Earlier this week, the Montreal Canadiens sent Torey Krug Kids Jersey Alex Semin to the AHL, and then terminated his contract so that he could go to the KHL instead. He'll play the rest of the season for Metallurg Magnitogorsk (assuming they don't get sick of him, too). That makes three pro teams for Semin in the last eight months or so, and two of them were so sick of him they just let him walk. In fact, Semin is still collecting checks from his Carolina buyout to the tune of $2.33 million, and will be until 2021.He is such an interesting case in the old school versus new school way of evaluating hockey, perhaps the most important one.The underlying numbers all say he's good or even excellent. And to some extent, so too do the more traditional numbers, because up until a few days ago, he was 30th among active players in points per game, at 0.8 per night. Which explains why, after he played his way out of Washington (and boy will some Caps people badmouth him at the slightest opportunity) and only earned a one-year deal with Carolina, then a five-year deal. Both were worth a $7 million AAV to Jim Rutherford, who's pretty old-school as these things tend to go.But on that one-year show-me contract, he Tanner Glass Youth Jersey put up 44 points in a lockout-shortened 44 games, and even in 2013 was basically a 50-plus point-scorer if he'd stayed healthy. The production suffered the next year, even if the possession was still dominant a score-adjusted 54.6 percent but Carolina decided it had enough. So off he goes to Montreal, where he's scratched a ton of times, only has a single goal in 15 games, still dominates possession (56.6 percent) and is told, basically, not to bother coming back. On a $1.1 million AAV.This seems an awful lot like the misevaluation of a player, because while you can certainly say he's been unlucky to some extent, he's also not doing particularly well for himself. In 15 games, and yes, limited minutes, he only generated two shot attempts for himself from high-danger areas. Two high-quality scoring chances from a player with his talent level, regardless of usage, just isn't acceptable. And it's therefore not going to matter very much to his employer that they continue to get more high-danger attempts per 60 minutes than their opponents when he's on the ice.Semin got run out of three different towns in five years for his lack of results despite the good underlying numbers when he was on the ice, and to some extent you have to say the issues extend to how he behaves in the locker room. It's hard for a lot of people to believe in on-ice intangibles, but when you hear, his teammates hated him, though, you can see an issue. Not sure that was necessarily the case with Semin in Montreal, but there's been enough smoke over his career to speculate there was and perhaps still is fire.However, you'd have to say another part of this relates back to expectations. You expect Alex Semin to score you a lot of goals, even if you're only paying $1.1 million for him. Obviously in Carolina the expectation is heightened by his pay grade, but players can only be what they are, regardless of salary. We learned this in the case of David Clarkson, for example. Pay Clarkson $1 million and he probably produces relatively similar results to if you paid him $10 million. Semin is no different.In a Twitter conversation about player evaluation yesterday, TSN's Scott Cullen pointed out that Stan Bowman talked about player expectations at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and noted that when Chicago asked coaches to evaluate players after every game on a 1-5 scale, they routinely rated low-skill grinders above high-skill scorers.Put another way: If we can agree that Kelly Olynyk White Jersey Patrick Sharp, just to stick with a recent Chicago example, is better than Bryan Bickell, why would coaches say Bickell had a better game than Sharp more often than not? You have to think that part of it is related to the fact that it is incredibly hard to score in the NHL; last year's scoring leader barely scored a point a game, and so if a guy like Sharp doesn't produce a point every night, he's not necessarily going to look like he had a good game. But if all you ask of Bickell is to go out and throw his body around, he's going to be really successful at that, and occasionally chip in a point or two, it's because it's really easy to check people (and sometimes score a goal when you play for a team coached by Joel Quenneville).But Bickell was sent down this year for an extended period, wasn't he? Why? Because he now has a $4 million cap hit, and he cannot justify being the checking guy alone. But in many other ways he was only having a somewhat down year by his own traditional standards, and the 94.5 PDO wasn't helping him look like a positive contributor.That's the disconnect between http://www.authenticyankeesshop.com/authentic-21-paul-oneill-jersey.html Traditional Hockey People and Advanced Stats Spreadsheet-Lookers, but it's natural to look at results over process, especially when there are millions of dollars involved and guys aren't producing to expectations.
↧