FN Mailbag: March 13, 2015

It’s about that time again! The Flames continue to defy gravity and the very real chance they make the playoffs for the first time since 2010 looms large on the horizon. Hazzuh! Calgary’s improbable success continue to cause tension between fans and “advanced stats” analysts however, so I got a lot of questions related to that in this week’s mailbag. 

We also touch on Monahan comparables and some hypotheticals regarding the Flames blueline. 

Speaking as part of the advanced stats crowd, the point is often to gird against unreasonable expectations and bad conclusions. As someone who has written about the team for nearly a decade, I can attest that sudden, seemingly inexplicable spikes of success can lead to faulty conclusions or decision making when things cool off. If you don’t properly account for your strengths and weaknesses while things are good, it can lead you to asking the wrong questions when they aren’t. Of course, to many fans this feels like misanthropes raining on the parade more than anything.

That said, this clash is also more fundamental than what I’ve described. Different fans have different reasons for following the game and different ways of supporting a team. There’s definitely an element of “wanting to be right” (confirmation bias) when stats and non-stats fans argue, but sometimes it’s less about the intellectual disagreement and more about how each relates emotionally to the club. 

For example, I personally don’t follow the Flames strictly for escape. I am far more engaged by the intellectual challenge of determining causality, finding new innovations and predicting outcomes than just hoping the club wins night to night. 

One of the reasons I started writing about hockey independently, rather than hanging out a message boards, was a need to investigate and express my own fanship without having to engage in useless No True Scotsman discussions with other people who also seem more concerned with inspecting other fans’ credentials than actually talking about the game. My interest is in talking about the game in a serious, skeptical and critical manner – though I’ve come to accept that it’s not at all others fans expectation or experience. 

That’s a tough one. Unlikely? Uncanny? Gift from the gods? The Flames success this season is a crazy confluence of improbable (high shooting percentage, great OT/one-goal game record) and ability (low PIM’s, quality goaltending, Excellent top defense pairing, growth from Gaudreau and Monahan). 

Like everyone else, I’ve become relatively weary of the dug-in factions on either side of the analytics battle. I am working on an article that will seek to re-frame the debate and potentially reconcile the two sides, as much as that is possible. I can’t get into specifics yet, but I want to move beyond calling low or high possession teams “bad” or “good” and talk about fragile and robust clubs instead.  

The next stage of analytics will be effectively teasing apart individual contributions from external circumstances like teammates, coaching strategies and opposition. This goes for both possession (shot volume) and percentages (goal frequency). There are some early attempts to do this in development currently, but we’ve only taken the first few steps. Getting more (and cleaner) data from SportVu in the near future may help.

Interesting question. One I hear all the time currently is Jonathan Toews, owing to Monahan’s high personal SH% and penchant for two-way play (which has improved greatly this season after a shaky rookie season). I’m somewhat hesitant to make that comparison because it’s extremely optimistic and Toews is a superior puck distributor in my eyes. 

Jordan Staal has been the most natural comparison for me, particularly early career Staal – big centre with a  good shot and very good hockey IQ. 

I ran a Hockey Reference query to help suss out a list of comparables for Monahan. It’s a very encouraging list of names, so be sure to check it out.

At this point, probably not. Sieloff is just 21 so he has time to recover, but he’s lost copious amounts of key development time to injury during his formative years and seems to have tumbled down the organization’s prospect rankings as a result. He has frequently been a healthy scratch on the farm this year. 

Reinhart, on the other hand, is running out of runway. He’s nearing the end of his entry level contract and isn’t any closer to making the team full time than when he arrived. The influx of quality forward prospects fighting for ice time and his huge step back offensively this year (10 goals, 19 points in 50 games) has likely sealed his fate in the Flames org. 

The Wiz was acquired by the Ducks in exchange for Rene Bourque (unwanted roster player), a 2nd round pick and prospect William Karlsson (a former 2nd round pick). Wiseniewski is signed until 2017 at $5M/season, so it wasn’t a rental deal. 

I would have probably supported a move like this by Calgary. Wisniewski has been decent for years and would slide comfortably into the Flames top-4 rotation. His deal also isn’t onerous for a team with so much cap space and what the Ducks gave up hardly qualifies as essential. 

Green is known as defensively suspect offensive defender, but the truth is he’s been a positive possession player against tough competition for most of his career. He’s a very good player (when healthy), though it seems like putting up 70-point seasons from the blueline is week behind him.

That said, he’s also 29-years old and already showing some signs of breaking down. I would be willing to sign up for 3-4 years at $5M or so, but probably not longer than that.

Haha. Hahahaha. HAHAHAHAHA…