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.