IKnowPhysics

Per John Vogl, the likelihood that Eichel gets the C is between 99.9 and 100 percent.

Good article and illustrations. Having played in a 1-2-2 as both a forward and a defenseman, I'm familiar with it. The Sabres players failing to step up and pressure puck carriers could be a lack of talent, but it could also be a lack of confidence with self or teammates. For a defenseman to make an aggressive play on the puck at their own blueline, they have to be confident in their own ability to make the play and they have to be confident in their teammates' ability to make the play if they fail. If one or the other isn't there, it is all too easy for a defenseman to back off and take the "safe" positioning, even if it breaks the effectiveness of the system. This confidence in self comes from successfully executing plays to get positive reinforcement. The confidence in teammates comes from familiarity and trust begat from playing time with your defense partner and your forwards. On a young team that didn't have confidence from success, that also had the defense get jumbled (see other thread and pair ice times), it's easy to see why they couldn't adapt to the system. Guhle's play in the last gif is a perfect example of this, and I see this in inexperienced players all the time.

Here's a similar set of data as presented before, but now displaying goals for GF / goals against GA / goals for % (GF% = GF/(GF+GA)). Refer to the ice times in the first post for a frame of reference. GF/GA/GF% Ristolainen Bogosian Scandella Beaulieu McCabe Nelson Guhle Fedun Tennyson Ristolainen R 0/1/0.00 26/36/41.94 5/9/35.17 3/4/42.86 2/3/40.00 6/4/60.00 0/0/--.-- 0/2/00.00 Bogosian R 0/1/00.00 1/5/16.67 3/5/37.50 0/0/--.-- 0/0/--.-- 0/0/--.-- 0/0/--.-- Scandella L 2/1/66.67 1/2/33.33 7/11/38.89 1/2/33.33 0/0/--.-- 0/3/00.00 Beaulieu L 3/4/42.86 2/1/66.67 1/0/100.00 0/0/--.-- 5/2/71.43 McCabe L 0/2/00.00 2/1/66.67 0/1/00.00 4/7/36.36 Nelson R 3/7/30.00 0/0/--.-- 0/0/--.-- Guhle L 0/0/--.-- 0/0/--.-- Fedun R 0/0/--.-- Tennyson R Compare these stats with the team-wide stats: Team Total (all situations): 198/278/41.60 Team Total (even strength 5v5): 119/176/40.34 Team Total (PK 4v5): 8/44/15.38 Team Total (PP 5v4): 44/10/81.48 The Buffalo Sabres were atrocious in even strength goal differential. It was so rare to find a pairing that produced a positive goal differential. The only pairs of defensemen included in this analysis to do it were Beaulieu and Nelson (2/1 over 58mins but had a gross CF% of 40.4), Beaulieu and Tennyson (5/2 over 63mins and did ok with a CF% of 53.7), and McCabe and Guhle (2/1 over 27mins both left shots, CF% 51.9). That's only about 148mins of positive goal differential even strength pairs over the entire season. Note that Scandella/Ristolainen posted marginally better GF% (41.94) than team total (40.34), despite taking most of the hard work. The small sample sizes make it tough to draw many specific conclusions from, but when all of them are considered together, one things is absolutely clear: the Buffalo Sabres team defense sucked fat .

So, this could be done without a whole lot of trouble, and maybe I will. But be warned: sample sizes for goals are a whole lot smaller than attempted shots, so the uncertainties in the goal analysis will get a lot larger, especially for pairings that only played a few games together. It'll be hard to tell what's meaningful.

No, you're right. Just because a player's possession stats aren't as bad as you thought, it in no way implies that you have to like that player, especially the way this group played. The effort here was to try to understand what Housley tried to do with player pairings, to see if there were any clues as to why the group was bad, or if there were any signs of life from the callups.

Holy . Nailed it.

I almost flipped my when I couldn't find the "erase formatting" button before I saw the "paste without formatting" notification.

Right. Very difficult to pick that apart without further deep diving. Also difficult to account for is quality of teammate and quality of competition. Looking at the Player Usage Charts, you see that Housley used what he thought were the best Sabres players in big minutes against the opposition's best players (ie, Risto, ROR, Eichel, Scandella, Reinhart). Generally, the Sabres players that had worse teammates also fewer minutes and faced easier competition. I think the sample sizes were large enough, mostly to wash out some of that, but likely not all of it. Then get to work.

The Goal: To better understand which defensive pairings were successful to inform our guesses about the upcoming defense lineup, I decided to look at how the different defensive pairings performed in 2017-18. The metric I use for this analysis is CF%, which is Corsi For %. I pulled the data from here. About CF%: Definition: CF% is a calculation of shot attempts for / (shot attempts for + shot attempts against). It scales from 0-100; 0 is BAD; 100 is GOOD; 50 would mean equal shot attempts for and against; 66.67 would mean out shooting your opponent by a factor of 2 to 1. Most CF% with good sampling ranges from 40 (BAD - getting outshot by a ratio of 1.5 to 1) to 60 (GOOD - outshooting your opponent by a factor of 1.5 to 1). The CF% used here only considers 5v5 even strength shot attempts. Pros of CF%: CF% is a good indicator of team puck possession, because, more or less, if your team has the puck, you're attempting shots, and if your team doesn't have the puck, you're facing shot attempts. The rate of shot attempts occurring is much higher than say, goals scored, so sample sizes are much larger and statistically useful. Cons of CF%: CF% can be rough and potentially meaningless without context. Considering time on ice (or total shots for and against) is critical to establish sample size. Corsi stats represent the entire group of players on the ice when the shot attempt occurs, so an individual's CF% can be skewed by the quality of teammates, quality of competition, and sometimes game situation. The Data: The following is a table of Sabres defensemen who played in 2017-18 and are continuing with the organization in 2017-18. Each data point has two numbers: time on ice played together (in MM:SS) and CF%. The single letters are that defenseman's handedness. TOI/CF% Ristolainen Bogosian Scandella Beaulieu McCabe Nelson Guhle Fedun Tennyson Ristolainen R 10:22/45.83 951:31/48.53 170:06/48.78 46:09/44.44 30:49/37.33 77:19/48.70 0:27/50.00 7:25/30.77 Bogosian R 10:30/50.00 69:25/58.06 170:24/46.25 0:00/00.00 0:45/50.00 0:00/00.00 0:00/00.00 Scandella L 35:15/50.72 34:40/47.62 198:39/42.39 10:00/64.00 4:04/81.82 46:33/49.38 Beaulieu L 92:46/53.85 58:07/40.38 5:00/50.00 0:27/00.00 63:22/53.73 McCabe L 21:09/52.94 27:19/51.85 54:04/48.84 76:31/42.75 Nelson R 127:15/56.80 0:00/00.00 2:25/42.86 Guhle L 0:00/00.00 0:00/00.00 Fedun R 0:51/100.00 Tennyson R Ice Times of Pairs: Examine the times. First, disregard any pairing with less than ~15:00 together - this would be less than one game played together, and could easily be incidental time on ice (scattered line changes, etc). Note the pairing that logged the biggest minutes: Scandella-Ristolainen 951:31. They were paired together pretty steadily, as they were: LD-RD pair, healthy, and produced an ok-but-not-great CF% of 48.53. The next longest pairings were Scandella-Nelson 198:39, Bogosian-McCabe 170:24, Beaulieu-Ristolainen 170:06, and Guhle-Nelson 127:15. That's a big dropoff, and the next set of times is an even bigger dropoff. It's clear that Housley leaned on Scandella-Ristolainen and was trying to find something -anything- beyond that pair that he liked. Player Usage Charts confirm this: Scandella-Ristolainen took long, hard minutes, creating a shelter for the rest of the defensemen. Bogosian logged minutes with Beaulieu and McCabe, but not Fedun or Tennyson- it's clear that he was injured and these players were brought up to replace him; they're also the same side and wouldn't be paired together. It's also clear that Housley did NOT want the callups playing on the ice together: Fedun only played with McCabe, and Tennyson only had time with veterans -never with Guhle. Veteran Performance via CF%: Ristolainen had significant time with Scandella, Beaulieu, Guhle, and McCabe. The near-identical CF%s of ~48.7 show that it doesn't matter who Risto plays with as long as it isn't McCabe at 44.44. Scandella spent most of his time with Ristolainen, but during some changeups, he played with McCabe, Nelson, and Tennyson, mostly without any notable success. This meh-ness with others only encouraged Housley to keep him with Ristolainen and eating up the heavy minutes. Bogosian's peak ice time with McCabe makes intuitive sense: at the start of the season, they seemed like the clear-cut 3-4 guys. But Beaulieu-Bogosian at 58.06 performed much, much better than McCabe-Bogosian at 46.25. B-B ended up posting the best CF% of any significant ice time pair. Beaulieu didn't only have a positive impact on Bogosian's game. Beaulieu was the best statistical CF% partner for several other players: Ristolainen, Scandella(!), McCabe, and Tennyson. McCabe has a rough season, in which he struggled to play against better competition with his most steady defense partner, Bogosian. With Bogosian out, Housley spent the rest of the season trying to match McCabe with literally anybody on the team, left or right. He saw some success with Beaulieu and, briefly, Nelson and Guhle. Youngins Performance via CF%: Nelson played with Scandella for a while and that was an awful 42.39. He was put with Beaulieu and did worse 42.39. And then Ristolainen(!) - even worse 37.33! But Nelson played pretty good with McCabe 52.94, and found a real niche with Guhle for the second-best CF% at 56.80. It think it was quality of competition- hard minutes with Risto, Scandella, and Beaulieu and he couldn't hack it. Easy minutes with Guhle aren't so bad. Guhle. Guhle. The up-and-comer. The usage charts show that he was a sheltered noob, and in this role, he found success with Nelson at 56.80 and McCabe 51.85. But he also did as well as Scandella did with Ristolainen at 48.70- while not great, because he survived those harder minutes, he showed what he hopes to be capable of someday. Of Ristolainen's LD partners outside of Scandella, Guhle played best. Fedun, not really a youngin at age 30, played a couple games with McCabe. He didn't show much. Housley played Tennyson with Scandella, Beaulieu, and McCabe trying to find a fit. His best posession was with Beaulieu (53.73). Optimizing Pairs: Without useful pair data on Dahlin (L) or Hunwick (L), it's hard to know what will actually happen. But based on historical data: these could be the best pairs without them: Scandella-Ristolainen 48.53 Beaulieu-Bogosian 58.06 McCabe-Nelson 52.94 (Guhle with Nelson 56.80)

Sam Reinhart because O'Reilly's gone. Of Sabres who played more than 45 minutes with O'Reilly (about 3 games worth of O'Reilly's shifts), Sam Reinhart had the highest FF% (55.2) of any Sabre forward with O'Reilly and had the lowest FF% of any Sabre (46.0) without O'Reilly. ROR had a massive positive impact on Reinhart's game. I hope he can find his way without him, but if he doesn't, I guess I won't be surprised. [Glossary: Fenwick - any unblocked shot attempt (goals, shots on net and misses) outside of the shootout. Referred to as USAT by the NHL. FF% - Percentage of total Fenwick while that player is on the ice that are for that player's team. FF*100/(FF+FA)] Runner up: Scott Wilson, same reason. High FF% with ROR (54.0), abyssmal FF% without ROR (41.6). The difference is that Scott Wilson's numbers were good because he earned time with ROR and Reinhart, giving him excellent linemates. When he did not have those linemates, he had bad linemates, which dropped his FF%. But the team FF% was worse (41.3) when Scott Wilson played without those two players than the rest of the team was without those three players (46.9), meaning that if Scott Wilson was on the ice without ROR or Reinhart, the team was awful. Giving him only Sam brought the team back to its relative average (46.9), which is still bad The bottom six was awful last year, and I hope new linemates will give Scott a fresh start, but it's possible that without ROR, Wilson may be part of the problem.

It's conceivable that McCabe is paired with Dahlin (especially if Bogosian isn't healthy and they keep Dahlin on the right side, despite his left shot). If that's the case, I could see McCabe's physical closer-to-home style meshing extremely well with the offensive-oriented game that we expect from Dahlin. I don't know if McCabe would blow up the points stats, but he wouldn't need to; he'd just have to provide excellent support to his partner.

This was more than half the reason I was waiting to buy an Eichel jersey.

It's a banner that you rode victorious through the post-tank wasteland.

Yep. I'm being patient. Except for that spankin' new Dahlin jersey hanging on my wall. Patient.

Fvck am I glad I waited to buy an Eichel jersey.

Seven Dirty Words, for science: . piss. . . . . tits.

Ugh, they're simply determined to make me want to subscribe.

Wait, censored stuff is deleted? What the ? in weak. This is some . Why not stay with the pound signs? Now there's no way to tell what the I'm saying.

Some good discourse in here, which is what I was looking to foster when I posted the thread. The clickbait thread title worked (notice that I haven't posted a post to justify firing Bots), and that was before I knew we gonna have a karma system.

Hmmm. That could be forward thinking. And really kind of dumb if they actually wanted the return they got for ROR. But forward thinking, nonetheless.

[Scandella ice time intensifies.]

I don't know why pi edited it. I enjoyed the hunter2 reference.

It's an interesting way for Ottawa to force their trade partners to show their cards. You want Karlsson? Offer him a contract. If it's good enough that he wants to sign it, we're gonna make you pay us the assets we think that's worth, or else there's another team with a contract for him in hand.

Yeah, that part's weird. Karlsson's return is the key to their future, and they would be bogging it down by actively enforcing movement of a bad contract. And they have the cap space. So unless the team is actually in real-dollar financial straits, they should consider just eating it for the betterment of the franchise.

An ode to the great Rhett Warriner.