JR Ewing

Red Kelly was a helluva hockey player, but yeah... Odd.

I'm really not sure what the thinking is. Kassian DOES have some use: he can skate, he has some defensive awareness, and he has worked well with McDavid (not EVERYbody they put there clicks). But really, that's where they need to put a much more talented player, and Kassian is only playing on the 1st line because Peter Chiarelli cultivated all the crops and then salted the field when he was done. The team was stripped of pretty much any winger with talent. If Kassian is still on the 1st line for another season, then the Oilers haven't done nearly enough to give McDavid some help, and if Kassian's playing down the lineup, then $3.5M is FAR too much for a depth player. It's really tough to see this working out well at all. Kailer Yamamoto has been a difference maker since joining the Oilers, but he, Draisaitl and RNH should not be broken up. In other words, at least one of Tyler Benson and/or Raphael Lavoie needs to work out.

Some advice for Ken Holland:

Maybe you could send an email to somebody at their offices? info@edmontonoilers.com Good luck.

I'm inclined to go with Ken Holland's model in his good years as Detroit GM: if your team is deep, talented, and has the puck most of the time, a "good enough" goaltender will do. Except for some freaks, it seems like a) Goaltender numbers can fluctuate a fair bit from year to year b) It's really difficult to differentiate the goalie from the defense. If you click on "Filter" you can lower the TOI for the goaltenders. I had put it to 1,000 minutes to get rid of the back-ups and guys with a small number of starts.

They certainly showed how craptacular Mike Smith has been this year, with the Oilers giving up more goals than expected. That's 3 wins compared to an average NHL goaltender. But really, Martin Jones has been horrible for the Sharks, and has been (by far) the worst starting goalie in the league this year. He's cost them 21 more goals than expected; so about 7 wins. Huge.

[Hidden Content]

It's absolutely true. Barry Fraser was the Oilers head scout from 1979 to 2000, but moved to Mexico in 1985. Once he did that, the quality of Oilers picks fell completely off the table, and they paid dearly for many years. Barry Fraser's picks while living in Edmonton 1979-1985) '79: Lowe, Messier, Anderson '80: Coffey, Kurri, Walt Puddubny, Moog '81: Fuhr, Steve Smith, Marc Habscheid, '82: none '83: Beukeboom, Tikkanen '84: Todd Ewen Barry Fraser's notable picks while living in Mexico, 1985 - 2000 '85: Buchberger '86: none '87: Geoff Smith, Shaun Van Allen '88: Shjon Podein '89: Josef Beranek '90: not one draft pick played a single NHL game in his career. Let that one soak in. '91: Martin Rucinsky '92: Kirk Maltby (traded early in his career) '93: Jason Arnott, Miroslav Satan (who was dealt for nothing 35 goals into a 360 goal career). '94: Ryan Smyth (and that was after wasting the 4th overall on Jason Bonsignore, who didn't even want to play hockey). '95: Georges Laraque '96: Tom Poti '97: Jason Chimera '98: Shawn Horcoff '99: none '00: none It's not every scout that picks 7 future Hall of Famers in his first three drafts, but it wasn't meant to last. In those first three drafts, the Oilers selected players that would go on to dress for 10,199 games. After Fraser moved to the hockey hotbed of Cabo San Lucas, he selected that many players in his 10 drafts. In the next 15 years, I count three impact players in total, even though the Oilers spent many seasons picking in the top 5 or 6. There were years where members of the scouting staff admitted that they hadn't watched even a single game of players that Fraser told them to pick. His first three drafts were as good (and possibly better) than any three that a scouting department has ever had, but the rest of his career was a disaster. Many years, the player with the most NHL games was 40-50. Why did this go on for so long? Why was mediocrity and failure accepted for such a prolonged period of time? Because Oilers.

Well... Decent with another Cup win thrown in there. But yeah, they had a long period of sucking other than the late 90s, where they were competitive. What would help the Flyers is that their head of scouting doesn't live in Mexico, and (presumably) actually watches hockey games. Also good: the Flyers scout the World Juniors. Edmonton didn't do that until 2007.

It's the NHL. They always (publicly) back the referees no matter how badly they allow things to escalate in games.

That guy gets away with a TON of stick work, and I don't know how.

Others around the hockey world have been weighing in... Former ref Paul Stewart: Georges Laraques, recounting an on-ice pick-up hockey incident between him and Oilers Now announcer Bob Stauffer, who in the 1980s was a strong minor hockey player but never played junior or pro: Teemu Selanne: Scottie Upshall: Ray Ferraro: James Neal:

Random thoughts in point form... -I think that Tkachuk absolutely gave Kassian a headshot and that, once again, the refs screwed it up to start with, and they also allowed a charge (MT skated in hard from the faceoff dot to hit a guy aready engaged with somebody else) to be a non-call. I don't blame Kassian for being angry. -Tkachuck absolutely got one over on Kassian, whose temper cost the Oilers dearly, because he should know better, because -This isn't even the first time he and Tkachuk have gotten into it like this. From November 2018: -That game, btw, was going in the Oilers favour up until that point, and after this they became far more interested in running around and hitting, putting themselves out of position, and they lost the game. Todd McLellan's game behind the bench. -If Kassian hasn't yet figured out that Tkachuk won't fight him, then he'll never figure it out. The game was too close and there was too much on the line. He should have done what Gordie Howe used to do: take a number and bide his time. -The NHL is a bush league. The refs allow guys like Tkachuk (who I think is a very good player) to play in this way, while calling few penalties, and then always make sure to punish the opposition when they can't take it anymore. For Tkachuk, it serves as reinforcement that he should continue in this way, because he's found the line, and nobody will make him stop. TLDR - Tkachuk is a tool, Kassian is a dummy.

I will say that version 2 is better than your previous iteration. Allow me that compliment. Strongest correlation coefficients to Minus Score v1 -0.84, Points scored -I actually had intended to do a top 3 or 5 on this, but will sum it up quickly: the least damaging offensive statistic (G) was a -0.75. A correlation coefficient of +0.6 or greater or -0.6 or less is enough to show a good relationship between two sets of data, while a +1 or -1 would show a perfect linear relationship. A correlation of -0.8 is enough to show a significant negative relationship. In this instance, the more points a player accumulates, the more damaging it is to his Minus Score. Correlation between +/- and Minus Score v1 score: 0.21 In other words, there's enough of a correlation between a player's Minus Score and his +/- to show a relation between the two numbers, and it was very very far away from the negative relationship between offense and Minus Score. Version 2 *does* improve in this area: Strongest correlation coefficients to Minus Score v2 -a tie between Points (-0.61) and Power-Play Points (0-.60). In v1, these were also very close, almost all equally as damaging. That has been mitigated in v2, but is still relational. Correlation between +/- and Minus Score v2: 0.35. It is an improvement, but a good +/- minus is still only contributes to Minus Score half as much as scoring points lowers a player's Score. Keep plugging and improving, but keep in mind that, due to the nature of +/- itself: -It will still punish players with bad goaltending and reward those whose is good. -It will still unfairly rewards and punishes players for being on the ice when empty net goals are scored: a time when the odds of an empty-netter are far higher than a tying goal being scored. -It still punishes good players on bad teams and rewards mediocre players on strong teams. I've not come in to tear apart your work, though I am offering criticism where I see parts which I think need re-shaping. And I *do* speak from experience on this as I've done a hell of it with hockey. The sheer number of spreadsheets I've populated my various hard drives over the last 25ish years with is a hell of a thing, from working on seeing if we can accurately predict who will win the Hart Trophy (we can, btw) to estimating ice time back to the 1960s (that works, too). I don't do much of it any more, and I let my website lapse well over a decade ago. I got out before the blog revolution and Corsi and scraping huge amounts of situational game data became a thing . J0e Thornton, here on our site, would probably remember when I was quite active. Now, I just get some mentions in a few books on sports data mining, and for some reason a statistical society in Quebec. I remember when having the audacity to publicly suggest that a goalie's SV% is more important than how many games he win meant that I had to write about 10 "Dear Idiot" letters per week. Trust me, I get it. Oh, and for what it's worth: Pete Palmer and John Thorn published their work on Linear Weights and Total Player Ratings for baseball about 35 years ago. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Yes. Pretty much the only guys who have spoken in an unguarded way are the ones who don't work in hockey in any way. Dustin Penner spoke very frankly (and amusingly) on the show. I hope that Roenick doesn't lose his job, because I really don't think he should. My preference would have been for NBC to handle it all internally, but it is what it is: they pretty much have to make a show of things after their own past screw-ups, and he will over-pay for what he said. I have to admit I haven't seen an awful lot of her, but she seemed good in my limited viewings. I usually watch games an hour or two after they start, and tend to blast through the TV timeouts and intermissions. I would hope that if she took offense to it, and said anything at all, that it was to Roenick personally. Yes.