Jiri Hudler: WOWY-Zowee?

 

With the acquisition of Jiri Hudler yesterday, there’s been a lot of hemming and hawing about how good he actually is. Are his goals and underlyings merely a result of being on a very very good Detroit team? Or was he helping drive the engine of that Detroit team and other players benefited from him?

Thanks to David Johnson’s incredibly powerful stats.hockeyanalysis.com website which has easy to access WOWY tables, we can actually gain some insight into that.

Those are some very good numbers. That line basically averaged 19+ Corsi events for in every twenty minutes of icetime and 16ish against, giving approximately a +3 Corsi event per 20 minutes rate.

Still, Zetterberg is an excellent player, and Filppula pretty good as well – how does Hudler stand up without them?

Surprisingly well. His Corsi ratio without Filppula is actually better, and it only takes a small step back without Zetterberg. That’s darn good news. On the downside, most of the step back without Zetterberg is in the defensive area, as the CF/20 increases. In fact, that’s a particularly ugly CA/20. Still, the overall Corsi ratio is good, which means we should have little cause to worry. Which brings me to the third table: Filppula and Zetterberg without Hudler:

 

Here we can see that Filppula is actually pretty bad without Hudler, giving up more Corsi events than he generates- while Zetterberg is far and away an elite player. However, given that Hudler and Filppula spent more time together than Hudler and Zetterberg, we can probably assume that Zetterberg’s time away from Hudler was also time away from Filppula. 

What about the rest of the team? As a proxy for the whole of the Red Wings, I used Jimmy Howard since he played the vast majority of minutes and is on ice for everything.

 

This is what’s rather telling, in that it shows very little change: Hudler is a good player who adds to offense, but his defense can be somewhat suspect. I’d expect it’s a wash overall though.

Actually, very little. While all three played the “tough” zone starts- tough zone starts in Detroit are like cold summers in Puerto Rico. Hudler, Zetterberg, and Filppula had Offensive Zone Start percentages of 55.8%, 54.5%, and 53.8% respectively, and were in the bottom five forwards for OZ% (rounded out by Datsyuk and Bertuzzi). Similarly, QualComp tells us equally little, with Zetterberg playing the second toughest competition on the Red Wings and Filppula and Hudler coming in 5^th and 6^th out of 12 forwards with more than 50 games respectively. There’s a reason players suddenly look a lot better when they land in Detroit (and usually worse after they leave).

Hudler is not really a player to excel against the “toughs”, though he might outplay them decently enough. Instead, he’s a high offensive player who needs good circumstances for anything more than mediocre results. His contract is only a mild overpayment, but unfortunately, not really what Calgary needs right now given their greatest weakness is forwards who can outplay otehr team’s big guns.