Patrik Allvin Shuffles the Deck Chairs

I haven't posted here in a long time - but it's sure been a week in Canuck-land, and sometimes, you just gotta write about it.

As fervent deadline-watchers saw, the Canucks did a surprising two-step in the leadup to the trade deadline. They started by moving out Bo Horvat, then Luke Schenn and Riley Stillman, bringing back useful draft picks and youth. It looked, for all purposes, that management was finally admitting they needed to tear things down. That image was reversed quickly when they flipped draft picks to acquire Filip Hronek. As others have said, Hronek is a good player on a good contract, but the Canucks as they currently stand are perhaps the wrong place for him. 

Patrik Allvin announced yesterday that "my expectation is to make the playoffs with the players we have here." As of today, the Canucks are 19 points out of a playoff spot. How much can they really be expected to improve by next season? Yes, their goaltending has been a mess with Demko hurt, and if he is healthy next year, he will make a difference. Aside from Demko, though, injuries haven't been a serious issue for the Canucks this year; none of the team's core players have missed more than a game or two.

Instead, a lot of things have actually gone right for the Canucks this year. Pettersson and Hughes are having the best years of their careers. Bo Horvat was, too, before he was dealt. Andrei Kuzmenko has provided incredible production on a bargain-basement contract, and while some will say JT Miller is having an 'off year', he's still on pace for a 74-point season, which would be the second-highest total of his career. Brock Boeser, also apparently having an off year, is still on pace for 60 points despite reduced PP time.

Which begs the question: where will this team improve? You can't bank on those core players to be much better than they have been. At the end of the day, you have to look at the elephant in the room: the Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Tyler Myers contracts, and the combined $13,260,000 in cap space that they occupy. They dutifully chew up a lot of ice time, but their defensive metrics have been exceptionally bad in the last two years. Can you really bank on them making a major improvement at their age? 

Allvin commented yesterday that clearing cap space isn't so easy. He is right. Is it possible to move their contracts? Maybe, with some combination of paying out draft picks and/or salary retention. Buyouts aren't a real solution either; in the end, the team still has to pay 2/3 of the total cap hit, spread out over double the length of time. An OEL buyout would be on the books until the end of the 2030-31 season.

Allvin is going to be in the difficult position of needing to clear cap space this summer. The Canucks' salary commitments for 2023-24 are, shockingly, already over the cap. JT Miller is getting a $2.75 million raise; Kuzmenko's salary is going up by a eye-popping $4.6 million.

If you can't move Myers or OEL, what are Allvin's options? He will need to trade at least one of Miller, Boeser, Conor Garland, or perhaps Anthony Beauvillier. Subtracting any of those players will make the team worse; all of them can be useful offensive contributors, albeit at salaries that are richer than other teams might want to pay. Once one or two of them are moved out, however, Allvin will be be crossing his fingers that a younger player (Podkolzin, Hoglander, Raty) is able to replace their production in a top-six role. That's a hard bet to win.

Ultimately, you end up back in the same place: with, maybe, a slightly juggled forward group and the same two black holes that OEL and Myers represent on the roster. Yeah, you've added Filip Hronek, who will help, but that's probably off-set by losing Horvat and not having a high-end centre to replace him. No matter what you do, all Patrik Allvin can do is shuffle the deck chairs. There is no way for this team to be a serious contender in 2023-24, and it's hard to bank on them even making the playoffs. Trying to do so is just extending the pain for the franchise.

Canucks Twitter has been loudly calling for a real rebuild. I get that it's a lot harder for Allvin and the organization to commit to one; publicly admitting to one is an admission of failure to the current core. There's no doubt that Hughes and Pettersson would rather have a shot at the playoffs next year than to be told the team is not going to try to win. It's not the kind of thing that will help to sell players on committing to the team in the long term. That being said, players aren't stupid; if they see that there is a real long-term plan in place, they can be convinced to buy in.

Allvin had some serious missed opportunities to help the team's prospects for 2024-25 and onward. JT Miller's value, in particular, is not going to go up, and his no-move clause kicks in with the new contract. He is a useful player now, and can help a team win. By the end of 2024-25, though, he will be 32 years old, with five years left on his deal. It's very possible the contract will look like OEL's by that time, and will be the next anchor that drags the team down through its next young core. The missed opportunity to move him - even for a small return - could end up being a curse for the team through another generation.

Canucks - why it makes sense to put Frank Corrado through waivers today

The Canucks announced today that Frankie Corrado hasn't made the team and is being sent down to the AHL. To get there, he'll have to go through waivers.

That, by itself, is unfortunate news. Corrado is still just 22, and played well in Utica last year. Although he hasn't shown value in his 28 NHL games to date, he still has a good chance to develop into a real NHLer.

Trevor Linden then went on record today to say that the Canucks could've held Corrado up with the big club if they had put Chris Higgins on LTIR.

Here's the thing, though: Corrado was eventually going to have to be sent down. He doesn't have a spot with the big club, and keeping him around as a regular scratch would hurt his development. The best thing for him now, it seems, is to play top-pair minutes in the AHL and keep improving.

Getting him to the AHL means that he has to go through waivers at some point, and today is probably the best day to do that. 29 other NHL teams are making tough decisions about roster cuts, and claiming Corrado only makes sense for them if they're prepared to give him an NHL job. As of today, those teams have all spent a month picking their guys at training camp and teaching them their systems. Corrado's not such a world beater that they'll necessarily want to upset their apple-carts to get him.

For that reason, today's the best day to send him down. Three weeks from now, when Higgins might be back, Corrado would be more likely to be claimed by a team that has either lost guys to injury or sent their rookies back to junior/the farm. If you can get Corrado through today, he can play a full season in the AHL, or if he plays half the season and proves he's really ready to move up, you call him up then. There's no point in waiting until a later date.

All this said, of course, there are still the valid points that the team shouldn't have kept Corrado up for so many games at the beginning of his career and burned his waiver-proof contract years, or that maybe Corrado wouldn't be any worse than, say, Luca Sbisa on your bottom pair. Those decisions already having been made, though, sending him down is the right thing to do.

Follow Rory Johnston (@rnfjohnston) on twitter: twitter.com/rnfjohnston

R.A. Dickey's fastball is just fine, thank you very much

FiveThirtyEight posted a thought-provoking article this afternoon applying game theory to FanGraphs' "Pitch Values" data. For the most part, game theory is a very useful way to interpret the Pitch Values data. If a pitcher is getting great results with his curveball and terrible results with his change, he should throw more curveballs, even if that means opposing batters will start to expect more curveballs and do a little better against them.

The 538 article does a specific analysis of R.A. Dickey's numbers, and that's where they go wrong. They assert that Dickey should be throwing a lot more knuckleballs, because his low-80s fastball, admittedly, is pretty darn pathetic. Given that Dickey is already throwing his knuckler for 87% of his pitches, it stands to reason he should reserve the fastball for throwing batting practice only.

What the article fails to grasp, though, is the role of Dickey's fastball in his arsenal. Dickey primarily uses it when he's behind in the count when he really needs a strike. It's not something he uses much on the first pitch. I'm not sure if FanGraphs' pitch values adjusts for this sort of usage; given that Dickey's throwing the fastball on a lot of 3-0, 3-1 counts, it shouldn't be a surprise that he walks a lot of batters with it and rarely gets strikeouts from it.

More importantly, though, the fastball is there to set up the knuckleball. Batters will try to rush their swings to take a cut at the fastball, only to have their timing messed up when the knuckler comes on the next pitch. In this way, Dickey uses the fastball as a waste pitch the same way other pitchers use brushbacks or fastballs at eye level to set up their breaking stuff as strikeout pitches.

So, R.A., don't pay too much attention to the latest from FiveThirtyEight. They've oversimplified the issue. It's perhaps a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, and a classic error of economics that they've made some problematic assumptions in coming to the conclusion they did.

One of the key points of game theory for this sort of situation is that altering your strategy (i.e., altering the percentages of the time you choose different options) will alter your own results as well as influencing the strategy of your opponent. Dickey can't simply throw more knuckleballs without giving up the happy side effects created by the use of his fastball.

Follow Rory Johnston (@rnfjohnston) on twitter: twitter.com/rnfjohnston

Jim Benning and the Canucks do have a plan: Steve Stamkos

It is a dark time for the Canucks. The team's recent moves have been a serious clearing of the decksoffice. Fan favourites Kevin Bieksa, Eddie Lack, and Zack Kassian have all been sent packing, as has longtime Assistant GM Laurence Gilman. One can find logical reasons for all of those to go; Bieksa's getting old, Lack was crowded out in competition with Miller and Markstrom, and Kassian wasn't turning into the player the team hoped he would. Gilman may not have been seeing eye-to-eye with the new regime; we may never know what happened there.

Say what you want about the sensibility of those moves. I am mostly in agreement with those that would say that the Canucks didn't get as much of a return in trade as one would hope. I think Gilman was a unique asset to the team in terms of his understanding of the cap and the player market in the league; obviously, Benning and Linden didn't agree. Those questions are being analyzed to death elsewhere. I'll spare you another analysis of that.

One comment that I will discuss: Does Benning have a plan? My answer is that yes, he does:

“We’re in a transition period where we’ve got some good young players now in our system,” explained Benning. “When these guys are ready to play we want the room for them to step in and play. With cap room next year we can be more active in the high-end unrestricted market.”

(thanks to Thomas Drance at Sportsnet for the quote)

Benning sure showed his cards there. He's got a vision of how to turn the Canucks into a winning team: clear as much cap space as possible to bring in a superstar to build around. The player he obviously has his sights on is Steven Stamkos, who will be a 26-year-old UFA next summer if Tampa Bay can't lock him up. The Canucks will have cap space to burn next year; Dan Hamhuis, Brandon Prust, and Radim Vrbata will be off the books, creating the option of offering an $11m+ salary to Stamkos, if they wanted to.

It's regularly rumoured that Stamkos wants to come home to the Toronto Maple Leafs (he was born in Markham), but Stamkos has remained tight-lipped about the possibility whenever asked. It certainly makes a lot of sense. It would also make sense that he'd be wary of Toronto, given the way they treated Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf.

It's another question if he would actually be willing to come to Vancouver. The team will be a shell of its former self, still employing the Sedins and Ryan Miller, and with a thin defensive corps. The young forward group offers some promise.

That's Benning's plan. This isn't some stealthy attempt to tank - he's trying to free up jobs so players like Horvat, Virtanen, McCann, Cassels et al can have a shot in the NHL and the team can figure out what it has. 2015-16 may well be an ugly year, but Benning's hope, one would think, is that there's enough talent there to surround a big star player like Stamkos and make it a winning team.

It's not the worst plan. I'm not sure I trust Jim Benning to execute it, given his checkered track record in both trades and contract negotiation, but that's what I think he's up to.

(an edit for clarification: I don't think that Steven Stamkos in a Canucks uniform is a likely result. It's just the only end-game that I can rationalize as an explanation for why Benning has been making the moves he has).

Follow Rory Johnston (@rnfjohnston) on twitter: twitter.com/rnfjohnston

Ryan Johansen and the Economics of NHL Offer Sheets

@botchford Then what needs to change in order to make offer sheets more inticing? Lower penalties? Or should they just scrap offer sheets?
— Cam Davie (@offersheet) September 17, 2014

Cam (aptly, @offersheet on twitter) raises a good question here. Why aren't offer sheets more common in the NHL?

Botchford's response - 'they always get matched, so what's the point?' is a big factor. It may be that teams don't have the stomachs to go big enough - in effect, you need to offer the player the same money he'd get as a UFA to make it happen.

Another answer that is commonly given is that the draft-pick compensation is a hindrance to offer sheets. I'll tell you right now: it's not. The inclusion of draft picks in the equation is a zero-sum game that may alter the ideal contract price, but not the incentive for a team to put out an offer sheet in the first place.

Let's use Ryan Johansen as an example. No, no one's signed him to an offer sheet yet, though for all we know, teams have called his agent and asked.

Johansen's Market Value

Blue Jackets president John Davidson revealed the team's most recent offers to Johansen, and most of the hockey media agreed that the numbers were pretty darn fair. The offers were:

- $6m over 2 years;
- $32m over 6 years; or
- $46m over 8 years.

Let's do a little reverse-engineering to guess a contract value. Reportedly, Johansen has 4 more years as an RFA; so the last 4 years of the 8-year deal are UFA years. If years 7 and 8 are worth $14m (the difference between the $46m of the 8-year deal and the $32m of the 6-year deal), the Jackets are working off a UFA valuation of $7m. For comparison, Paul Stastny, Alex Semin, Daniel Sedin and Henrik Sedin are all players currently on UFA contracts with $7m annual averages.

Let's put aside, for a second, whether or not those players are comparably valuable to Ryan Johansen. Maybe they're not far off. But the point is, the offer is such that if Johansen is worth $7m/year on the open market, he'd be worth $56m on an 8 year contract, or $49m on a 7-year deal (which is the longest you can go on an offer sheet).

Back to RFA-land for a second. If the UFA years are worth $7m each, based on the $46m/8 offer, that leaves $18m for the first 4 years. If years 1-2 are worth $3m each (based on the bridge contract), years 3-4 (arbitration years) are worth $6m each. If the Jackets offered Johansen a 7-year deal, they'd be offering him $39m/7 ($46/8 minus $7/1)

Adjusting for Draft Pick value

So if Johansen would get $49m/7 as a UFA (again, let's assume), we have to deduct a bit from that price for the draft pick compensation. The draft pick compensation depends on the AAV of the offer sheet; in 2013-14, a $7m AAV would call for compensation of two 1st-rounders, a second and a third. However, because we're going to deduct a little from the price to reflect the cost to the buying team, we're going to slip down one bracket to compensation of a 1st, a 2nd and a 3rd.

We don't know the dollar value of those draft picks; there are a lot of variables, including where in the round they are, who the team might get, and so on. But for sake of argument, I'm going to pull a number out of the air and say that the three picks are worth $5m total. Again, let's assume. Play along with me.

So now we're looking at a $44m/7 market price for Johansen, after the value of the picks is removed. Mind you, the total cost to the signing team is $49m when you include the lost draft picks. Note that this valuation is considerably higher than the $39m/7 valuation represented by CBJ's offers. The decision the signing team faces is:

Door #1: Give Johansen an offer sheet, and if it's accepted, he's worth $49m over 7 years. Pay $44m and lose $5m worth of draft pick assets. Net gain: zero.

Door #2: Don't make an offer. Net gain: zero.

If Johansen signs the $44m offer sheet, Columbus has a decision to make:

Door #1: Let Johansen go. Pick up draft picks worth $5m. Net gain: $5m.
Door #2: Match the offer sheet at $44m/7. Keep Johansen, who is worth $49m over the contract. Net gain: $5m.

As you can see, in both situations, Columbus would just as happily let Johansen go as they would keep him. The net value to them is the same either way.

Now let's mix it up a little. As we saw above, the signing team isn't realizing any profit by signing Johansen at $44m/7. What if they offer, say $42m/7 instead? This offer would still be above Columbus' $39/7 valuation. Let's say Johansen signs the offer sheet. Now, the signing team has a potential $2m profit.

The math now changes for Columbus, though. Here's what happens:

Door #1: Let Johansen go. Pick up draft picks worth $5m. Net gain: $5m.
Door #2: Match the offer sheet at $42m/7. Keep Johansen, who is worth $49m over the contract. Net gain: $7m.

Clearly, Columbus should match the contract because it's below open-market value. Thus, if all other factors are equal, it is impossible for a signing team to come up with an offer sheet that won't be matched unless they are willing to pay full market cost for the player (after accounting for the value of the draft picks).

Now, obviously, 'all factors' will rarely be equal. A smaller-market team like Columbus may not have the financial flexibility to pay Johansen. If he were with a larger-market team, they may have overspent their cap space and couldn't afford to allocate as much salary room for him. Teams might place different valuations on a player's abilities, may feel he's a better/worse fit for their system or their locker room, et cetera.

In short, an offer sheet can succeed where the player is worth more to the offering team than the current team. That being said, unless the valuations are far apart, the offer sheet will have to be close to the UFA market price, which will reduce the incentive for offering teams to make the offer in the first place.

I would suggest, also, that the 'factors' described above will tend to actually increase the current team's valuation of the player. The player may be integral to the team's system, its locker room, its fanbase, and the community. The team is more likely to have made roster decisions on the assumption that the player will be there, and losing the player would create a hole that would be nearly impossible to fill. It appears that most of these factors apply in the case of the Blue Jackets, and that's why I would suggest they're not vulnerable to an offer sheet in this case. I'd argue that the Shea Weber situation had a lot of similarities.

How can the league create more incentive for offer sheets (though it's not clear they want to)? as one example, I imagine that if the compensation picks came from the league rather than the signing team (the same way sandwich picks are awarded in baseball), that would reduce the cost to the signing team and improve their incentive to make an offer.

That being said, I don't think the league wants this. In CBA bargaining, it has consistently tried to protect the ability of poorer clubs to keep RFAs as long as possible. I don't think we'll see a change to offer sheets anytime soon. For now, they are merely an occasion and extraordinary remedy for teams that are clearly undervaluing their RFAs.

Follow Rory Johnston (@rnfjohnston) on twitter: twitter.com/rnfjohnston

Marian Gaborik's contract could net Kings 5-20% cap savings

The news just came out that Marian Gaborik has signed a 7-year, $4.875m AAV contract extension with the Kings. He's 32 years old now, and will be 39 by contract's end. There's a good chance he'll be retired before it's over.

If the Kings are smart (they are), they're structure the deal as front-loaded, as follows:

Years 1-3: $6,500,000
Year 4: $4,875,000
Years 5-7: $3,250,000

This is, as far as I can tell, the most front-loaded, cap-friendly structure the CBA allows. It allows for the possibility that Gaborik may retire before the contract's up, without causing any cap recapture.

If Gaborik retires after 5 years (age 37), the Kings will have paid him a little over $27.6m for 5 years - a true AAV of $5.525 million, yet they'll only face a $4.875m cap hit. If he retires in just 4 years, that AAV is $6.09m; if he sticks out 6 years, it's a $5.146m AAV.

Regardless, the proper salary structure in this case will allow the Kings to get a cap discount of 5-20%. That's a pretty hefty advantage.

This will be something that any team can take advantage of for star players that are in their early 30s. Just as before with the long-tail contracts, you can get a cap savings by including years where they're likely to be retired. The savings isn't as large as it once was, but it's still substantial.

Follow Rory Johnston (@rnfjohnston) on twitter: twitter.com/rnfjohnston

edit: the original version of this post had some calculation errors, which have been fixed.

Ryan Kesler, and trading in-conference

Elliotte Friedman is reporting today that though the Canucks have many suitors for Ryan Kesler, they'd prefer not to trade him to a Western Conference rival. Of course they aren't; teams, as a matter of course, usually try to trade players outside their conference, or at least not to a division rival. This is the case in other pro sports too.

The main reason is obvious: teams don't want to get beaten or embarrassed by their former stars on a regular basis. It's a good way to enrage a fanbase. If you're a GM, losing a key game or series facing the player you traded is a fireable offence.

Does it stand up to reason, though? I'm not so sure it does. Kesler is 29, and has two more years on his contract. Suppose you trade him to the Blackhawks, and he and Jon Toews form a formidable dynamic duo for a couple of years. Yes, the Canucks will lose a couple of games to that team. But if Vancouver's entering a rebuild - and given that Luongo and Edler's names are out there too, they seem like they are - what's the harm in losing ganes to the Blackhawks in 2014-15? You're not trying to be competitive next year.

More seriously, if you assemble some young talent to aim for contending in, say, 2016-17, doesn't it actually make a lot of sense to send Kesler to Chicago? By that time, he's possibly left them as a UFA, is in his 30s, and you've stripped them of Brandon Saad and a first-rounder (just spitballing here), and knocked them down a notch such that you've got a better chance of winning games against them.

Just a thought, really. It's such a well-worn truism of the trade market but I think people are too wedded to it.

Follow Rory Johnston (@rnfjohnston) on twitter: twitter.com/rnfjohnston

Alex Ovechkin vs. the former Southeast Division

Alex Ovechkin scored a very impressive four goals against the Tampa Bay Lightning last night. They've been one of his favourite opponents over the years; he's scored 70 points against them in 52 career games, his second-highest total against an opposing franchise.

Now, there's no doubt that Ovechkin is a special player, and one of the best of his generation. But has he had an easier time of it because of the fact that he's spent most of his career to date in the brutally awful Southeast Division, which existed up until 2012-13?

Let's consider Ovechkin's numbers against those teams:

Opponent	GP	G	A	Pts	Pts/gp
Tampa Bay	52	35	35	70	1.35
Florida	47	30	31	61	1.30
Atlanta/Winnipeg	54	40	41	81	1.50
Carolina	54	25	42	67	1.24
TOTALS	207	130	149	279	1.35

To put it mildly, that's a massive beating. If you imagine Ovechkin played only SE division opponents, his average 82-game season would be 51 goals and 59 assists, for 110 points.

 Now, consider this:

Opponent	GP	G	A	Pts	Pts/gp
Eastern Conference	516	324	315	639	1.24
Non-SE Eastern Teams	309	196	166	362	1.17
Western Conference	114	73	58	131	1.15

Ovechkin's performance against the rest of the league drops off significantly. Against the Eastern Conference as a whole, his numbers still look amazing, but if you cut out the SE division, it drops quite a bit. Against the rest of the East, he's a 96-point player; against the West, he's a 94 point player.

That's not to say that playing in the Southeast division has been worth 14 or 16 extra points a season for Ovi; obviously, he doesn't actually have the luxury of playing all 82 games in-division. In the six-division era, teams played about a third of their games against divisional opponents; that's about 27 games. They'd play about 20 games against each of the other two divisions in their conference.

So, in actual fact, Ovi was only playing about 7 extra games against SE opponents than other Eastern teams. If playing the SE division only is worth 15 extra points over 82 games, that means 7 extra games in-division has been worth about 1.3 extra points per season for Ovi versus, say, Sidney Crosby. Versus a Western Conference player, it's more significant - as much as 4 points.

While we like to say that players in the Southeast had a big lift from regular access to punching bags like the Florida Panthers, it's easy to forget that they all had to play plenty of non-divisional games, and that everyone else gets to play the SE division too.

The big difference, really, has been between the two conferences; for most of the six-division era, teams only played each team in the opposite conference once a year, so Western teams got barely any chance to feast on the weak SE divison. So don't pile on Ovechkin for getting easy pickings down South; in fact, it's been the entire Eastern Conference that enjoyed that advantage.

JP Arencibia: Blue Jays, foolishly, cut a face of the franchise

It's been a quiet off-season for the Blue Jays thus far. The biggest news to this point is yesterday's announcement that Dioner Navarro will be coming in to replace JP Arencibia as the Jays' starting catcher.

The move is perhaps not a surprise. Arencibia's batting regressed last year, striking out 148 times in 497 at-bats, putting up an ugly .194/.227/.365 line. He was only able to pull himself up to a replacement-level 0.1 WAR thanks to good defensive numbers. He's about to turn 28, and we can no longer assume that he'll sort it out and get better. In fact, the league may have sorted him out. He's now likely to land somewhere as a backup catcher and occasional pinch-hitter.

Navarro, his replacement, isn't really an improvement, however. Navarro had a nice 2013, hitting .300 with 13 homers over 240 at-bats, but that's a serious outlier compared to his career line (.251/.313/.371). His defensive numbers don't help him. For the most part, he's the same slightly-better-than-replacement catcher that Arencibia is. He's 29, so, like Arencibia, we know who he is by now. There's not likely any more upside here.

So what's the point? If you're going to re-arrange deck chairs, why not stick with the devil you know?

I make this point because while JP is an underwhelming asset on the field, he rates very well as a clubhouse guy, and most importantly, as a fan favourite. In particular, he's a huge hit with female fans, because he's undeniably one of the prettiest faces in MLB:

Dioner Navarro isn't a bad-looking guy, but he's not going to draw a crowd in the same way. The Blue Jays saw a big upswing in attendance last year, and a lot of that was driven by young fans up in the 500 level - and of those, a large portion were female.

Female fans are smart, and they know baseball. They want the team to win, and they know that JP's strikeouts hurt the team. But they also like to be entertained, and JP does that. When he does add offensive value, it's through home runs - and all fans love those. Dioner Navarro will put together a few more singles and some walks, but he's not going to create excitement. I daresay he's not going to sell a lot of jerseys, either.

JP puts butts in the seats. He was part of the youthful energy that made the Jays a big draw in 2013, and he became a face of the franchise. For female fans who bought "ARENCIBIA 9" t-shirts, he was a key part of forming that bond between fan and team that keeps people coming back. Any way you slice it, he may not have added much on the field but he did earn a profit for the franchise. The money that you earn on Arencibia can then be spent elsewhere on the roster, upgrading the starting rotation or the second base position. If the best you can do is a sideways step to a similarly mediocre catcher, why not stick with the guy that fans love?

Zach Bogosian and Inflation: why his contract is better than it looks

When the news came out yesterday that Zach Bogosian had signed a 7-year, $36m contract with the Winnipeg Jets, it certainly raised some eyebrows. Long contracts might seem sensible for stars like Erik Karlsson and Shea Weber, but Bogosian is, by most accounts, a solid yet unspectacular player. He plays tough minutes, and at just 23 years old, the contract will span his prime years rather than paying for mid-30s decline years.

Obviously, it's pricing in the possibility that he may establish himself as a reliable, top-pairing guy. The $5.14m AAV seems high for a young defenceman - it's higher, for example, than the salaries guys like Ryan McDonagh, Kevin Shattenkirk and Slava Voynov will earn next year. It's also higher than the salaries of a lot of other top-pairing guys around the league including Alex Edler, Nik Kronwall, and more.

I'd say the Jets may have overpaid. They may not have needed to offer quite so much - after all, the long contract protects Bogosian against the risk of a serious or career-ending injury. If he gets multiple concussions, or a broken leg, or simply flops - that $36m is money in the bank.

One saving grace, though, is that the contract price will look better every year thanks to inflation. The 2013-14 salary cap will be $64.3 million, but if the NHL continues to build its revenues, that cap figure is likely to grow by about 5% each year. Consequently, Bogosian's cap hit will represent a smaller portion of the Jets' budget each year. In 2013-13, Bogosian will eat up about 8% of the Jets' cap. By year seven, though, he'll only take 6% of their cap space - equivalent to a $3.84 million dollar salary today.

In effect, giving Bogosian a 7-year deal reverses the cap hits that we would normally expect for a player like him. Many RFA defencemen take cheaper 2-year second contracts (see, for example, PK Subban's $2.875 AAV 2-year deal) knowing that they'll be able to cash in on a bigger deal as an unrestricted free agent afterwards. Bogosian 'reverses' this by taking a bigger effective cap hit at the beginning of his deal (8% of team cap space), but will have a much cheaper cap hit by the end of the deal (6% of team cap space). This arrangement is especially effective for the Jets, who aren't facing a cap crunch for this year, but may find themselves trying to build a high-powered contender once Bogosian is further along in his contract.

Baseball Calculus: Starling Marte and the Hot Start Bias

I have Starling Marte on my fantasy baseball team. I'm happy that I do - he's had a great start to the season, putting up fantastic fantasy baseball numbers: a .304 average, 5 homers, 33 runs, 17 RBI and 10 steals. Over a full season, that projects to a .304/118/18/61/36 line - terrific stuff. The sort of performance you'd expect from a second- or third-round player. Marte is perceived by many as an emerging star.

Here's the problem: Starling Marte is, at this point, probably one of the most overrated players in fantasy baseball.

 

 

Don't believe me? I'm convinced Marte is in for a serious reckoning, which has perhaps already hit. Most telling is his 46/9 strikeout-to-walk ratio, which is dangerously close to Jeff Francoeur (35/5 this year) territory. Pitch selection is important in baseball. If you're too free a swinger, pitchers will get you to chase more pitches. You'll get fewer good pitches to hit. When you do make contact on pitches outside the zone, you're more likely to hit weak grounders and pop-ups. Marte's .304 batting average is an illusion created by a .385 BABIP, which places 8th among MLB regulars. He's been lucky.

 

Marte is overrated because of something I'd call a 'Hot Start Bias'. We tend to form opinions about players over time. If a rookie has a hot week, we'll keep an eye on him, but we're slow to commit to him. If he has two good weeks, we look more closely. If, after a full month, he's hitting .327 (as Marte was) and among the MLB leaders in runs, steals and OBP, we will look at him and say "maybe this kid really is going to be one of the best leadoff hitters in baseball."

 

Then, we start keeping an eye on him. Every time we check his stats, that batting average is still over .300; he's still among the MLB leaders in runs, and he's got good numbers across the board. And because he's a fun, exciting, emerging star, we check his numbers often. Every check is another data point in the formation of our opinion.

 

Here's the problem, though: we make the mistake of simply checking his season-to-date stats every time. We don't check his recent numbers, which would show that since the start of May, he's hitting .270/.333/.432 with a 20/2 K/BB.

 

This problem can be illustrated graphically with some concepts borrowed from basic calculus.
 

 

 

 

Remember that thing from Calculus I? The 'area under the graph'? I'm suggesting that our opinions of a player like Marte is something that is formed over time. Every time we check his batting average, it's a data point in our minds. In early April, we see those high averages - he stays over .330 until April 18 - we think 'excellent, but it's still early; I'd like to see him sustain it'. Then, for a few more weeks, he maintains an average around .320. Now he's gradually tailing off towards the .300 mark.

You might note above that the graph starts only on April 10, cutting out Marte's first week. This is a bit of a cheat on my part; he hit poorly in his first couple games, keeping his average low until he got hot a few games in. I've left those games out purely for visual effect. While it's statistically dishonest, I don't think it changes the issue.

Back to my argument: very data point further adds to our perception that Starling Marte is a .300 hitter. That he's a good player. That he's one of the league's better leadoff men and an excellent fantasy baseball player.

 

Here's the amazing thing: what if he is actually only, say, a .260 hitter from here on out? Let's say he hits a steady 1.04 hits in 4 ABs for another 117 games (bringing him to 162 total). Here's how that batting average chart will look:

 

 

So here, we see the hot start is a bit compressed, followed by a steady tail-off down to a .272 average at season's end. As you can see, I've kept the original blue shading for days where Marte's average is over .300, and used red shading once he falls below .280. The blue area represents our perception that Starling Marte is an excellent hitter; the red is our perception that he's actually pretty average; sub .280, which is still decent for an MLB regular but not a star. Everything in between is kind of neutral.

 

As you can see, though, the size of the blue area far exceeds that of the red area; the cumulative effect of this perception will be that, at the end of the season, plenty of people will still be saying things like:

• "Starling Marte can easily hit .300 in 2014."
• "Starling Marte is going to win a batting title someday." (don't get me started on this line...)
• "Starling Marte is going to be a perennial all-star."

All this when he's really a .260 hitter. He's a lot closer to Chris Young than Andrew McCutchen, yet his hot start will continue to skew perceptions of his ability level because of this bias.

And that's why I'm trying to sell high on him in my fantasy baseball league. People think he's this awesome, budding superstar, based on seven weeks of BABIP-fuelled good luck. He's not. He's going to be overrated and over-drafted by fantasy players for some time before we all clue in to the fact that he's actually pretty average. We fall prone to this Hot Start Bias all the time, yet seem to be surprised every time we get caught by it. It also runs in the opposite direction: if a talented player starts badly in April, we'll miss it when he tears it up in May and June because we've got it in our heads that he's "not having a good year." There's no reason to get caught in this trap if we think carefully about how our perceptions operate.

Follow Rory Johnston (@rnfjohnston) on twitter: twitter.com/rnfjohnston



Mark Buehrle: now with more groundouts!

Mark Buehrle put up another strong start for the Blue Jays today, (7 IP, 4H, 2 ER, 6/2 K/BB) and though he didn't get the win, it's another positive sign that he's getting back on track after a tough start.

His improving ERA and K/BB are easy to notice, but what you may have missed is that he now hasn't given up a home run in three straight starts. This isn't just luck; he's done it by getting more ground outs. He's gotten more ground outs than air outs in each of those three starts (11/5 today) after being on the wrong side of that ledger for the three preceding starts, where he allowed 8 HR in 18 innings.

Buehrle's been a pitch-to-contact guy for some time, and has always given up a fair number of home runs. As his stuff ages, he's going to have to keep the ball down to stay out of trouble, and it looks like he's been able to do that lately. Getting ground outs will speed up his innings and allow him to be the innings-eater the team needs (especially after days like yesterday, where Ramon Ortiz got knocked out in the third inning). He'll likely be facing Atlanta's high-power offence on Monday so he'll definitely want to make sure he keeps the ball on the ground.

Jose Bautista is batting 2nd, and that's good news

Batting your best hitter second in the lineup has been a pet theory among sabermetricians for a number of years, but it's getting increasing interest around baseball this year, and the Blue Jays are joining the bandwagon, moving Jose Bautista into the second spot in their batting order. Does it make sense? Or is Jose's power wasted there?

The injury to Jose Reyes robbed the Jays of a natural leadoff man, and they've struggled to find an appropriate fill-in. Emilio Bonifacio and Rajai Davis got long looks there, as their speed looks good atop the order. Also getting time were guys like Brett Lawrie and Munenori Kawasaki. That whole group was a failure, though; your leadoff hitter must be able to get on base, and all those players feature below-average OBPs. The natural solution, I felt, was Melky Cabrera, and indeed the Jays have finally put him there. Melky had been batting 2nd or 5th most of April, as the Jays really wanted to mix his switch-hitting abilities among all the right-handed power bats. Now that Adam Lind has turned it on, they've been able to use Melky to lead off. He's not especially fast - indeed, he remains in the leadoff spot right now despite hamstring issues - but he's one of the team's best OBP guys.

When your lineup features as much power as the Jays have (it's not just Bautista and Edwin Encarnacaion; JP Arencibia and Colby Rasmus are piling up HRs too), you need to get as many guys on base in front of them as possible. Sending Davis and Bonifacio up there to make outs did nothing to set the table for them - it just burned outs and stopped the offence before it could get started.

Further, batting Melky 5th was similarly wasteful. Bautista and Encarnacion are two of the team's better OBP guys. They'll often get on via a walk, and if they're on base that often, you need a guy with some power to bring them in. Arencibia and Rasmus are perfectly suited to do that; their OBP isn't great, but they can cash in men on base. Melky, on the other hand, has a good chance to hit a single, but can't drive in runners en masse.

So with Melky in the leadoff spot, who bats second? As I've said above, the Jays have plenty of power guys but few OBP men. In that regard, Bautista is a perfect solution. With Edwin hitting 3rd and Arencibia 4th, the Jays have enough power in the middle of the lineup that Bautista can be deployed elsewhere.

A further advantage is that Bautista is less likely to come to the plate with 2 out. Batting 3rd - especially behind Davis and Bonifacio - teams could pitch around him, knowing that a walk with 2 out was a lesser risk. With none or one out, walking Bautista is a greater risk, because the Jays will have more chances to drive him in. So teams have to pitch to him, and he's able to get fastballs that can become home runs. How much better is Jose with less than 2 outs? His career BA/OBP/SLG splits:

• none out: .279/.366/.559
• one out: .250/.358/.459
• two out: .229/.363/.443

The difference is undeniable. With two out, Jose gets a lot of walks, but doesn't get pitches to hit. The fewer outs, the more pressure teams face to pitch to him. You could easily make an argument, based on these splits, that Jose should be leading off. Yes, he'd be hitting a lot of solo home runs, but he'll do that anyway (just with 2 outs) if the Jays can't put decent OBP men on in front of him. Batting him 2nd behind Cabrera is a good compromise, and will continue to help the Jays. Bravo to John Gibbons for being willing to work outside the conventional wisdom.

Follow Rory Johnston (@rnfjohnston) on twitter: twitter.com/rnfjohnston

Frazer McLaren NHL Suspension Video

Photo courtesy thestar.com

Last night in Toronto, an incident occurred in a game between the Ottawa Senators and the Toronto Maple Leafs. Early in the first period, Frazer McLaren of the Maple Leafs and Dave Dziurzynski of the Senators dropped their gloves and exchanged blows, and before too long, McLaren struck Dziurzynski flush on the cheek, knocking the Senators player out.

This was a violation of Rule 46 - Fighting. McLaren was assessed a major penalty on the play.

Dziurzynski was injured on the play, suffering a serious concussion. McLaren targeted Dziurzynski's head on the play, striking him with a closed fist in a clear attempt to injure his opponent.

McLaren has a history as a repeat offender. Though he has not been suspended or fined during his NHL career, he has been assessed fighting majors on five other occasions this season.

The NHL Department of Player Safety has decided to suspend Frazer McLaren for zero games.

You won't be seeing Brendan Shanahan reading from this script today, or anytime soon. My apologies if you clicked on this link and actually thought this might be for real - and yes, the title of this post is intentionally deceptive.

But ask yourself: why is it that the NHL calls fighting a 'penalty' prohibited by the rules if it comes with special exemptions for supplementary discipline? Imagine you were told that a player on the Leafs had taken a major penalty on a play last night and knocked an opponent out cold. You'd immediately assume a suspension would be forthcoming. Why is it that the league says it's getting serious about 'player safety' when it has harsh penalties for hits that were formerly 'hockey plays' but allows carte blanche for fighting?

Like most fans, I enjoy seeing fights. It's thrilling, and even though I know staged fights (as last night's was) are a bit silly, I still find them entertaining the way I enjoyed watching pro wrestling when I was thirteen. But it's time to grow up. It's amazing that the NHL has made no moves to address this after what happened to Derek Boogaard and Rick Rypien, and what will happen to other players to come. Even if it's not another death, there will be plenty more players with brain damage in the coming years.

I realize, too, that fighting is important to the players, who like having tough guys on their team to discourage players on other teams from making cheap hits. I get that - and I realize eliminating fighting outright would be very hard to do.

But the NHL ought to do something, and the obvious step is to end the staged fights. If one arises naturally after a big hit, that's one thing. But when McLaren and Dziurzynski square off 26 seconds into a game to fight for little more than entertainment, that's a fight no one needs. The NHL should realize that these incidents are embarrassing - McLaren certainly did. After the fight, he didn't raise his arms, didn't salute the crowd, didn't pantomime as if he were putting on the prizefighter's belt. He looked ashamed of what he had done, embarrassed that he had hurt someone just so people could cheer. You can bet that's not what he imagined growing up with dreams of playing in the NHL.

You know, we ain't hockey players. We've been clowns.
We've been goons! We're the freaks in a fuckin' sideshow. We're nothing but a bunch of criminals. We oughta be in jail, that's all there is.... Yeah. Really ashamed of myself. See, Ned was right. Violence is killin' this sport. It's draggin' it through the mud. If things keep up the way they are, hockey players'll be nothing but actors, punks.
Well, I'm not playin' my last game that way.  ...Yeah. It's my last game, and I wanna play it straight. No more "Nail 'em." No more "Fuck with 'em." That's finished. I wanna win that championship tonight, but I wanna win it clean. Old-time hockey, like when I got started, you know? Jeez. Toe Blake, Dit Clapper, Eddie Shore, those guys were the greats.
I don't know what to say. Christ, it's up to you.

Follow Rory Johnston (@rnfjohnston) on twitter: twitter.com/rnfjohnston

5 games for Patrick Kaleta: does it set a precedent?

Patrick Kaleta might not fear the NHL's discipline system after a 5-game suspension (photo courtesy espn.go.com)

Patrick Kaleta's hit on Brad Richards earned him a 5-game suspension, as announced this afternoon by Brendan Shanahan. The NHL elected to carry out Kaleta's hearing over the phone, meaning 5 games was the maximum suspension that could be imposed. More serious suspensions can only be imposed in an in-person hearing.

If the league does impose a suspension of six games or more, the new CBA will allow players the right of an appeal to a 'neutral arbitrator', whose "standard of review will be whether the League's finding of violation of the League Playing Rules and the penalty imposed were both supported by substantial evidence."

It's not entirely clear what 'substantial evidence' will mean. Must suspensions be based on the precedents of other suspensions? For example, if another repeat offender makes the same hit tomorrow night, is the league forced to give him the same penalty? Or do they just need to show that they have some evidence? It's not clear from this whether arbitrators will have the mandate to show seference to the NHL's decisions, or whether they'll regularly pick apart the reasoning for the suspension imposed.

This leaves open the question: what would be sufficient to warrant a 6-plus game suspension? The answer, clearly, would be a serious injury. Kaleta's history as a repeat offender (two-game suspension in 2009, a fine and a four-gamer in 2011), and the seriousness of the hit (Shanahan described it as being in an "extremely dangerous" position near the boards) both supported a serious suspension, and the NHL's tendency has been to rapidly escalate suspensions for repeat offenders.

Now that the decision has been made to cap a hit like Kaleta's at five games, the league could face a test when hand out longer suspensions. If players can argue that other hits are no worse than Kaleta's (including, for example, a hit that results in a serious injury but comes from a first-time offender), imposing a longer suspension could prove impossible.

Offer sheets: there's no point

Though Jamie Benn and PK Subban have signed, Ryan O'Reilly remains unsigned and discussion remains as to why no one has dropped an offer sheet on him yet.

It's important to think back to a quote from last week's 30 Thoughts column by Elliotte Friedman:

As one GM (not one quoted elsewhere in this blog) said: "If Nashville is going to match that offer to Shea Weber, what the [bleep's] the point of  doing one?"

There is basically no point. Though there are plenty of teams that would like to add a guy like O'Reilly, even if you offer him a multi-year deal at $5m per - I've gotta think Colorado matches. How high would you have to go to get Colorado to let him go? $6m? More? At that point, you're giving up a stack of first-rounders for a guy who's certainly an excellent player, but I don't think anyone's confusing him with Anze Kopitar. He's not a superstar.

I advocated for someone signing Michael Del Zotto to an offer sheet on this blog a couple weeks ago, and now I'm pulling back off that opinion. Yes, these guys should be getting paid more. But there's no GM who's going to want to stick his hand in that beehive because he's not going to come out with the player. Instead, he's just going to force the player's team to match.

What's worse, he then faces the problem of a 'revenge' offer sheet from the other side. Where this is a real threat or not is a question, but you can bet it's going to cause a lot of stress when it comes time to re-sign his own RFAs. Much more real is the fact that he's going to have his own players asking "you think Player X is worth $Y; why are you offering me this shit contract?" It's all a lot of headache for a very small chance of reward.

If GMs aren't colluding (and I really don't think they are), they're going to worry about their own team first. If Ryan O'Reilly is getting lowballed in Colorado - that isn't Dave Nonis or Mike Gillis or anyone else's problem. Their job is not to set a market rate, or force other teams to pay up; they're worrying about their own team first, and if Colorado is losing games in the meantime without a top-line player, all the better.

Insurance A-Fraud?

Fox's Ken Rosenthal reported this morning that the Yankees might be hoping that they can get out from under Alex Rodriguez' contract with an insurance payout. On its face, it's a fair point; they took out a sizeable insurance policy on the contract in case A-Rod suffered a career-ending injury. The plan, as Rosenthal explains, would be to find a doctor willing to call Rodriguez' hip injury "career-ending", file some paperwork, and presto, insurance payout covers 85 percent of the $114 million remaining on the deal.

Simple? Not so much. Ken probably wouldn't be surprised to hear that insurance companies are reluctant to pay out claims if they can avoid it. In particular, they (rightly) are especially reluctant to pay out where there's a whiff of fraud. You may have also heard that Alex Rodriguez doesn't have the best reputation as a truth-teller.

Furthermore, the fact that this strategy is being publicly discussed (Rosenthal reports that a 'high-ranking executive explained the same plan to him) will raise the insurer's suspicions even more. You can bet that they wouldn't simply take the opinion of a single doctor cherry-picked by Rodriguez and the Yankees.

Here's what would actually happen: the claim would get denied, and the Yankees and the insurer would end up in court. The insurer would insist on a second opinion, and demand the reports of every other doctor that checked on Rodriguez. If A-Rod had 'shopped around' until he got a favourable opinion, it's game over. The insurer could point to the conflicting opinions and show that Rodriguez can play. If that fails, they might still be able to insist that 'their' doctor examine hime, or they could send up a slew of expert witnesses to say he should be playing, or that the Yankees failed to mitigate his injuries, or that they allowed him to use PEDs, perhaps voiding the policy because of increased injury risks and so on...

You get the picture. You can't just fill out a form and magically get an insurance payout. Any insurance claim that approaches $100m - whether it's for a baseball contract or a construction project - will not be handled the same way as a car insurance claim for a fender-bender. There's too much money at stake, and any insurance company will fight tooth and nail to avoid paying out illegitimate claims. Unless his injury is worse than reported, you can bet on A-Rod being on the field in 2014.

Follow sports law and business nerd Rory Johnston (@rnfjohnston) on twitter: twitter.com/rnfjohnston

Power plays up 38% in NHL's opening weekend, but we've seen this before

Through two days and 17 games, the 2013 NHL season has seen a lot of disorganization and choppy game play (and I'm not just referring to NHL's Gamecentre, which has led to numerous reports of bad streaming quality and unexpected blackouts). It's apparent that the short training camp has meant that teams aren't fully back in game shape, both in terms of fitness and familiarity. Of particular note is that penalties are up significantly through the first two days: we've seen an average of 9.1 power plays per game, which is a 38% increase over last season's average of 6.6.

Unsurprisingly, this has also coincided with an increase in scoring overall: goals are up 9%. So far in 2013, we're getting 5.79 goals per game compared to last year's 5.32.

Is this indicative of anything? Well, yes - we've seen much tighter calls on hooking in particular, with refs blowing the whistle on even a slight tap into the hands. There are a few factors at work here; players are a little undisciplined early, making lazy plays, and many are not at a mid-season fitness level yet. Playing in the AHL or the Swiss league is certainly helpful, but there's no way those leagues can replicate the speed they're now dealing with in NHL play. What's more, it seems the referees are erring on the side of making the call to 'set the tone' early on.

Will it last? Definitely not. Last season's opening weekend featured 8.6 power plays per game, and it seems like an opening week penalty-fest has become standard in the NHL. The referees seem to have been given the usual edict to 'call it tight' for the first few games. Things should return to normal in short order.