TrueBlueGED

Is this a good time to remind everyone that the impact of sheltering is vastly overstated? The only way to truly shelter players is to minimize even strength minutes entirely and pump up power play time. Otherwise, everybody plays everybody, and the actual difference between the hard match ups and the easy match ups is marginal. Edit: put differently, matchups don't dictate a player's performance. It can nudge it, sure, but if player X performs poorly in Y role, they'll probably also perform poorly in Z role. Maybe less poorly with less of an overall impact on the team, but poorly nonetheless.

Short version, in English: Triumph blames Mittelstadt's performance on everyone but Mittelstadt. I think he stunk last year in his own right.

But he has, and he's been a drag on those players. He had 426 minutes with Sheary, 162 with Rodrigues, 152 with Reinhart, and 119 with Skinner. All of them had worse corsi, goals, and xG while skating with Mittelstadt. Obviously some of that is Skinner and Reinhart got to skate with Jack, but neither Rodrigues nor Sheary spent so much time with Jack as to pump their numbers much. Again, like with Thompson and Sobotka, these things are not mutually exclusive. Okposo can be a drag and Casey can be bad in his own right. After all, a team doesn't finish 5th from the basement if they only have 1 or 2 problem players.

We might be talking past each other. I don't think you're drawing the proper inference from what the authors are saying with respect to how it would apply to Casey's numbers and my comment about using a 68 minute subsample to evaluate him, or you're misinterpreting what I was getting at. The Sedins have a ton of error when trying to isolate because they spend 90% of their ice time together, so there isn't enough time apart to do the work with any accuracy. That all makes sense, but it's not what I was arguing about. You presented a 68 minute subsample of Casey's career under the pretense that it was a better representation of his on-ice impact than the full sample, because the full sample includes so much time with Okposo that he's statistically indistinguishable from Okposo. I disagree with that because, as others have noted, the majority of his ice time has come with players not named Okposo. So I don't think that introduced the same collinearity problem of the Sedins. It's also worth noting that about 30% of his ice time in 2017-18 was spent with Okposo. Or, only about 7 points less than in 2018-19. If the model screwed him because of his time with Okposo, one would think it would've happened both seasons. Which brings me to my larger point, which I was trying to argue in the first place. Mittelstadt has 952 minutes of ice time at even strength. You're trying to draw conclusions with 7.1% of that, while chucking the rest of the data because of Okposo, when Okposo was relevant to less than 40% of it (a huge difference from the Sedins' 90%+ shared ice time). That's weak, both statistically and theoretically. There is no way you're going to statistically distinguish that small of a subsample from the rest of his ice time with any confidence that the difference in results was anything other than happenstance.

It's not a narrative that Casey was bad this reason. It's just the harsh reality. As to the charts...a regression with a sample of 68 minutes, such as the one you just posted, is almost certainly useless. I can't be 100% sure without seeing the full model, but I'd bet my life savings that such a model has a p-value around 3 million and a confidence interval that includes the entire range of outcomes.

My eye test saw Casey do more promising things this season than Thompson, but neither was an NHL player by metrics or eyes. I have more hope for Casey because he's a year younger and his problems were more of the physically not ready variety than the mentally clueless variety. But really, I'd feel infinitely better about both of them if I could erase the 2018-19 season from my memory. They were both really bad on the whole.

Sorry, WildCard. I hope you're sitting down.

But the problem with this view is it assumes we know what the Sabres are trying to do in each instance. We don't.

I have a conceptual question which I'm not even sure how I feel about. If you can get a legit top-6 winger for Risto, but only a middle-6 center, which trade do you make? Just to put names to the question, I think I'd rather trade Risto for Ehlers than for Tyler Johnson, even though Johnson clearly fills the bigger hole in the lineup.

My posts have all been present tense for a reason. Thompson is bad. He doesn't have to stay that way. I'd bet he does, but it's not a given. That said, young players who go on to be good usually do show signs of life in the underlying metrics before their traditional metrics and reputation catch up.

If we managed Risto for Trochek, I'd never mention that ROR trade again (though I promise to continue telling everyone how bad Thompson is until he isn't). That would be perfect.

How much ice time did they actually have together in St. Louis. Anyway, know who else had significant ice time with Sobotka this season? Rodrigues and Pominville's corpse. Know whose metrics weren't utterly destroyed by it? Rodrigues and Pominville's corpse. Why? Because they're not also bad hockey players. Sobotka is/was horrible and certainly dragged his linemates down, there's no disputing that. He should never see NHL ice again. But Thompson was also bad and dragged his linemates down. These things are not mutually exclusive.

Did you ignore the chart from my previous post showing Thompson also sucked in St. Louis?

That's not entirely true. He had a chance with better players and immediately pooped his pants. But this gets back to my question about comparing to other players. Know who else was saddled? Much-maligned Zemgus Girgensons. Know who played considerably better than Thompson? You guessed it, big Z! Edit: NHL hockey players don't have to be good at everything, but they have to be good at something. Tage is bad at everything.

Which, I may say, is considerably more than you have done for your side of the argument. Yes, Thompson's shot is hard...but unlike in real life, weapons of mass destruction in the NHL have to hit their target to matter. Alexei Zhitnik's point shot had a considerably better hit rate than Tage's one timers. Tage's top speed is fine, but he isn't quick, and his edge work is deplorable. In their short time in the NHL, both this season and the one before, Nylander has shown more. That's not to say he's shown a lot, but Thompson has legitimately been closer to washed-up Sobotka bad than a promising young player. Seriously, Thompson has been all-caps BAD: I've posted this before, but it's worth re-posting to emphasize how bad Thompson has been as an NHL player, both here and in St. Louis. Honest question: would it be helpful to frame it as Thompson vs NHL players rather than Thompson vs Nylander? I really don't care if anyone questions Nylander, but nobody should think Thompson has been anything other than a disaster as an NHL player.

Good, they were a terrible trade partner anyway.

This is fair. I think Nylander has a clearly higher ceiling, but there's also a reasonable chance he's a complete washout. Jokiharju is much more likely to be a long term NHL contributor.

But they should. An offer sheet for a Labanc level player is infinitely more likely to work than trying to poach an elite player, while simultaneously giving you a better player than you're likely to get outside of a really high draft pick.

Why? Okposo is better

I continue to not fully buy into the idea that he needs a lot of spare cash to make a big move. It's not like money-in-money-out deals are unheard of. As was said elsewhere, he currently has more NHL bodies than NHL roster spots. Something is going to give. And it's entirely possible he can move Scandella and boom, suddenly we have cap space to est a bad contract for a year.

You spell Tyler Johnson weirdly.

We don't know this to be true around the league, and as a fanbase there's obviously a lot of disagreement over how true it is on the ice.

Maybe. So far, though I have liked his offseason, all he's done is make a series of low-risk moves.

Yea, you can trade his rights. I don't think there's any way Botterill would just let him walk unless arbitration gives him something nutty like $5M. Which for a guy who doesn't produce offense isn't going to happen.

Well, we don't know what his contract ask has been. Maybe Botterill is looking at a figure he doesn't like for a 3rd pairing Dman.