Category Archives: G Money

Beer League Hero, Edmonton Oilers, G Money, NHL

Rumblings From the Beer League Heroes Batcave

OILERS V. MAPLE LEAFS… #YIKES

So I had to watch the game after work yesterday and I’ll be honest, it wasn’t as entertaining as I thought it would be. I can watch the Oilers play and be content with a good effort if they lose. But last night, something was definitely out of place. The door was ajar if you will.

How the Oilers can get that many powerplay chances and not come away with one goal is beyond me. How they Oilers coaching staff can continue to use the same tactics on said powerplays is also leaving me baffled.

  • Where’s Puljujarvi and this shot of his we are continually being teased with?
  • Why isn’t anybody in the media doing their job and asking McLellan during the scrums about Jesse’s missing shot? They’re happy to bitch and moan about in online but I haven’t heard one MSM member question Todd McLellan about this.
    • Then today we see Eberle taken off the 1st PP unit and then replaced by…. Mark Letestu! Because he wasn’t commenting about playing too many minutes last year at the beginning of this season when he was scoring to start the year. Makes perfect sense!
  • Why does Andrej Sekera get any time on the PP?
    • His hatred for shinpads is getting old.
  • The other teams have the Oilers figured out and since the PP runs through 97, they just cover the cross-ice lanes and clog everything up like by bathroom sink. Thus, leaving McDavid to do it himself of move the puck to the point which still doesn’t help because the shooting lane is full of players.

Another thing I didn’t notice right away while watching the game but after, when I was reading G Money’s post-gamer over at his site, is the shooting charts 5×5. Check them out.

What the f*ck are the Oilers doing out there if they aren’t shooting the puck? We know that McLellan likes shot volume… So turn it up to 11 for Christ’s sake!! Why are they doing their best to get the opposition’s goalie a shutout every time a losing streak comes along?

Hopefully, they can get something together versus Patrik Laine and the Jets tomorrow night.

The new lines that were being run at practice are as follows:

Jesus, Mary and Joseph! How Pouliot stays in the lineup is mind-boggling, isn’t it? Not even the fancies have his back this time around. So to that, I say he’s must have some interested parties and the Oilers are showcasing him.

Taking out Kassian and Hendricks will bring the intimidation level down a bit but if they’re not performing to McLellan’s standards, then perhaps it’s time for a little break. In Hendricks case, he’s looking his age these days. I love the guy but let’s get that conditioning back up to par and then give it another go. As for Kassian, he’s looked a tad off for the last few games.

The team lacked bite against Toronto and adding in Pitlick and Slepyshev could bring back a bit of that edge and it most definitely will bring more speed.

Why hasn’t Anton Slepyshev been able to hold down a spot on this team? He’s been hitting, shooting, and creating chances for the majority of the games he’s played in. More so that say, Zach Kassian or most recently, Pat Maroon. This is a player that was once described as one of the best in the KHL before coming over. He’s a Russian that has accepted there’s a certain path that one has to follow when attempting to break into the NHL and that must mean something. For the most part, I wanna say the kids that come over from Russia expect to be slotted into their NHL team’s starting lineup right away but not with Slepyshev. He’s been a good soldier so far and I think he should be rewarded with an extended run.

Mark Fayne has been recalled because Eric Gryba was hurt at practice. This falls under the category of “Who gives a shit?” because I’d be more than surprised if he made it into the lineup. Then again Matt Benning has been having a tough go of it as of late… Maybe Battlin’ Matt Benning gets a rest one of these days and Fayne draws in.

Talbot needs another break here and Gustavsson made some sweet saves in the third period last night. I’d like to see Gus get a start in the next couple of games.

OILERS GETTING A VISIT FROM A SPECIAL SOMEONE?

Gawd I hope that G Money can shed some light on this play from the Oilers game yesterday when he returns from the game on Saturday 🙂

@Oilersnerdalert is G Money, if you’ve been following the Oilers online through our site, Lowetide’s comments section, Twitter, and his own page; you’re very aware of who G Money is.

The BLH family has known about this for a while now but we were asked to keep it on the down low. But today is a new day and our old boy Zachary Laing has let the cat out of the bag with a little slap and tickle…

G Money just released a tweetstorm explaining the invite as well. So congrats to him and let’s hope for all the best!

 

Click on the pic and grab a new 16-bit Fighting Looch tee!
Edmonton Oilers, G Money, NHL

Is Connor McDavid getting fatigued because of too much ice time?

Connor McDavid, Age, and Fatigue

I made this comment in my OilersNerdAlert EDM-DET post-game yesterday:

McDavid isn’t really McDaviding very much. … Prior to this game, McDavid had the fourth highest ice time in the league for a forward. All the players ahead of him are veterans. Maybe the idea of playing the crap out of him is not a successful long term strategy, especially for a 19-year-old player who was a featured high ice-time player in the World Cup before the season started.

Da Fax

Let’s look at some facts in that regard:

  • McDavid is averaging 21.4 minutes of all situations ice time (ATOI) per game this season. He’s still fourth in the league after last night’s game. (All data sourced from corsica.hockey)
  • The next nearest Oiler forward is Jordan Eberle at 18.5 minutes, nearly three minutes per game less than McDavid.  That’s a very reasonable 55th in the league for forward ice time.
  • There are three forwards ahead of McDavid in ATOI.  They are: Ryan O’Reilly (25 yo, 22.4 mins), Patrick Kane (27 yo, 22.2 mins), and Anze Kopitar (29 yo, 21.8 mins). The #1 ATOI forward in the league is 6 years older and plays just one minute more per game.
  • Of the top 10 forwards for icetime, not including McDavid, the average age is 28 years.  The youngest are 23 years old (Scheifele and Trocheck).
  • A quick scan of the top 50 ATOI forwards shows only a handful of young players (Gaudreau, MacKinnon, Forsberg, Barkov). McDavid is the only teenager on the list. (note: can’t guarantee that as this is eyeballed)

The Immortals

Now, we all know that McDavid is an extraordinary player, and I don’t doubt he can tolerate more icetime for his age than ordinary mortals. And the team is generally not very good without McDavid on the ice, so the temptation to play him every minute you can must be overwhelming.

But let’s not forget, he’s just 19 years old – still a growing boy. (And given he’s three years from his likely peak, his age is something that should absolutely terrify the rest of the league)

So this kind of icetime load has me worried, especially since it looks to my eyes like McDavid hasn’t been able to easily shed the hooking and holding the way he did early in the season.

Overtraining or Ubertraining?

In my day they called long-term fatigue from too much training volume ‘overtraining’ – do they still use that term? While this could just be an ebb in the regular pattern of ebb and flow, it might not be. The end result of overtraining is often injury, and that’s something the Oilers must protect McDavid from at all costs!

Not sure if this is anything real, but I believe it is something that should be given attention. I hope TMc and the Oilers training staff are watching closely.

Edmonton Oilers, Fancy Stats, G Money

It’s way too early for this dashboard

It’s not enough data!

Normally for a shot metrics dashboard like this, you’d prefer to have at least 10 and preferably 20 games of data.

But I’m showing it to you anyway!

The reason is because, well, it actually does have a few interesting things embedded in it, and I’m going to walk you through what I see. Would be interested to hear if you observe anything else!

So without further ado …

Here is the dashboard, annotated with numbered points of interest (click to embiggen, an explanation of the dashboard is at the end if you haven’t seen it before):


Analysis

So referring to the numbers above, and remembering the caveat about how early as it is, here’s what I see of interest:

  1. Oh what a surprise, the McDavid line tops the board!  The biggest thing to note here is that big discrepancy between McDavid’s blue Corsi line and his purple Danger line. Most players I expect will have those converge over the season. I expect with McDavid that divergence is going to stay.
  2. Mark Fayne only played the one game but hey, it was really good!
  3. I still think the best thing for his development (and the cap situation) is for Jesse P to spend a good chunk of time in the AHL.  But these are nice numbers for a raw rook.
  4. Oscar and Adam aka KlefLar aka AdamBom are giving up an unhealthy edge in shot attempts, but are doing very nicely on the danger aspect.  As I noted in point #1, this is a mild cause for concern, as these two tend to converge over time.  However!  Larsson has shown for the last couple of seasons that he is a better danger suppressor than he is a shot suppressor, so I expect that we may see this ‘poor shot, good danger’ being a persistent effect too. I can live with that!
  5. You can clearly see the recent uptick for Gryba and Nurse – they’ve played two really solid games in a row.
  6. Russell and Sekera started very strongly but have been falling off the pace the last while. This is what a lot of the “Russell warners” suggested was likely to happen.  I don’t think it’s overly indicative either way, and have very much liked both Russell and Sekera’s game so far.  But it’s something to keep an eye on.
  7. Like Nurse and Gryba, Nugey had a rough start to the season, but the last couple of games have been really solid, and against Vancouver I thought Nugey was the best of the Oiler forwards.

The other notable issue is that performance of the team outside of the McDavid line is a significant concern.

Those are the main things I see on this dashboard this early in the season.  There are other things of note (like Pitlick’s shot metrics vs his 20% sh%!, but those are exactly the kinds of things that it really is too early to comment on. I’m more interested in some of the early trends around the key players and prospects).

How about you?  See anything else interesting?

PS. Dashboard Explanation

If you haven’t seen this dashboard (I tweet it out regularly through the season, and will do more of these walkthroughs here at BLH every 20 or so games), here is how to read it:

  1. Every player with even a single game will show up.  Blue background is a forward, yellow is for defensemen.
  2. The list is sorted by raw Corsi differential
  3. The blue/brown trace shows you raw Corsi differential over the course of the season so far. Blue means above breakeven, brown is below.
  4. The purple line shows my Dangerous Fenwick metric, which takes unblocked shots and adjusts them for danger (based on shot type and distance)
  5. Obviously, the farther above the line, the better!
  6. But really what you’re looking for is things like trends, hot and cold streaks, big divergences between raw and danger metrics, and so on
  7. I call it a dashboard because in a single image it gives you a really clear look on how every player on the team is doing over the course of the season, and that’s not easy to do!
  8. Feel free to tweet questions at me @OilersNerdAlert. You can also post questions in the comment section below, but for some reason my comments get eaten on a regular basis, so I might not be able to respond!
Edmonton Oilers, Fancy Stats, G Money, NHL

Vital Signs – Late October 2016 Edition

1 Comment

Every once in a while, I do a ‘vital signs’ analysis on the team.  I look at a variety of indicators that give us a look under the hood of how the team is doing on a number of important indicators.

Why do I call them important?

Because they tend to predict how well the team is going to do in the future much better than do the above the hood indicators like goals and win-loss record. The under the hood indicators tell us whether recent success (or failure) is likely to sustain.

Now that said, it is very early days, and so these numbers are going to shift around a lot (unstable condition, a symptom of life). Even so, they do carry a little bit of information right now, so the peek under the hood isn’t entirely futile. And it supports the idea of staying level headed – something that becomes all the more important when the team rockets off to the best start in many years!

The Vital Signs Monitor

To make the measures a little easier to review, I take my inspiration from the Star Trek vital signs monitor, to wit:

The main difference when using this idea for hockey is the switch in colour scheme. Unlike vital signs where normal is good and high or low is bad, with hockey the middle tends to be good (for a middle pack team), the high numbers are often unsustainable, and the bad numbers you hope will rebound. So we adjust.

Let’s see how that looks for Our Oilers (click to embiggen; data from corsica.hockey):

Down below, I explain the rationale for the indicators I’ve used.  If you’re not interested in such arcanery, just pay attention to the rankings for overall, EV offense, EV defense, special teams, and what I call ‘unpredictables’ (sh% and sv%, which are volatile and for most teams without either elite or terrible goaltending tend to move strongly towards the midline as the season progresses).

What’s the Frequency, Neal?

First, before we mull on this chart specifically, take a minute to think on what you think the chart should say by the end of the year. Are the Oilers a top 10, middle 10, or bottom 10 team?

In my view, there are some terrific strengths (McDavid, C depth, the new top pair) married to some real flaws (backup goalie, right wing depth, not enough righties on defense). I’d call this a mid pack team – I don’t expect the current record to sustain, but I don’t expect a fall all the way back to historic depths either.

IMO

In that context, this vital signs set actually looks OK to me.

  • Sh% is high and will likely come back to earth.
  • Sv%? Well, it’s not out of the question that the Oilers have a Top 10 goalie if Talbot stays healthy.
  • The PP shot rates give me great cheer. These are excellent numbers, and exactly what you’d hope to see a team loaded at forward able to do. Huzzah!
  • The PK shot rates cause some concern, and that SA60 number needs to come up big time.
  • The EV CF% is not very good, but most of that is the poor shot rates against. Some of that is score effects, as the Oilers have opened up the score a few times. But it is concerning. Like a few others, we’d like to see it move up towards the middle as the season progresses.
  • The xGF numbers are higher than the CF numbers. Both have comparable predictivity, so I’d expect the two of them to converge in the middle. And middle is good.  By the way, in December of last year the trend was reversed – the Oilers were having trouble converting their shots to dangerous chances, so this is not a bad place to be.

Bottom Line

I’m usually quite curmudgeonly when I look at the Oilers fancystats.  They haven’t been good over most of the last decade – and they’ve been right.

This year, though, I’m a little encouraged. Overall, this is kind of where the Oilers should be if they are to be a middle tier team.  As long as the raw shot metrics (CF/CA) move towards the danger metrics (xG) and stay somewhere in that middle lane, life is good.  We’ll keep our eyes peeled.

But there’s a bright side to the great start, even if it’s unsustainable. Because the early points are banked, they can’t take them away, and other teams have ridden an early hot streak and late season mid-tier play to a playoff berth.

So why not us?

Happy i.e. Ungloomy Halloween!

Addendum – Metrics Rationale

Ferda boys.  Ferda!

I use these metrics, for the following reasons.

1 – CF% (5v5 Corsi For %) is the single best predictor of future success we have (it’s not great, but it’s as good as we’ve got).  I break the components of this down into rates to look at the offense and defense separately.

2 – I roll in the corsica.hockey expected goals (xG) to get a sense of whether the shot attempts levels that Corsi is giving us are translating into dangerous chances.  Again, also looking at offense and defense rates broken down.

3 – I look at shot rates on the special teams. I don’t use Corsi in this case, because I’m not interested in possession so much – the team on the powerplay should have possession as a given! Rather, I look at how many unblocked shots the team gets on net (or gives up). This is a sustainable skill on powerplays.  I add in the expected goals, again to incorporate the degree of danger for and against.

4 – Just for fun, throw in the shooting and save percentages. These don’t tend to stick or predict very well, but usually if they are unusually high or low, you can expect them to move back towards the middle as the season progresses.

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Breaking News, Edmonton Oilers, Fancy Stats, G Money

Will Kris Russell help?

2 Comments

Hall’s gone. Yak’s gone. Devalued then shipped off.

But that’s water under the bridge.

There’s something else under the bridge that I’m much more worried about, even though he’s only 5′ 10” and about 170 lbs.

You Complete Me

That something is Kris “The Holy Terrier” Russell. (That’s not his real nickname, I made it up. It was either that or “Blockhead” and that one seemed unnecessarily mean)

So … Kris Russell is the guy Chia has decided will ‘complete’ the Oilers defense.

Fan – freakin’ – tastic.

I already see people in my Twitter feed rationalizing the deal.

“Well, maybe he’s not so bad.”

“OK, I think he’s a decent third pairing guy.”

“He scores points though, right?”

“Blocks a lotta shots man!”

Is it true? How good or bad is Russell?

Russell! Somebody gonna get a seen real bad

Without having previously done any detailed digging on the player, my impressions nonetheless have not been positive.

A. I’ve watched him play for the Flames. I wasn’t paying particular attention to him, but I was never impressed. There – the seen ‘im bad folks should be satisfied!

B. The Flames (and it pains me to say this) have two outstanding defensemen in Giordano and Brodie. They have a third defenseman who is pretty good in Dougie Hamilton. Ignoring handedness, all three of those guys would play on the Oilers easily, and probably with a lot of Top 4 ice time.

Yet somehow defensively the Flames are one of the worst teams in the league, giving up the fourth worst shot attempts rate in the league at even strength. Yes, that’s worse than Edmonton.

How is it possible they have such good defensemen and still suck defensively? Well, some of that is coaching (as an Oiler fan, I’ll miss Bob Hartley terribly). But based on watching the team (I live in Calgary, and my company has – had – corporate tickets, so I’ve seen more Flames games than I care to admit) a lot of it is the bottom 3 – Russell, Engelland, and Wideman just aren’t good defensemen, and they drag the team down.

Russell in particular dragged Hamilton down – if you dig into the stats (sorry eye test only folks) they were 5v5 CF 45% together, while Russell was 45.6% apart from Hamilton, and Hamilton was at 52% away from Russell.

In other words, if you think Hamilton had a bad year in Calgary, you’re wrong – he had a bad partner in Calgary that made it look like he had a bad year. And that partner is now an Edmonton Oiler.

MERITORIOUS!

But you know what? I’ve had bad (or good) opinions about players before, and then I’ve started digging into their actual results and been forced to change my mind. Maybe that will happen here. Let’s take a look.

I mentioned Russell’s results with and without (WOWY) Dougie Hamilton. Instead of just looking at a single WOWY, let’s look at my favourite WOWY visualization, which is from Micah Blake McCurdy’s hockeyviz.com. This lets us look at the entire pattern of how a player impacts the other players on the ice with him. Here’s Kris Russell in Calgary (feel free to skip to my explanation below):

Ouch. This is ugly. See how the blue area is clustered well below the red line? That’s bad. It means Russell’s shot results overall are well below breakeven … but we knew that already.

What makes it so much more alarming is that the black squares are mostly to the left and below the blue squares. That means Russell makes most of his teammates worse when he’s on the ice with them. And the red squares are mostly above and to the right. That means most of his teammates are better – in some cases, much better – without Kris Russell.

That’s as ugly as it gets.

Quality of Competition – the Wood and the Money

Now let’s take a look at the metric that @Woodguy55 and I developed, the “WoodMoney” metric. What this does is it isolates performance vs specific matchups. We look at how the player did when facing the 60 best players in the league, and also vs the middle and the ‘gritensity’ players. (You can find the specific lists, and details on how WoodMoney is calculated, in this article).

Here’s a visualization of the results, but you can ignore this and just go to my interpretation if you like:

So what is this telling us?

1 – The relatively even TOI splits tell us Russell was regularly used as a Top 4 defenseman

2 – But his results were below breakeven against all levels of competition. This is a particularly terrible result, as actual Top 4 defensemen should have at least passable results against middle tier competition, and better than passable vs bottom tier competition.  His danger (shot distance and type) adjusted results were at least better than his raw shot results, that’s a small plus.

3 – His Rel results were below zero against all levels of competition. In other words, he did worse against all levels of comp than his teammates did against that same level of comp. This is an acceptable result for a bottom pair defenseman, but not for a second pair defenseman.

It’s possible to see bad results like this and have reasons for it – Adam Larsson for example doesn’t look great, but then you have to account for his zone start usage, which is brutal. This isn’t the case for Russell, who, if anything, got a pretty big push as far as offensive zone starts go.

So he’s generated these results while starting quite often in the offensive zone.

That’s bad.

These results say that Kris Russell is a third pair defenseman – but he’s not particularly good at it.

But … but … he scores!

Chia’s been looking for a powerplay quarterback.  So , maybe KR is an ‘offensive’ defenseman that will help the powerplay!

Will he?

Russell’s career point scoring is 177 points in 573 games, or 0.31 pts per game. By comparison, Andrej Sekera is at 0.33 pts/gm in his career, and last year with the Oilers he was 0.37 pts/gm.

As for the powerplay, only four of KR’s 19 points last year came on the man advantage, though in fairness, he was not used on the powerplay much.

That may be understandable though – the Flames powerplay put up shots and dangerous shots (per corsica.hockey’s expected goals metric) faster with Russell not on it, with Hamilton and Giordano the undisputed champs of the powerplay shot rate.

Scoring upgrade? Not so much.

Penalty Kill

I have heard Russell is a decent penalty killer. I’ve also read a tidbit that suggested that the penalty kill is 3x to 5x as important as the powerplay, because you can lose the game with a poor penalty kill, but you can’t win it with a good powerplay. I’m not so sure I believe this, but I might buy the idea that the value is not entirely symmetric, that maybe the PK is a bit more important.

So can Russell help the PK?

Maybe.

His shot attempts rate against (92 per hour) is right in the middle of the pack of the main defenders, and his expected goals rate (6.05) is also good. He’s certainly not bad at it … it’s hard to make the determination that he’s ‘good’ just from a couple of numbers like this but … hey, sure, why not, chalk one up for the little guy!

Penalties

One topic I’ve added to my defenseman analysis the last few months is a look at penalty differentials (call it the Gryba Clause).

How’s Russell doing vis a vis the zebras?

Hallelujah! Our first big plus. Russell runs at a +0.38 penalties/60 rate. In other words, he draws more penalties than he takes. This is actually quite rare for a defenseman. So while his results are poor, at least his team gets a few extra powerplays as a result of his play.

That’s good.

Conclusion

Here’s Kris Russell in a nutshell:

  • Shots wise, he gets snowed under by all levels of competition. Even the third pairing doesn’t look like it will be sheltered enough for him to be able hold his own.
  • He drags most of his teammates down with him
  • Russell is not a true offensive defensemen. He scores on par with, or maybe a little less than Andrej Sekera. But Sekera (by eye and by stat) is much better defensively
  • Despite the Oilers’ dire need for a powerplay QB, Russell probably won’t help the powerplay
  • Although he should help the penalty kill
  • He might be able to draw more penalties than he takes

Is he worth $3M?

Nope.  He’s not even the third best lefty at this point.  I’d take Klefbom, Sekera, and Davidson over him in a heartbeat, in almost any situation.

And being that he adds to this crowd on the left side, if he forces one of our good LHD to the right side (where we know they were less effective last year), then his negative impact won’t just be on his own pairing, it will negatively affect other pairings.

And if he’s the one moved to RHD and proves to be even less effective than he has been in the past on the LHD, that thought is frankly terrifying.

Unless Chia and TMc plan to dress seven defensemen every game, and only have Russell out on the penalty kill … well,this isn’t good. I wish I had something positive to say, I really do.  Contrary to popular opinion, I may regularly boil over with scathing criticism of Oiler management, but I want my team to win.

But digging into his results has not made me feel better about this signing … worse if anything.  I hear Russell is gritty, truculent, good in the room, and deliberately blocks shots with his balls.  I’ll cheer for Russell and the Oilers to succeed. But I do not believe this signing will help them succeed. This isn’t good at all.