative possession won't result in substantial goals against, especially if their ice time starts sneaking up relative to the rest of the team. Remains to be seen, but certainly negative possession isn't good regardless of how many goals are scored against. At the very least it's substantial time each game in which we're not likely to score either. I'm not really that interested in railing against these guys to be honest. My biggest argument is that I believe we can ice a better lineup and aren't currently doing it. As I said in another thread, based on everyone's play so far I'd do the following for the 3rd and 4th lines: Z-AA-Mantha Glendening-Helm-Sheahan You could shelter the 3rd line, especially until Zetterberg is up to speed, and the fourth line I proposed is one that I wouldn't mind seeing play more minutes than your typical bottom line.

Hmmm...lots of good ones here. And I'm reluctant to do any this year so as not to spoil my success from last year. But here goes. 1. The Colorado Avalanche lose in the Western Conference finals 2. Tortorella fired midseason, Blue Jackets BARELY miss the playoffs 3. Ovechkin FINALLY lifts the Cup, despite a down year in goal scoring.

Ott, Miller, and Glendening DO hurt us. They're terrible players. Watch how often they get trapped in the defensive zone. Their corsi against is abysmal. I'd MUCH rather have two cheap kids sitting on the bench, and the fourth line populated with guys who can actually get the puck out of the d-zone.

Admittedly I missed yesterday's game. But based on what I've seen so far I'd do something like Nyquist-Neilsen-Vanek Tatar-Larkin-Abby Z-AA-Mantha Glendening-Helm-Sheahan Z looks sloooooooow. Keep his minutes down until he's back in game shape. Plus, how sweet is it that he started his career as the "kid", and now he'd be the "old goat"?

Our "fourth" line last year played as much as our "third". Glendening had more ice time than Tatar. So play Helm and Sheahan on the fourth and call it the third, who really cares what they're called?

Time already HAS told. It's not like this is speculation. There's a reason why puck possession matters. It has for years. Everybody already realizes it. Go look at the best possession teams in the league, by year, and you'll find a laundry list of playoff teams and Cup contenders. Almost never will you find a bad possession team who's had any success (I can't really think of one). So intentionally icing a line which is astoundingly bad at possession is insane. It makes no sense. Unless you're a dumb ass old dinosaur which thinks having the puck and getting it out of your zone is less important than how hard you work while you're losing it. Sadly Holland seems to be slipping into that camp.

Ken Kal is just carrying water for the organization. First of all, Ott-Glendening-Miller isn't all that tough. We're not talking about Clutterbuck-Cizikas-Martin here. They're only marginally more "gritty" than average and probably LESS gritty than a line of Sheahan-Helm-Callahan/Bertuzzi/Jurco/Nestrasil would be. Secondly, who cares about "grit" if it means you're getting trapped in your own zone and getting scored on all the time. Ott, Miller, and Glendening are AWFUL at getting the puck out of their zone. Quantitatively. They're amongst the worst players in the entire league in terms of CA/60. So unless someone can tell me how to "grit" the puck out of the back of your net I'd say that's just a bulls*** excuse to agree with the status quo by Ken Kal.

I'm not sure why people don't understand how stupid this is. Andrej Nestrasil, for example, scored roughly as many points last year in 55 games as Drew Miller and Steve Ott have in their last 200 combined games. He's younger, bigger, and cheaper too. He's quantitatively better at the game of hockey than they are. So while losing him doesn't amount to anything earth shattering, the fact of the matter is that we are currently paying MORE money for worse players than we would be if we had simply done nothing at all. None of Pulkkinen, Frk, Ferraro, Nestrasil or anyone else needs to be a budding superstar to validate their spot on our roster. They only need to be better than someone who's currently on it. In most of those cases they are. I can't believe how cavalier people are being about the fact that our GM seems content to ice a WORSE roster than he has to. For more money (while we're over the cap). It's absurd. Holland's Red Wings are getting as bad as Team USA was in the World Cup. He genuinely believes that things like heart, and grit, and moxie, and pluck, and gumption, are to be valued MORE (in some cases) than being good at hockey is. I'd understand if the choice was Pulkkinen vs. Helm, or Frk vs. Jurco. But it wasn't. It was Pulkkinen and Frk vs. Miller and Ott. Neither one of which has any value to our team which isn't surpassed by someone else who was already a regular on the team. They aren't good defensively, they aren't good penalty killers, they don't provide speed, or energy, or skill, or anything at all. They are, at this point in their careers, nothing more than Cory Emmerton was during his. A plug. And not even a cheap one. A fourth line of Jurco-Helm-Sheahan, or Bertuzzi-Helm-Sheahan, can do ALL the things Ott-Glendening-Miller can do. Only better. And we could ice that lineup more cheaply by inserting guys on ELCs on the third line and as the healthy scratches.

I don't think anybody is saying that Frk or Pulkkinen are future stars, or top line material. In a nutshell my argument for why losing them sucks is that this lineup (Blashill and Hollands): Tatar-Neilsen-Z Abby-Larkin-Sheahan Nyquist-Helm-Vanek Ott-Glendening-Miller AA Jurco Is worse (AND more expensive) than something like this: Tatar-Larkin-Abby Z-Neilsen-Vanek Nyquist-AA-Mantha Jurco-Helm-Sheahan Pulkkinen Frk So why lose those guys when the alternative is better and cheaper?

Jensen has looked like hot garbage so far this preseason. A far cry from how he looked the last two.

Nice one timer by Frk. Kid can really shoot the biscuit. That's the exact type of thing that Pulkkinen needs to do at this level. Unfortunately he might be a bit too slow and/or small to go into traffic and get a shot off like that.

Exactly. I don't think it was that the Neilsen-Tatar-Vanek line didn't work, so much as they wanted different things out of their lines. My impression initially was that they wanted Neilsen, Zuccarello, and whichever other winger to act as a sort of shutdown line to play against other top lines, freeing up the first and third lines to provide the offense. Neilsen was their best defensive forward. So in that sense, putting him with Tatar and Vanek wouldn't work. Subsequently Gaborik got hurt and Tatar played extremely well on the top scoring line so there was no reason to change the philosophy. They just moved Tatar up to the first (from the third) and drew Boedker into the lineup.

This isn't quite true, but close. During the exhibitions games at the beginning of the tourney, when Team Europe was still trying to figure out their best line combos, Tatar-Neilsen-Vanek was a line (for about a period) against Team NA. Afterward, Tatar and Vanek played briefly together with Draisaitl (sp?) before Gaborik was eventually hurt and Tatar went up. But you're right in the sense that they did not play together for prolonged periods of time. 100% accurate.

I don't think it's "wrong". I just think it's a bit misleading, because saying a young player had a down year (meaning they scored less, which is demonstrable) is often misconstrued as they regressed or stalled in their development (which both Nyquist and Tatar have been accused of). I agree that they scored less overall. I guess my point is that their regression in production had very little to do with the quality of their individual play. I was responding to someone who called Tatar a "new man", and I think that's not really accurate. He's always been this good. He just looked worse last year because our powerplay was garbage and he played nearly 2;00 minutes less per game.

Well, I'm certainly not going to try to talk you into liking something you don't. But it's too bad that you didn't see any games. There were some really good ones played. I really liked watching the NA team play.

I look at Callahan the same way I look at Andrej Nestrasil from a couple years ago. Is losing him some big loss? No. Is he anything more than a fourth liner at the NHL level? No. Did he produce more in 55 games last season than Drew Miller or Steve Ott have in their last 100 games? Absolutely. And if you can field guys like that for your 4th line more cheaply than you can sign either of those guys, why wouldn't you do it?

In my example above, Jurco's the most unproven of the proposed 4th liners. Otherwise Helm and Sheahan have shown decent ability to produce against tougher competition than a fourth line would provide. Not many 4th lines around the league actually play hockey. Most, like ours, are checking line guys who play the majority of the time in their own zone. I have plenty of faith (I acknowledge that it's just speculation) the 30+ points that Sheahan and Helm have proven capable of producing against tougher matchups would carry over against lesser lines...even despite the reduced ice time. 60 odd points out of your fourth line would be pretty nice.

But if you look at Tatar, his even strength scoring rate last season was 1.69 pts/60. The year before it was 1.7 pts/60. However his powerplay production dropped from 5.43 to 3.9 pts/60, which likely had to do with our powerplay going from among the best in the league to one of the worst. Hardly an indictment of Tatar. Nyquist's even strength points/60 actually increased from two years ago to last year. 1.44 to 1.69. But again, his powerplay production plummeted from 5.73 to 3.08 pts/60. Again, likely because our powerplay went from good to awful. Their rates of production, at least at even strength, weren't worse. Their rates on the pp were much worse, but how much of that had to do with them vs. Ferschweiler's pp being ineffective?

To be fair, I definitely said I'd rather he be on the team than either of them. Even if he's only AS good as them, he's still a better option because he's cheaper. I don't see how as team as absymal as ours was (at times) last year signs either of those two goofballs to a contract. Actually, I'd throw Glendening into that mix as well. I'm not going to be heartbroken if Mitch isn't on the team, in fact I think we've got MUCH better options for our fourth line, but Miller and Ott aren't it. I'm tired of our team's weird fetish for gritty, experienced, plugs on the fourth line. If we absolutely HAVE to have a gritty, shot blocking, pk guy on the fourth line I'd rather it be Mitch. Here's a novel idea, do away with this notion of a "matchup" fourth line. Let your best players play against other teams' best players, and put together a fourth line that could roast other teams' fourth lines. Then you might actually see "depth scoring", which would be helpful. In some ways (and I know I'll catch a ton of s*** for this) I blame the glorification of the Grind Line for this. People seem to think that the Grind Line was a matchup line, and that is some tried and true strategy for line deployment. It wasn't. Firstly, they hardly ever matched up against top lines on good teams. They were dangerous because they were WAY better than other depth lines. Hypothetically, if you did something like this, our fourth line would absolutely bury other depth lines on other teams. Tatar-Neilsen-Abby Z-Larkin-Vanek Nyquist-AA-Mantha Jurco-Helm-Sheahan

Since when do you care about possession? When it's convenient for your argument? Tatar is one of the best possession wingers in the league, has been for a couple years, and you complain about him incessantly. Also, the AHL doesn't even track possession metrics so I'm not sure where you're getting that information from. Chances are you have absolutely no idea what he does for possession and are just making things up to serve your point of view. Thirdly, Callahan's numbers in the AHL are reminiscent of Abdelkader's and better than Ott's numbers at the same level. And while neither of those guys is a great possession player at the NHL level (and you've made your distaste for Abby quite clear) even you have to admit that they are/were at least deserving of an NHL jobs, possession vacuums or otherwise. What makes Callahan different?

Apparently Matthias Janmark is going to miss majority (or all) of the season with a "joint issue" which required surgery. And this has got me wondering... People said the Erik Cole trade was bad, and blamed Holland excessively, because Cole got hurt and couldn't help us. So now that Janmark is hurt, does that make the Cole trade good again? Or better at least?

I don't know that his time is past, but I agree that he's not a priority. And to be honest, it's not the end of the world if that's the case. As much as I'm annoyed by our organization's "grit" and "desire" and "veteran leadership" fetish, if you're going to prioritize those things I'd rather you do it on the fourth line than on the second or first (looking at you Brad Richards).

I don't agree with this. Tatar looks exactly like he always does...good. Tatar scored at almost exactly the same rate last year as he did two years ago. The only difference was his usage. And the narrative surrounding last year's season. Dumb s*** media types like Helene St. James and Ansar Khan kept repeating over and over that he and Nyquist had "down years". And pretty soon everybody starting thinking it. But it wasn't true at all. The only thing down was their ice time. It's the exact same thing that Phil Kessel had going on this season. Look back over his career and his production fluctuates with his ice time, but his RATE OF PRODUCTION remains relatively stable. So no, Tatar isn't a "new" man, Krueger was just smart enough to recognize how good he is and give him the minutes...unlike our coach who preferred to give those minutes to Helm and Richards lol.