The Hockey PDOcast - The Friday Mailbag with J-Fresh Hockey

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

Dimitri welcomes back Jack Fraser, AKA J-Fresh Hockey, as the guys crack open the Friday Mailbag and answer your listener questions. This podcast is produced by Dominic Sramaty.  The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate. If you'd like to gain access to the two extra shows we're doing each week this season, you can subscribe to our Patreon page here: www.patreon.com/thehockeypdocast/membership If you'd like to participate in the conversation and join the community we're building over on Discord, you can do so by signing up for the Hockey PDOcast's server here: https://discord.gg/a2QGRpJc84 The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate.

dressing to the mean since 2050. It's the Hockey P.D.O.cast with your host, Dmitri Filipoven. Welcome to the Hockey PEOCast. My name is Dmitra Filipovich. And joining me for today's edition of the Friday mailbag. It's my good pal, Jack, Razor, Jack. What's going on, man? I'm doing pretty well. Trying to get back in the swing of things after getting back from the World Juniors. But I think I'm starting to find my footing again here in Toronto.

I'm heading to Manitoba in two days. So not too much time to get comfortable, but. it's nice to finally be back on. I love it. All right. Yeah, so we're going to do the mailbag as usual on Fridays. If you want to get on the fun and future editions, keep sending them in. And let's get right to it.

We've got a lot of fun stuff to get through and only 50 minutes to do it. So here's the first one. Not Mikey Davis. And I don't know this user, but I suspect it actually is Mikey Davis and they're just trying to throw us off the scent. Asks, why is nobody talking about how quietly dominant Nikita Kuturob has been so far this season? Well, when you have players who have been really good like that for a while and aren't, you know, like literally right at the top of the scoring charts, I feel like they kind of flip through the cracks, especially with Kuturov, who has had the injuries and everything, obviously. I think he's kind of gone somehow a little under the radar despite the fact that he has two cup rings and another final appearance. I mean, he is having an excellent year.

I think it's an improvement on the year that he had last year not only in terms of points, but also in terms of, you know, the underlying. and everything too, but he's undeniably, I mean, one of the best playmakers in the sport, and he's a huge reason why the Lightning have continued to look like a True Cup contender, even while some of the other teams near the top of the standings last year have faltered a little bit. So, you know, nothing but good things to say about his season, but it doesn't surprise me that a player like him might slip through the cracks when we have so many shiny new toys to talk about. Yeah, there's obviously a bit of lightning fatigue,

just the fact that the team has played in three straight cup finals. we've talked about them plenty during those stretches, and he himself had the 128 point season a few years ago. I think it's fair to say, though, right, that we're just generally as fans of the NHL becoming kind of desensitized to some of the scoring totals and production we're seeing around the league, right? Like, it's almost, like, tough to fully capture a large group's attention that isn't, like, following the team on a daily basis.

Like, these players have to almost be doing just completely outlandish video game type stuff just to register because pretty much all the tall players right now are just doing things that almost like would have been unthinkable as recently as like five or six years ago. Yeah. And, you know, and it's not just Kutrov. I mean, have you heard anything about Mark Seidley scoring at an almost 50 goal pace so far this season? Because I definitely haven't.

Like there's just kind of that kind of player who's been around for a while who like until, you know, maybe when the dust settles at the end of the season, if he has like 125 or 128 or whatever points, then maybe we'll talk about them more. But especially with the lightning, I think there's just an assumption around the league that the lightning are doing the lightning thing. And, well, they are. I don't think Kutrov is going to complain too much about flying under the radar if he has another chance at getting us down the cup ring.

Well, let me give Mikey Davis some stats here then. Let's change that. Let's talk about Kutrov. So he's on pace for 125 points. Only McDavid and Tage Thompson are producing more points per minute. Third in the league and primary assists behind only Connor McDioux. David and Leon Dre Seidel and both those guys generally get to pass to the other, so that helps them. Some fun sport logic stats.

So only Zach Hyman has more inner slot shots so far this season than Brayden Point, who is Nikuta Kuturov's running mate. And of the 62, the points taken, I imagine like 55 plus of them are probably directly coming from passes from Nikita Kuturav. Only Mitch Marner has more successful passes into the slot than Akita Kuturov so far the season. And here's my favorite one that kind of helps capture why he. he's such a unique player. Of the top 15 players in terms of average offensive zone possession time per game that's listed, he does not show up on that list. And it's generally the types of players who are dominant on the puck, who are great distributors,

who kind of control the flow of the action for their teams. And Kutnikov does that, but he does that in a bit of a different way than a lot of these kind of like younger puck transporters, right? Like a Jack Hughes or Matthew Barsout always have the puck on their stick. They're always sort of dancing around trying to create on the move and probing. and waiting patiently. Kuturab is much more deliberate in terms of the way he plays.

He almost knows exactly where it's going to go, so he sets that up, and then as soon as you pass it to him, it's off a stick right away. Like, you very rarely see these moments where he's kind of holding on to it and methodically waiting. It's much more precision-based and timing-based for him.

And I think that's kind of cool because it actually does run counter to the way a lot of the other top-point producers play. Yeah, yeah, he's very opportunistic. I mean, his defensive metrics are, quite poor, but I think he's surrounded by a structure in Tampa Bay that allows him to more than compensate for that offensively. And like he said, I mean, entering the season, I easily would have had him listed as

one of the best pastors in the sport, and he's done absolutely nothing this season to get himself off that list. So, yeah, nothing but could think to say about him. Okay. Next one. Iron Caniak asks, are the Canes the unluckiest team in the league for scoring actual goals? This is something we've obviously talked about.

plenty of times you're in the PDO guest, but I did want to rehash this because I think the framing of this question, and it was attached with a chart that shows that in every offensive category, they're like first or second in terms of, you know, shots, shot attempts, everything. But then in goals, they're kind of middle of the pack. And I guess the pushback to this is the phrase luckiest or unluckiest. Like, lucky implies as a chance, the kind of chance is dictating as opposed to them being responsible for those results, if you know what I mean. So I actually don't think they're the unluckiest because it's kind of like part of

how they play in a way. Now they've been poorer at 5-1-5 in terms of goals than they were last year, and they've been slightly less efficient in that regard. But this is kind of what they do. It hasn't necessarily changed that much from previous seasons, I don't think. No, this isn't our first rodeo. I think it's fair to say. I mean, like, you know, you look at the results that the hurricanes have had in terms of

expected goals and scoring chances and shots and everything compared to their goals. I mean, you just go down the list for the past, you know, seemingly like six or seven years. Like you can always pretty much count on them laying behind compared to the rest of the league. A lot of that is a function of how they play. Some of that I guess is probably a function of the kinds of players that they have brought in. And, I mean, that was the whole idea behind getting Max Patch ready and having him be kind of the marquee addition in the forward group is that he is kind of that pure finisher. and he creates plenty of quantity as well. We've seen him already fit in very well with Carolina.

I think he's kind of the perfect player to add in the way that I think we were very positive about the fit with Brent Burns in the offseason as well. Pat Truddy can create the quantity. He can get to this flight. He can make those dangerous chances. But I think unlike a lot of the players that they've had or that they've kind of moved through,

he can put them in the net. And that's kind of the whole idea of taking on that whole contract for free was that he fits that niche of exactly what they need. And if they are going to, you know, again, it's not maybe necessarily luck. But if they are going to see out this process and turn some of these chances into goals, I would bet that he's going to have a pretty big part to play in that. Well, here's what I wanted to run by. I was kind of curious re-dick on this.

So I think natural statric has them right now at third in high danger chances generated. and third and expected goals. And then when you look at on Micah's site, on hockey biz, their shot chart, there's three big kind of dense red blobs, right? They're at the right point, the left point, and the net front.

And I'm curious, like, I'm kind of skeptical of those, of the fact that they actually are generating the third highest rate of expected goals and high danger chances, because it feels like it's probably being overcounted or overinflated by a lot of, like,

rebounds where they're jamming it in from tough angles, kind of like that. The whole Brady Kachuck thing that we've been talking about for the past couple years. Now, do you feel like that's kind of the case here where if you just look at it, it's like, oh, wow, well, they're 28th in shooting percentage, but their third and expected

goals, clearly we should expect them to regress, where in reality, that's probably not. Like, I actually think they probably generally are kind of a middle of the pack offensive team. Yeah, this is a real, like, fool me once, full me twice, full me three times, fool me four times, full me five times situation. Like, we know the deal with the hurricanes. We have this conversation. It seems like every year and then sometimes again in the playoffs, too. Yeah, you know, I mean, I don't have access to the ultra-fancy, you know, like proprietary data

that would maybe factor in some of the extra stuff that the public models aren't picking up or the hurricanes aren't doing. But yeah, every time I see the hurricanes right at the top of those kind of high-danger chances or expected goals charts offensively, there is always that skepticism that runs through me that maybe there's something not being accounted for. And it comes down to the way that they create offense, which, like you alluded to, is a lot of point shots, a lot of puck retrievals, a lot of tips and rebounds and net mouth scrambles. And those plays look really good on a heat map. They look really good in a model whose, you know, primary variable is shot location and

which can't factor in some of the more, you know, nuanced subtleties of what goes into making a chance dangerous. But when it really comes down to it, you're not always super short. shocked when that process isn't really resulting in actual goals. You know, as many dividends as it may pay in terms of, you know, puck possession and defense, which I think it absolutely does. You really do kind of have to create offense in some different ways, maybe to get the puck actually in the net at the rate you'd like.

I do wonder, like, you know, Petruity in his four games that he's played has looked great playing with, with Jarvis and Ajo as the trigger man, and we'll see on him. Burns is fitted nicely with Jacob Slavin as we expected on top pair. wonder though like the acquisition cost for them was so low they basically just got to absorb them on their cap sheet for nothing and it's a no-brainer in that regard but i do wonder whether those were the types of additions that kind of materially address that underlying issue for them that we keep dancing around because come the postseason again they're presumably going to have to face and

igorish as turk and they're going to have to face an andrew vasselowski they're going to have to face not only a stingy defensive team that limits where you shoot from but also a dominant goalie that can just eat those up without any issues. And so I'm not sure why they haven't kind of been more deliberate about identifying this and attacking this and bringing in elite shooters beyond the fact that those players are generally flawed in other areas and probably wouldn't fit in with how Rod Brindamor likes to play. Or maybe it's a matter of those guys are also hot commodities and generally come with pretty expensive acquisition costs.

And this is a Hurricanes team that doesn't really want to get into the bidding war of trying to get those guys. Yeah, I think there's a lot of that. I mean, you know, like you said, Burns kind of plays directly into the way that they've been playing. Like, it really is kind of a doubling down. You know, Pat Scheretti, I think, is more along the lines of what you would see in terms of actually kind of addressing the problems that have come.

And, I mean, clearly the hurricanes love the way that they play. You know, they love the Brindamore style of hockey. I don't think they're going to, like, fire him and bring in Paul Maris or something next year because they hate the style and they don't think that it's going to work. I mean, I've had my skepticism with whether that style is going to be able to get them to a Stanley Cup just because, you know, I think I've maybe spoken to this on the pod before when we were doing playoff previews, just the sheer amount of just energy and exhaustion and exertion that it takes to play that style where you're constantly just forechecking, aggressively,

retrieving, prox, retrieving rebounds, eating sticks in the face and net mouth scrambles. Like on paper, it kind of seems like the style of play that would be designed for tight playoff hockey. But I do sometimes wonder whether maybe the gap starts to run out by the time you get into a deep run. But, I mean, clearly they like the way they play hockey. They see that the way to address those issues is just to have, you know, maybe some more talented scores. You know, they've drafted talented scores. They obviously brought in patch ready. maybe they haven't really had the opportunity

to directly acquire those kinds of players for the most part but again like you said if patch ready can be like 40 goal patcher ready in the playoffs then that I think would go a pretty long way towards helping things out yeah I was just on our pal Thomas Dances show before this

and we were talking about the hurricanes because the Canucks are playing in this weekend and he brought up the point of like when you talk to players who have been through Carolina and are playing on different teams now, so they're kind of more willing to talk about that process. They bring up the fact that throughout these regular season games, they feel internally like they are going into every game with an advantage because they're going to outwork and out hustle every single team they play. It's like on a Tuesday in January where you're playing against the 24th best team,

you're going to be able to just dominate them in that regard and really beat them to a pulp that way. Then when you get to the playoffs and every team, team is trying their absolute hardest on every single shift. It becomes slightly easier to find, slightly more difficult to find those advantages. But this is a team that has won a lot of games over the past couple years and is once again doing just fine. And I don't necessarily have any issue with viewing it through the lens of, all right, well, we're going to be really good in the regular season. We're going to hang around. And the playoffs can kind of be

random and very luck-based. And so if we just stick around long enough for four or five, six years here, maybe one of these years, things go our way. We avoid one of these hot goalies. and all of a sudden we win a Stanley Cup. I think there's certainly worse strategies to trying to win a Stanley Cup than doing that. Yeah. No, I think you're right. If there's one thing we've learned from the past 10 years or so, you just want to give yourself as many shots as possible

and put yourself in as good a position. And with the hurricanes, I think their asset management and the players they've prioritized going after have generally been strong. And I think they have as good a chance as anybody at making a deep run this year. and maybe we'll be talking about this stuff in May or June. Yeah. Okay. Let's get into player cards here because I got a bunch of questions about that.

So the first one, your pal Dan, asks, how does Jack gather data to make his player cards? That's one that I've gotten pretty frequently. So I'll let you lay out kind of the methodology behind it. Well, that's nice of your friend Dan to ask that. So I make them collaboratively with a data scientist named Patrick Bacon. He goes by top-down hockey. He built a whole whack of hockey models, including this war model.

And the way that he gets that data is essentially by scraping the NHL's public play-by-play data that they publish. He does lots of fancy math to run, you know, ridge regressions and stuff, to try to suss out the impact that players have in and build the war model. And then that feeds directly into the player cards, which update on a daily basis. In terms of how the data gets processed, there's stuff that I've done in terms of working out how things should be weighted year by year to make sure that it's as predictive as possible. You know, obviously with any data like this, you're basically just trying to get as close to something solid as possible because nothing's perfect, nothing's airtight. But you want to present it as clearly as you can. and also try to maximize the amount of takeaways that people can get from it without, I think, being totally misled.

So obviously those launched this week, we kind of reached the 50% of the season mark, which is when I think we feel confident that the sample size is solid enough that we can start drawing some interpretations from it. But, yeah, there's a lot that goes by behind the scenes, and Patrick is a huge, huge part of that. and I'm always grateful when he, you know, when he gets the data in and does the magic with it because they would not happen without him. Yeah, well said. Okay, well, then a follow-up here, Rock Lobstrass, which player card good or bad has surprised you the most when you saw it this year?

There's two. Brady Shea and Philip Roanick. Two players who I think it's fair to say were in that much maligned, category by analytics people a couple years ago. Shea, I think, he started out quite strong with the New York Rangers when he was coming up. I think he had a couple years there where maybe what he was bringing to the table was more in the physicality department than the play driving department. Last year, I think, was a step-up for him.

And then this year, the two-way results have just been extraordinary. And there's a reason that, you know, when guys like Domel's decision are running their, their models to come up with Norse contenders that he's showing up there. And I think it's a similar thing with Philip Roanick. Like when he signed his extension, I kind of had him in that category of guys who are solid enough but are being played way, way, way too much and in a role that they're not prepared for. The underlines were always pretty brutal, similarly to Shea.

Last year, a little better, you know, looking like kind of a top forward defenseman. And then this year, I mean, like, if you're going by the underlines alone, like, in the Norris conversation, which is. absolutely absurd and you know it's not quite tage Thompson but it is a pretty shocking turn of events so I've I'm always pleased to see guys who have maybe had the wrong end of the analytical darling stick a couple years ago suddenly break out and enter these kinds of conversations and I'm pleased that it happened with those too yeah it's always cool when when when when when it spits out the output and you're like

all right I just go through the video or go back and see what's happening I think a similar thing happened with me and Josh Morrissey a couple weeks ago, right? Where I was like, I mean, he was putting up more traditional stats in terms of just like on pace for 90 plus points, but it made me wonder what was going on and you go back and watch. It's like, hey, he's playing pretty clearly differently this year under a Rick bonus compared to them past. And our Palmeries are using them much more aggressively in terms of just attaching him offensively and he can attack whenever he wants. And so part of it is lock based in the sense that pucks are going in more for him when he's on the ice.

But also he's clearly playing a different way. and so we should recalibrate our expectations. And he's someone as well who, you know, his player card in terms of the performance that he's been at has spiked pretty significantly this season as well. Yeah, well, I mean, especially offensively, like to a level that I never would have expected him to be capable of. Like, the points are reflected in the underlines in a way that I think is pretty shocking to anybody who's been talking about him for the past couple of years.

But yeah, I mean, like, you know, analytics people get a rep for being kind of negative and liking to dump on players and stuff. But it really is always a pleasure when a guy who you've been critical of in the past, you know, like, I mean, for example, like Drew Dowdy three years ago or four years ago when he had those two really crummy seasons in Los Angeles when that team was kind of starting to enter the basement. You know, a lot of people, of myself included, I think, looked at that sudden decline and said, you know, this player has kind of started, his decline far earlier than expected.

This contract is going to be brutal. how is they going to get rid of it? And then, you know, as the team started to get more competitive, I think, you know, I've heard from, you know, scouts and people who have watched this game that they see just a higher level of commit and effort from them because the team is starting to win some games and it has really translated to the underlying numbers.

And it is great to see because there's nothing less fun than a big albatross contract. And we've seen a lot of players around the league, you know, like Jeff Skinner, for example, or even Eric Carlson, where it is a lot nicer, when the talented players in the league are playing up to their giant contracts than when the big ticket guys aren't living up to it. We're just talking about big cap dumps and albatrosses and everything.

Yes. Okay, one more question here before we go to break. Canadian beer drinker asks, I think Nino Nita Ryder would be a great deadline pickup for a few teams. What do you think the acquisition cost will be for him given the current market? And let's assume that a debt rate would happen with no retention. Now, he is on the books for four. million this year but also next year and i think that complicates things big time because we've seen

that the appetite for teams to take on money beyond this year is is pretty much non-existent and so i i think the acquisition cross is assuming that let's say Nashville falls out of it and u.sie starro stops carrying him to the degree he has and they decide to look ahead as opposed to trying to kind of trudge along for the rest of the season and they want to trade them i i i think i'm very very curious whether they'd be able to get anything at all just because it seems like this is the type of player the teams are just simply not paying for. And we saw it this summer where the best he could do was four by two from the national predators. Yeah. Like I just have no gauge for like what that extra year means in terms of player values anymore. Because like you said, like it really

seems like anything that has any extra term on it at all is just a complete no-go. Like even even in waivers, you know, depending on how good the player is. And, I mean, teams in the summer are more than happy to sign players to those kinds of contracts, and then suddenly they turn around and anything that's not just one year is completely anathema. I'm, unsurprisingly, I'm pretty big on meter rider as a player. I think as far as 5-1-5 goal scoring goes, he's one of the most efficient players in the league. Good play driver, not a defensive liability by any stretch of the imagination. I think would be a really good middle-six pickup for any contender, honestly.

The question will just be if they can fit $4 million into their cap structure next year, which, I mean, for a player of that caliber, you'd think that they should be able to. But I think teams are just so anxious about the idea of filling up their cap with anything that's not right at the top of the lineup at the moment. Of course, until July 1st comes when they're willing to dump their wallets out, it wouldn't surprise me if a player like that ends up either not going for very much sure are not going for anything at all and maybe getting revisited in the summer.

It's absolutely astounding to me how teams are just unwilling to take other people's mistakes. Not that Nido Neederrider $4 million next season a mistake by any means, but take on a contract, someone else is signed. And it's like, nope, this is a no-fly zone for me. And then they'll immediately turn around and spend that money on a worst player because it's like,

all right, well, I'm getting to sign this contract. And then we can put out a press release about how we got this new player. It's like, why not just get a, better player that's already under contract, especially if you can get them for very cheap, which we've seen, like, guys passing through waivers. And I don't know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's happening in the league. And I don't think we should, we should, we should, like, we need to factor that into whatever conversations we have about,

oh, what can this player fetch on the open market. Yeah, I'm not, you know, I'm, I'm no lease fan when it comes to, like, complaining about the flat cap or anything like that. But I will say, I will not regret it too much if we soon get out of a situation where quality players are being considered negative value assets just because they have another year on their contracts at fair salary. Yeah, I mean, needle rider is second on the Preds. And in scoring, as you mentioned, as a history of being a 5-on-5 needle mover in terms of impacts

and has the type of profile, right, like a big body who gets a lot of his shots from the slot and around the net, that any theory would be a player that would be highly appetizing to pretty much every playoff team. And yet, it seems like if the Predators decided to trade them, they couldn't get anything better than like a third round pick or something. It's a ridiculous climate aware in terms of how contracts are being viewed, but it is the reality. So need to factor that in. All right, Jack, let's take a break here in the program. And then when we come back, we're going to keep answering the listener questions. You are listening to the Hockey P.D.O.cast streaming on the

Sportsnet Radio Network. All right, we're back here on the HockeyPedio cast doing the Friday mailbag with my pal, Jack Fraser. Let's keep it going. Here's a question from Jonathan Jameson asks, what is your favorite team to watch so far this season in terms of play style and least favor? Let's take it from the positive perspective first. What's your favorite team? Well, one that I've, you know, like I will generally kind of watch, you know, like the lease for the Oilers or the Avalanche when they're on, maybe the Avalanche a little bit less so far this season. But I definitely have been tuning into a lot more Buffalo Sabres games than I ever thought that I would.

I know that that's like the chalk pick for a fun team to watch right now, but there's just so much going on with that team. Like there's, you know, there's young players who you want to see. There's obviously Tage and, you know, Jeff Skinner has been a lot of fun to watch too. You know, I think them and the New Jersey Devils would probably be kind of the top two in terms of teams that I think unexpectedly kind of snuck up on me in terms of being teams that I will actually kind of actively seek out on any given night. It is a chalk pick, but it's the correct pick.

You can't go with anyone other than a Sabres. They lead the league and shots off the rush via Corey Schneider tracking. They have this perfect combination of elite individual talent with Tage Thompson and Alex Tuck and Rasmus Daly and Own Power and so on and so forth, combined with an elite playing style as well where they're exclusively taking shots from high danger areas at 5-1-5 essentially. They lead the league in goals. They also give them up at the ninth highest rate,

which is in terms of how they take that next step to becoming a legitimate playoff team and contender, they're going to have to figure out, but for the time being to answer the purposes of this question, that makes them even more fun because they get into these fun, high-scoring environments. What's your least favorite team been? And you can't say the Blackhawks.

Yeah, I don't know if I really have, like, at least, like there's just kind of like a large swath of teams that I won't actively seek out. Like, if I'm watching one of the games, it will be most of, because I'd like to watch the team that's playing them. Right. You know, and that's a pretty broad category.

Okay. Let me give you one. Yeah, you might have one in particular that is fitting. Well, I'll give you the blue jackets. I assume they're in that large swath of the teams, and clearly they're like amongst those whatever five, six teams that are going to be jockeying for position to increase their odds for Connor Bedard. But I think we went into the season knowing the defense was not going to be good and was going to be a work in progress.

they were quite bad defensively in that regard last year. But with some of their young players and then bringing in Johnny Goodroll, I think there was a reason to believe that, well, at least they could kind of be almost this version of the lawful sabres we're seeing, where they've got fun, offensive players, and you're able to score some goals, get into some shootouts, and instead, their 30th in goals, 28th or worse, in high danger chances, shots, in expected goals generated.

They've been, by any measure, one of the worst, what are three offensive teams in the league. And I didn't really see that coming, of course. you know, losing Zach Wrenski for pretty much the entire of the season was very deflating to them and they just don't have any players like him to kind of pick up the slack in his absence. But I think it's been disappointing for me just because I expected they'd at least be like more aesthetically pleasing and really they've just been bad in pretty much every area. Yeah, I think that's a good one.

And especially in terms of surprises because like you really wouldn't think even if even right now if somebody said, oh yeah, the Blue Jackets are one of the worst teams in the NHL, you would figure that they'd at least be doing kind of something offensively as well to go with stuff. But like, you know, at 5-1-5, they don't generate chances or goals on the power play. They don't really do anything. Like if you like to watch a team give up a bunch of chances, then maybe there's some appeal there for you. But yeah, I think that that's a good pick. That might be, you know, the equivalent of the Sabres and the Devils in terms of surprisingly just bummer teams.

Yes. Okay. Jonathan Jameson here asks, are the Cracken? actually good as well. That was the second question. And this is one that we could probably spend the rest of the show on, but we'll try to keep it as tight as we can so we can answer a few others. But clearly we can take this one in any number of directions where I think Dom's model has them up to 93% playoff probability since the start of the new year. There's 7 and 0 and about scored teams 33 to 11 along the way. And so they're getting the results. I think there's still

some level of skepticism. I think largely relying on Martin Jones the way they have to play 30. games so far and then also the fact they lead the league in shooting percentage are two clear sort of reasons why I think people are skeptical of their record doesn't is it reflective of how good they actually are but at the same time they're clearly significantly better than they were last year at least and I'm kind of viewing it through that lens more so than viewing it kind of in isolation in terms of just how good they are this so far this year yeah I would say that like they're an okay team that is playing like a brilliant team yes I think they're like second in their division like eighth in the league right now.

I don't think they're that good. But I think that they're a slightly above average team that is having breaks go for them at about the same rate that they went the other direction last year. Like last year they had like the worst goaltending imaginable. They had, you know, pretty crummy finishing as well. And that was on top of an already completely dysfunctional team offense. Their defense, I don't think, is quite as good as it was last year. But it's still top 10 in terms of scoring.

suppression. Their offense is actually somewhat functional. I think that the moves that they made in the offseason to, you know, I think like the hurricanes, like to address, you know, strategically areas in their lineup that were fundamentally stopping them from being able to compete. You know, obviously, I mean, the finishing aspect has really worked out. I mean, they have targeted and benefited from having players who are very efficient scores like, you know, Burkowski.

I mean, McCann has always been a very efficient score. and he's been, you know, I think the most efficient five-on-five-wheel score in the league this year. But even at the bottom of the lineup, you know, guys like Daniel Sprong and even Ely Tollivan and now. And this is all with Oliver Bjorks-rand actually not finishing his chances very well, and that's not something that I would have expected,

considering his track record in that area. I mean, they're scoring more 5-1-5 goals than anybody in the league, which is insane. And the big part of it is that I think they have the highest shooting percentage at 5-on-5 in the league by, like, over a point. point, which is not going to sustain itself, but the fact that they are a reasonably okay offensive team, I think, is a step way in the right direction because they were definitely not that last season.

And like you said, I mean, Martin Jones, like they needed their goalpending to not be, like, pee-wee level this year, and it hasn't been very good. I mean, Jones has been really hot and cold. I think he's on a bit of an upswing right now. He started the season well. He had a really tough stretch there in the middle. Grubauer is Grubauer. It's easy to envision how this thing could completely fall apart.

But like you said, the improvements are there. This is already a very weird team anyway. So maybe we shouldn't be really surprised by anything that happens with him at this point. Yeah, I don't think, yeah. Leading the league in five-on-five scoring, shooting 12.3% across all situations, clearly not representative. I will say like they added shooting talent clearly and they prioritized out this offseason and the approach is clearly better as well whether that's because they have better players now

or because they had worked on that specifically in the off season but fewer point shots doing a better job getting to the middle of ice anecdotally just watching them like they play watching them last night against the Bruins they play at a very like high tempo pace as well and there's a lot of pre-shot movement there's very little kind of guy methodically bringing the puck up the ice walking into the zone and then shooting it's a lot of just puck balancing around them trying to create aggressively in that regard. And so, yeah, I mean, the depth is there as well, right? Maybe that that's something we should point out as well in the sense that they have 11 guys

with 20 plus points already. Like it's up and down through the lineup. You're getting massive production from a Daniel Sprong on your fourth line. Like there's very few shifts when you're playing against the Cracken where you can afford to just completely take it off because they don't have a single thread or it's like, oh, this kind of meat and potatoes fourth line that can't score at all is going to come out there. And so we can take a bit of a 40 second. breather here. When you play the Cracken, you can't really afford to do that. And so I think that's

helping them, especially in the regular season, where it is very effort-based, considering what we just talked about with the hurricanes. Yeah, I think the bigger surprise for me is maybe how well their blue line is doing. And again, like, they're not completely blowing the doors down or anything. But like the fact that, you know, they brought back a very similar to blue line to what they had last year, losing Mark Hordano, you know, adding in, I mean, you know, Justin Schultz, who I, I don't think any of us are super, super enthusiastic about. And Vince Dunn stepping in on their top pair. And, I mean, I tweeted about this, like, last week.

Like, Vince Dunn's trajectory has just been an absolute mess that doesn't make any sense whatsoever, where he goes from crushing it with the blues in a sheltered role to kind of falling off with that team and eventually finding himself exposed and shipped out of town. And then last year, he was really not good on the crack. second pair, like kind of a major weak point on their blue line. And now suddenly he's playing on the top pair, huge minutes, really tough competition, like, you know, very disadvantageous deployment in terms of the matchups he's getting. And he's putting up the best results and point totals of his career.

So I guess that'll learn you to try to understand anything that has to go on with this cracking team. But I feel like that's been a big part for them is being able to fill in some of those things. because like when I was looking at that blue line going into the season, I wasn't like Philip Grubauer worried about it, but I did think that it was going to hold them back pretty far, and it really hasn't.

Yeah. Okay, Tyler Moore here asks, with the traded line coming up, do the devils start using their picks and prospects this year to make trades and try to make a real run of it, or do they just go with the guys they currently have and take their chances in the offseason then? What should the aggression level be here for the devils

because they similarly had kind of a bit of an up-and-down season, right? They come out of the gate incredibly hot. They go through a bit of a rough stretch. Now they're leveling back. Their play hasn't necessarily dropped throughout. They just kind of went through a bit of a rough stretch in terms of pucks going in for them. But the results they had. Now they're back on track a little bit.

Where do you see them in terms of where they're at in the metro? And then also how aggressively they should be viewing this season compared to balancing it with like, let's take a four to six-year view of this instead. I mean, I still think that they're an excellent team. I mean, their goals share, they're expected goals share. The underlines are all very strong. The finishing, I mean, you know, who knows how much of that is the model's not quite capturing things properly, but, you know, it's lagging behind a little bit.

They had a bit of a cold streak there. Look, I mean, I think the devils are a great team this year, but I would have an eye towards not necessarily, you know, trying to maximize four years from now or maximize this year. I would like to see them make a move that kind of sets their team up for a little bit. I mean, I've been fan casting Tima Meyer to San to New Jersey since the start of the season. I still would really like to see that happen. I mean, I'm sure the sharks would like to sign them for like an eight-year, 10 million-a-year contract or something like that.

But if that's the kind of player that shakes loose, like this is a great opportunity for the Devils because they have those assets because I think they've kind of jumped back into a really good spot a little sooner than expected. You know, I don't think a lot of people expected this season to go the way it has so far, and they do have a very strong asset base. So, like, that would be the kind of move that I'd like to see them make would be to target somebody who's going to be on their team for the next five years or so, or more as opposed to maybe making the traditional, you know, just deadline ad of a rental, because while that might help them, I think that this might be one of those situations,

like we said, where they want as many kicks at the can of this as possible and they're set up in terms of their star players to have that opportunity. I don't think that this season is, you know, the last we'll see of the New Jersey Devils as a legit cup contender, and certainly not to the same extent that you have teams like Pittsburgh and Washington who are right at the end of their windows. Like things are just opening up for the Devils, and I think they have an opportunity

to launch themselves into that contender status for the next couple of years. Yeah, I'd like to see them approach this ambitiously, right? Those like traditional traded line moves of, oh, let's add a third-parent defenseman or, you know, a middle six-winger, like don't ultimately do that much for me. I'd like to see them try to have their cake and eat it too. If you look at the cap sheet, Andreas Janssen, Eric Halle, Thomas Attar, Miles Wood, varying levels of usefulness in terms of the,

the names I just listed, but the thing they have in common is all those guys are UFAs who are off the books this summer, and that frees up a ton of financial flexibility for them. Now they're going to clearly have to allocate and prepare to give some of that to Jesper Bratt's upcoming extension and pay raise and a few other RFAs. But when you have Jack Hughes at $8 million in year one of an eight-year deal, I think that's the best non-ELC asset in the league right now in terms of a contract where you're getting bang for your buck. And so that allows them, it gives them such a competitive advantage to kind of creatively add around them. And so, yeah, the idea of trading, even if you pay a 110 cents a dollar or something for Timel Meyer, and then extend them and keep them there for the next five, six years, I think you can justify doing that because it's going to make your team significantly better this season where you're already on the short list of contenders. And it's such a perfect fit moving forward.

So that's something, like I just, I can't get past that one. I know there's other ways they could go about it. but for me, Meyer to the Devils is almost like a no-brainer. Like I feel like we need to just make that trade happen manifested and call it in. Yeah, it kind of reminds you of the penguins like in the early 2010s. Like not in a one-to-one sense, but in the sense that the thing that they really, really need is like, a really high-end winger. Like, you know, like with the penguins in the early 2010s,

it was maddening that they would never acquire these high-end, you know, top winger's to play with Sidd, before, you know, the Kessel trade obviously happened, because, like, they had the centers, they had the defensemen, and, you know, the thing that it's theoretically the easiest to acquire was the thing that they just wouldn't do. And I think the devils are in a similar situation where obviously they're loaded down the middle, like nobody's going to be displacing Hughes or He's here

for the next several years. Defensively, I mean, they've made good acquisitions there recently, but they also obviously have, like, two, like, blue-chip defensemen coming up who are expected to be taking roles on that team soon. Like, they don't need to be talking about, like, the Eric Carlson trade or things like that, you know, that other teams, other ambitious teams might be thinking about. Like, they can focus on a thing that's relatively easy to get,

which is a high-end winger, and it's not going to be easy and it's not going to be cost-free. But in terms of a team-building philosophy, it's pretty much the thing that you would prefer to want to have to get the most because they are out there. they're not quite as pricey in terms of assets as other positions maybe. And once they get a guy like Tima Meyer, for example, like that really does kind of lock a core into place that you would think

would be able to at least compete for several years in the future. So, you know, I'm right with you on that. Yeah, I love it. Okay. Last question here. Eric asks, why are the Panthers bad? I mean, this is every time I do a mailbag, I feel like at least I get two or three questions about people,

just trying to make sense of this panther's season. There's clearly any number of ways to take this. And, you know, you just watch some of these recent games that they've played. And it's especially compared to last year where almost everything was going their way, right? They'd go down four nothing. And then all of a sudden, it would just snowball and they quickly score like five goals and come back and steal a victory. Everything's been so much more kind of like lethargic and toothless almost offensively. Now, part of that is they have very limited flexibility.

so when an Anton Lindel or Sasha Barcova out of the lineup, they really can't replace them. They're literally playing shorthanded. And then also the coaching change as well. But it's interesting because statistically, especially if you just go just purely on natural statric, it looks very similar to last year. The private models view it very differently, I know.

Like they're much less high on them and have shown a clear change in terms of them attacking significantly less off the rush and being much more in-zone sequence-based. But they're getting the shots. getting the chances, they're just not scoring at nearly the level that they did last season. Yeah, I'm interested to hear that about the private models, because I haven't seen any of that stuff since probably about halfway through December. And I do remember the Panthers still ranking tops in the league and expect a goals percentage

by the sport logic model, which was one reason, in fact, that I was maybe a little bit more bullish than I should have been on their chances of progression. I mean, like you alluded to, like the public model that I have in front of me, like, you know, the underlines are maybe a step back defensively, you know, still very strong offensively, you know, just outside the top five in terms of their scoring chance shares and everything with awful finishing and goal-tending, where generally speaking, you would say that that is a recipe for regression and maybe they will regress a little bit. But I think like you alluded to, there's some things that are just off about the way

the team's playing. I know our friend Korr-Schneider wrote a piece from McKean the other day, where he diagnosed one of their biggest issues is how they play when they're down a goal, where last year they were playing extremely aggressively, and it was really working out for them. And this year, they're actually kind of, you know, I'm on the verge of losing those minutes, which is never what you want to be when you're chasing leads. I think there is kind of a bit of things going on where they are, like, when they are, you know, controlling a game, they really take it over. and they really kind of, you know, rack up the chances and rack up the goals and win big time.

But those closer games, they're really just kind of not able to assert themselves the way that they did last season. And, you know, that's a problem. I mean, especially as you get further down on a season where, you know, I mean, the players are humans, they get frustrated. They, you know, might have some issues in terms of, you know, like they see themselves as pretty, increasingly far out of a playoff spot and they're disappointed. It is kind of a tough thing to expect them to be able to turn around, especially when those fundamental aspects of the game stylistically that were leading to their success last year

have been mostly stripped away in favor of a style of play that is, I would imagine, probably quite a bit less enjoyable than it was last year. So, I mean, if you asked me a month ago, I would have said that I thought the Panthers were primed to regress and that they were going to have a huge second half of the season. But I think as we get further and further on, this may just be a bit of a lost year and a lost opportunity for a group that, I mean, on paper,

should be queued up to do pretty impressive things. Yeah, this is a couple weeks old now, but I remember kind of around that mid-December range, I asked Stephen Valaket for what Clearside Analytics had them at. And last year, they were far and away, number one, in terms of expected goals generated off the rush in particular. I mean, they were in like literally every single offensive category. But this year, that one specifically had come back down to the middle of the pack

and they just weren't nearly as dangerous off the rush. Maybe the volume in terms of how they were moving up and down the ice and number opportunities they were getting was there. But they, you know, the efficiency on it in terms of what they were meaningfully generating off of it was significantly lower. And so I think whether that is a personnel issue in terms of the changes they made, whether that is the coaching change and Paul Murray's coming in and changing that up. I think they really miss Anthony Duclare because he was one of the few players they had that

could kind of single-handedly like the whole team played uptempo, but he was the one player who could almost just take the puck himself and just go up down to ice really quickly. And so they kind of miss that element as well. I think there's a lot of factors here clearly a play, but I think I'm not panicking in the sense that I think they're better in their results have shown, but they don't have their first round pick this year and they're clearly falling significantly behind the race, especially against some of their Atlantic Division rivals. And so, yeah, maybe it is time to start panicking about them because I don't think we can

just kind of expect them to turn this around eventually. It's clear that things have changed at least to some degree from last year. Yeah, like I'm looking at the Corey numbers and he has them eighth in terms of their rush opportunities, which, I mean, generally speaking, usually, that wouldn't be like a huge cause for concern. I mean, there are good teams. I mean, the avalanche are right behind them. They're right there with Boston and Tampa Bay and some very good teams. But the thing is, like, they were just so aggressive off the rush last year. And it was such a fundamental way that they play. And I think the idea with this stylistic shift has been, oh, like, this is going to make us more

ready for the playoffs when the game flows down and when we're not able to, you know, exert our will on teams the way that we did last season. But you do, have to get to the playoffs before you can play a stylistically playoff style game in the playoffs. So, yeah, it's been, I think, a little upsetting to watch. I mean, it's never fun to watch a team that has that level of talent struggle the way that they have just because, you know, you do kind of feel rotten. I mean, I guess the avalanche the season are kind of a similar situation. I mean, obviously their problems have been more so injury and maybe personnel based.

but, you know, having the avalanche and the Panthers kind of languishing in the middle of the league right now is not something that I was expecting, and it's not something that I'm too happy to see just because I am always an advocate for as high a caliber of playoff hockey as possible. And I feel like those two teams have so much talent that it would be nice to see them in better spots and, you know, able to kind of assuredly join the fray for the Stanley Cup. Yesterday they were such, just like a shot of adrenaline throughout the regular season and everything has been so much more difficult this year. I guess the one big winner is Andrew Burnett.

He must be feeling pretty good about how things have turned out here. All right, Jack, this is a blast. Thank you to listeners for sending the questions. I'll let you plug some stuff here quickly on the way out where can people check you out. Well, you can follow me at J. Fresh Hockey. Like I said, the player cards just got posted and updated this week so you can subscribe to the Patreon and access all of those. plus plenty of other good stuff.

You can also read my work on EP Ringsside, where we both write. I just wrote today about Bo Horvats game and why I think Peconc should trade him, which is probably not a super controversial opinion at this point, but there are still some people who disagree with it somehow. And, yeah, I think that pretty much covers me. All right, man. Well, all I have to plug is the P. is the PDOCAS, which you're listening to right now.

So if you enjoy this episode, go smash that five-star button, wherever you listen and leave us a nice rating and review. And that's it for another week of the PDOCAS. We will be back Monday with a whole lot more. So thank you for listening to us here on the Sportsnet Radio Network.