Fire Ritch Winter

 

 

Ritch Winter’s a pretty powerful hockey agent. His clients include Ryan Getzlaf, Braydon Coburn, as well as a spate of others. Ritch Winter also writes articles, like this one, on a blog.

It was linked to on twitter by a couple of people, and I took a gander at the article. Needless to say, I was not impressed.

Most Oilers fans would say “no”, and they’d be right. The way Renney throws lines out there on home ice suggests to me he might not be a good fit for any team.

Yes, because it was the 20-year-old defenseman that lead to winning those cups, right?

Because I’m sure that coaches and GM’s never talk. I mean, why would a GM want players that would fit the mold of what his coach is trying to do? Man, that would be super dumb. Teams like Detroit and Vancouver and New York and Los Angeles and San Jose and on and on never have the right players for the coach to work with.

So… it was because he was a control freak and couldn’t trust other people in his organization.

Well, it’s kind of tough to fail when you have Andy Sutton playing number 4 minutes. That situation’s just doomed from the start.

Look at that! A good point.

Well, we’re back to the bad points. It’s difficult to provide a player like Gretzky since he was pretty much the best player ever. Also, take note that in New York this is the first year Sather has been succesful in forever and that it’s mostly on the back of Lundqvist’s career season so far.

Well, that’s because Edmonton’s management group is the worst in the league and they’re trying not to get fired. They also have a convenient amount of pull within said media.

You mean “huge glaring differences in goal (everyone in the organization’s fault for not having good goalies) and on defense (everyone in the organization’s fault for not having good defense)”.

Ah, Andy Moog. The guy who had 1 year over .900 in SV% in his first 11 (tracked) seasons? Brilliant.

How does someone who can steal your job doing your job give you confidence, exactly? Also, does Rich have any evidence for this whatsoever?

DGIR is a very new (and flawed) stat and will likely be replaced by something better in less then a year, but OK. (Jonathan Willis took down DGIR here and Gabe Desjardins critiques it here.)

Gretzky and Messier also had 900+ points in that time-three seasons. Wins are a horrible way to evaluate a goaltender’s performance.

This is likely the reason the goaltenders mentioned above and the periphery young players he’s about to mention had the amount of success they did, but it’s completely glossed over by Winter.

The easy answer here is because the kids aren’t ready for the NHL, but we’ll let Ritch continue.

Now, be honest: if you aren’t a 40-year old Oilers fan, the chances you’ve heard of Huddy, Fogolin or Siltanen because of their on-ice achievements are nil. Coffey happened to be one of the five best defenseman of all time and Lowe was a defenseman in over his head on a team that never crested the .500 mark.

I’m not sure what the point he’s trying to make here is-should Tambo be the coach? I think Renney, considering he spends 270 days of the year evaluating players in the organization, knows his players pretty well.

And be 10 games under .500 in the season Winter uses as an example, even though they had the best player of all time score over 150 points.

Because “experience”, not “skill”, is the reason teams win championships.

I can only hope that he doesn’t count 18-year-old Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, 19-year-old Taylor Hall and 20-year-old Jordan Eberle as prospects.

Actually, it does make sense, since those guys aren’t ready to play in the NHL. Thus, they are not playing in the NHL. Sending players out there to be dominated night after night by the best players in the world won’t help them develop into long-term NHLers. Also, Hockey’s not like the other “multiple sports”, so you would expect a rebuild to work differently.

Except the difference here is that Hall and Nugent-Hopkins have been sheltered in their minutes, and as a result, have put up points. If the defense had players in the mold of Hemsky, Smyth, Horcoff and Belanger then the Oilers probably could’ve afforded to keep one of those guys if they really wanted to. Unfortunately, the Oilers only good defenseman, Tom Gilbert, is alone on the back-end.

Also, please note that Ritch Winter represents David Musil.

Because they do…?

Fact: most 18-year-old forwards do not play in the NHL because they are not NHL ready.

This, kids, is what we call “confirmation bias”. Never mind that the two biggest names there had awful rookie seasons-probably because they weren’t ready for the NHL -but Winter ignores the percentages. Since 2007, the percentage of first rounders who have played regularly (>20 games) in their rookie year is a paltry 17%. That number drops to around 4% when the whole draft is counted.

Most teams that think 18 year olds generally need time to develop make the playoffs. This is a fact, because all teams seem to think this way. Kids get dominated in this league because they aren’t as fast, as strong or as savvy as verterans. Only the very best of the best make the leap out of junior.

That doesn’t work when only one half of the group actually belongs in the NHL and the other doesn’t.

Because passing a basketball and evaluating a player are the same thing.

Ritch is using this experiment rhetorically to make a point, but it’s a sloppy metaphor nonetheless. The Gorilla study is on the volitional aspects of attention and the limited cognitive “energy” people have at any one time. What Rich is actually talking about is how convention can blind people to other possibilities. Limited resources vs a more wilfull ignorance. 

The obvious? That defenseman take time to develop and not every player has the same skill set and some can’t play in the NHL at an early age?

This is a stupid argument. Because some players get better at a young age, not forcing other players to play in the NHL in a vain attempt to create a good team will give a franchise salary cap problems?

Both of these men were high draft picks that got protected ice time due to the presence of veterans like Marian Hossa and Patrick Sharp handling the tough minutes.

Which is right in an NHL player’s prime and way ahead of any 18 or 21-year-old. Also worth noting here is that the Chicago Blackhawks got into extreme cap trouble, almost causing them to miss the playoffs last year because they had to bring up rookies who were unable to handle the rigors of being an NHLer.

Karlsson starts in the offensive zone 58% of the time and Del Zotto’s PDO is a staggering 106.2. Also, Del Zotto lived off the percentages his rookie season and when those regressed his sophomore year he got kicked down to the AHL.

Signing Gretzky to a contract?

Which is a luxury you can have when you have players to pick up the slack. The failure here isn’t that the Oilers don’t have young defenseman, it’s that the defenseman they do have suck so bad they can’t afford to bring up the young ones and shelter them.

If Winter has to pick a bone with Oilers management, he should do so by criticizing the construction of the team currently on the ice, not by advocating the use of players who would likely get killed by playing regular minutes in the NHL. This isn’t the 80’s anymore, Ritch. Players are larger, faster, and there are more highly skilled guys out there that can take advantage of young kids. It’s just a bad idea.

Also, using one of the great dynasties that featured generational talents and future hall-of-famers as a template for team building is absurd. As is ignoring the fact that Sather has been one of the worst GMs in the league for the Rangers over the last decade or so.

But I digress.