I think the Selke and Byng are fuck all trophies, they were created for average players to win, players that can’t win a meaningful individual award…
Leafs acquire Ryan O’Reilly in a big trade
- Thread starter Fun For All
- Start date
They are certainly lower tier. But they are the type of things that a committee could look at to justify an out of the blue pick in a weak class. Right or wrong.
I simply tease you about Gainey and Carbonneau. I have no firm feelings that make me believe either must be in the HOF - especially Carbonneau.
If ROR wins the cup and the Conn Smythe with the Leafs he will be a lot more favorable for the HHOF and a lot faster too,
To be honest, the HHOF doesn't have a very high bar. I still don't understand why Dick Duff is in the Hall, although it took 35 years. I saw Duff play in Montreal and he was a very good but not great player.
2 Conn Smythe is a slam dunk. It'll be a farce if that doesn't get you in. Look up the list of multi Conn Smythe winners. They are legends. One can be a good run but to win it twice you gotta be exceptional.
When Chicago won their last 3 cups it was 3 different Conn Smythe winners.
When TB won their last 2 cups 2 different winners and Point didn't win but he could easily have won one year.
When LA won their 2 cups 2 different winners.
During the Detroit dynasty when they won 4 cups they had 4 different winners and Datsyuk was not one of them
During the Montreal dynasty in the 60's and 70's no repeat winners.
During the NYI dynasty no repeat winners.
Only Roy has won the Conn Smythe with 2 different teams.
Joe Nieuwendyk has won the cup with 3 different teams but has only 1 Conn Smythe.
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ROR is too old, too slow, too played out. This was a dumb move that will not amount to much. Once again, the Leafs trading for a player based on who they once were, not who they are now.
I agree with you. They are trophies to bring the 'team' spirit because no team can win a cup without dedication from all players.
If Leafs are to do anything in the playoffs Matthews, Marner, and Nylander have to be dominant and scoring machines. O'Reilly is a complementary piece. Most likely deployed to stop the opposition's top forwards. The same way TB uses players like Cirelli. Aside from his rookie year when Matthews was flying out there against Washington MNM hasn't been dominant in any playoff series. Skill players like McDavid and Draisatl showed it last year. Point and Kucherov show it every playoffs. Boston's super line always. MNM have to show the will and determination in the playoffs.
TB is one of the heaviest teams in the league if not the heaviest and all their Defensemen are big. Hence O'Reilly and Acciari to help them play the heavy game in the playoffs. With Muzzin out I can see Dubas making another trade for a big heavy defenseman and have Sandin sit out in the playoffs again. They could probably trade Kerfoot also for that Defenseman since he's playing on the 4th line for 3.5 milion cap hit and he's small. Holmberg, even though he's a rookie, can probably play on the 4th line. Kerfoot with all his seasoning did make a few bonehead plays last playoffs.
Kerfoot though looks to have a No Movement for some reason. That is unfortunate.
TB is one of the heaviest teams in the league if not the heaviest and all their Defensemen are big. Hence O'Reilly and Acciari to help them play the heavy game in the playoffs. With Muzzin out I can see Dubas making another trade for a big heavy defenseman and have Sandin sit out in the playoffs again. They could probably trade Kerfoot also for that Defenseman since he's playing on the 4th line for 3.5 milion cap hit and he's small. Holmberg, even though he's a rookie, can probably play on the 4th line. Kerfoot with all his seasoning did make a few bonehead plays last playoffs.
Kerfoot though looks to have a No Movement for some reason. That is unfortunate.
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Is that what happened? I knew he'd retired but I didn't know it was because his body was too beaten up.
"TB is one of the heaviest teams in the league if not the heaviest and all their Defensemen are big. Hence O'Reilly and Acciari to help them play the heavy game in the playoffs. With Muzzin out I can see Dubas making another trade for a big heavy defenseman and have Sandin sit out in the playoffs"
That’s just the means, with age as a bonus extra, but if you want to compare teams: first, the means listed above graphically displayed, and then a set of plots of everyone in the NHL in their team.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24099454/Rplot03.png)
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24099457/Rplot04.png)
Click to see it larger.
What Does All This Mean?
Despite the narratives that will be made around which team is taller or older or bigger, we have zero evidence that team makeup as expressed in this sort of set of measurements means anything at all. Which means we also have zero evidence it doesn’t matter, as well.
Hockey players are not a random sampling of humans. They are a group that goes through many layers of curation by many people. But in general, you don’t play hockey in the NHL unless NHL Central Scouting puts you on a list when you’re 18. And they make lists of younger teenagers before those draft-eligible lists are made. GMs, coaches and scouts select from those lists.
However, it’s hard to look at those charts of height distribution and not see the magic number of six. We’ve all seen people call a player who is 5’11” short, when the player who is 6’1” is considered a big man. If six feet tall is a conscious or subconscious benchmark for scouts, then the players who aren’t ever getting there are weeding themselves out of hockey as children by moving to some other sport, helped along by the junior systems that are ready to show the smaller kids the door. The best we can say is that shorter players tend to be drafted too low — but like all draft analysis this is a lagging indicator that tells us what was happening 10 years ago, and we can only guess if that’s still true today.
Are the scouts and GMs doing a good job of finding the best hockey players? Or are they biased by their emotional reactions to height — the same kind of bias that can be found in many areas of life, and notably hockey fandom. How efficient or inefficient is their choosing? That’s what we don’t know.
Given this unrepresentative sample of humans, it’s not very revealing to take something like height in the NHL and ask if it correlates with success as a way to judge the choosers. We’d only know how that correlation looks within the group of players we have. It’s more useful to ask if shot rate means anything — that’s behavioural and can be changed or coached — height isn’t. Might we discover that poorer quality players skew taller (grading on the NHL scale)? We might, and it doesn’t escape my notice that the two very shortest players in the NHL are very talented players. I believe that if Victor Mete, one of the shortest defenders in the game, was four inches taller, he’d have a guaranteed job. But anecdotes aren’t the answer to: Does size matter? More complex research might provide some clues, though.
Which size, though? I was already leaning towards a belief that weight mattered more for how a player might play (not how well). Weight is a proxy measurement of strength, speed, acceleration, power, force, etc. It seems to me that the NHL players agree with me. It’s impossible to overstate how outside the norm NHLers are by weight. If you plot their BMI — which is about the only way to compare them to ordinary people — you get an astonishing distribution with an incredibly high density peak and a grouping around the mean so tight, you might as well call them all the same. The NHL has a standard size, and the variation in it, caused to some degree by variation in height, is minimal.
Is there a legitimate lower limit on height in the NHL? Maybe it’s imaginary. Maybe it’s a real factor of the weight that can be achieved at shorter heights, but my biggest takeaway from this is that the difference between a guy who is 5’10 and one who is 6’2” is in our heads, and the smartest thing is to ignore height entirely because even if it matters, it doesn’t matter more than skill, work ethic and luck. If you deeply and utterly believe that size is always important, then I invite you to do a little project of your own. Write down everything you know about Cale Makar and Victor Hedman and then see if they aren’t more alike than they are different.
William Nylander
To win MVP+30000
Most Regular Season Goals+20000
MORE FROM PENSION PLAN PUPPETS
| Team | Height (F) | Weight (F) | Height (D) | Weight (D) | Age |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anaheim Ducks | 73.38 | 202.46 | 73.44 | 199 | 27.22 |
| Arizona Coyotes | 74 | 204.83 | 73.36 | 198 | 25.45 |
| Boston Bruins | 73.67 | 202.5 | 73.86 | 202.43 | 26.71 |
| Buffalo Sabres | 72.87 | 198 | 73.57 | 202.57 | 23.29 |
| Calgary Flames | 72.92 | 201.92 | 74.43 | 208 | 26.86 |
| Carolina Hurricanes | 72.67 | 191.25 | 74.12 | 205.12 | 28.25 |
| Chicago Blackhawks | 72.93 | 196.21 | 75.71 | 211.71 | 27.14 |
| Colorado Avalanche | 72.25 | 193 | 73.57 | 202 | 27 |
| Columbus Blue Jackets | 73.07 | 193.29 | 73.38 | 196.25 | 24.75 |
| Dallas Stars | 73.46 | 200 | 73.43 | 203.57 | 28.57 |
| Detroit Red Wings | 73.36 | 197.36 | 73.86 | 201 | 26.29 |
| Edmonton Oilers | 72.92 | 198.15 | 73.86 | 203.43 | 26.57 |
| Florida Panthers | 72.77 | 191.85 | 73 | 200.22 | 28.89 |
| Los Angeles Kings | 72.5 | 202.43 | 73 | 199.29 | 26.71 |
| Minnesota Wild | 72.23 | 197.31 | 72.43 | 187.43 | 29.14 |
| Montréal Canadiens | 72.33 | 200 | 73 | 201.83 | 26.33 |
| Nashville Predators | 73.57 | 203.86 | 73.14 | 200.29 | 29.29 |
| New Jersey Devils | 72.19 | 188.38 | 74.71 | 206.29 | 26.43 |
| New York Islanders | 72.93 | 202.27 | 74.14 | 204.43 | 25.43 |
| New York Rangers | 73.46 | 200.15 | 73.43 | 197.86 | 23.43 |
| Ottawa Senators | 72.58 | 192.08 | 73.71 | 197.43 | 27.43 |
| Philadelphia Flyers | 72.83 | 194.08 | 73.5 | 197.12 | 27.75 |
| Pittsburgh Penguins | 72.38 | 192.23 | 73.62 | 194.88 | 29.88 |
| San Jose Sharks | 73.07 | 200.93 | 73.38 | 202.75 | 29.38 |
| Seattle Kraken | 72.2 | 188.93 | 75 | 210.29 | 27.29 |
| St. Louis Blues | 73.17 | 207.5 | 73.44 | 204.56 | 29.33 |
| Tampa Bay Lightning | 72.42 | 195.17 | 75.33 | 224.5 | 27 |
| Toronto Maple Leafs | 72.67 | 199.08 | 73.67 | 204.89 | 29.89 |
| Vancouver Canucks | 72.47 | 194.27 | 73.22 | 200.11 | 27.22 |
| Vegas Golden Knights | 73.07 | 203.4 | 74.5 | 207.5 | 29.83 |
| Washington Capitals | 73.47 | 201.24 | 73.43 | 203 | 30.43 |
| Winnipeg Jets | 73.93 | 196.27 | 73.56 | 197.89 | 26.44 |
What Does All This Mean?
Despite the narratives that will be made around which team is taller or older or bigger, we have zero evidence that team makeup as expressed in this sort of set of measurements means anything at all. Which means we also have zero evidence it doesn’t matter, as well.
Hockey players are not a random sampling of humans. They are a group that goes through many layers of curation by many people. But in general, you don’t play hockey in the NHL unless NHL Central Scouting puts you on a list when you’re 18. And they make lists of younger teenagers before those draft-eligible lists are made. GMs, coaches and scouts select from those lists.
However, it’s hard to look at those charts of height distribution and not see the magic number of six. We’ve all seen people call a player who is 5’11” short, when the player who is 6’1” is considered a big man. If six feet tall is a conscious or subconscious benchmark for scouts, then the players who aren’t ever getting there are weeding themselves out of hockey as children by moving to some other sport, helped along by the junior systems that are ready to show the smaller kids the door. The best we can say is that shorter players tend to be drafted too low — but like all draft analysis this is a lagging indicator that tells us what was happening 10 years ago, and we can only guess if that’s still true today.
Are the scouts and GMs doing a good job of finding the best hockey players? Or are they biased by their emotional reactions to height — the same kind of bias that can be found in many areas of life, and notably hockey fandom. How efficient or inefficient is their choosing? That’s what we don’t know.
Given this unrepresentative sample of humans, it’s not very revealing to take something like height in the NHL and ask if it correlates with success as a way to judge the choosers. We’d only know how that correlation looks within the group of players we have. It’s more useful to ask if shot rate means anything — that’s behavioural and can be changed or coached — height isn’t. Might we discover that poorer quality players skew taller (grading on the NHL scale)? We might, and it doesn’t escape my notice that the two very shortest players in the NHL are very talented players. I believe that if Victor Mete, one of the shortest defenders in the game, was four inches taller, he’d have a guaranteed job. But anecdotes aren’t the answer to: Does size matter? More complex research might provide some clues, though.
Which size, though? I was already leaning towards a belief that weight mattered more for how a player might play (not how well). Weight is a proxy measurement of strength, speed, acceleration, power, force, etc. It seems to me that the NHL players agree with me. It’s impossible to overstate how outside the norm NHLers are by weight. If you plot their BMI — which is about the only way to compare them to ordinary people — you get an astonishing distribution with an incredibly high density peak and a grouping around the mean so tight, you might as well call them all the same. The NHL has a standard size, and the variation in it, caused to some degree by variation in height, is minimal.
Is there a legitimate lower limit on height in the NHL? Maybe it’s imaginary. Maybe it’s a real factor of the weight that can be achieved at shorter heights, but my biggest takeaway from this is that the difference between a guy who is 5’10 and one who is 6’2” is in our heads, and the smartest thing is to ignore height entirely because even if it matters, it doesn’t matter more than skill, work ethic and luck. If you deeply and utterly believe that size is always important, then I invite you to do a little project of your own. Write down everything you know about Cale Makar and Victor Hedman and then see if they aren’t more alike than they are different.
To win MVP+30000
Most Regular Season Goals+20000
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- Preview: Maple Leafs @ Chicago
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/71994557/1442593843.0.jpg "New Jersey Devils v Toronto Maple Leafs")
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The Trade: My Instant Reaction
Height is not the definition of heavy. Acciari is only 5'10" but he's 209lbs. That goal he scored is how Hyman would do it. Solid on his skates. Couldn't be knocked down. Acciari is comparable in weight to Hyman even though Hyman is 6'1". Sandin who is 5'11" is 183lbs. No defenseman on TB is under 200 lbs. Hedman is 245 lbs.
