Speculation: What top 4D could Anders Lee return?

[EastonBlues22]

see what i mean he didnt even bother to look at the players I mentioned all had multiple seasons of Shooting percentages of over 20% until either injuries or advancing age cause them to change their games

many of them had severely shortened careers because of the beatings they took Charlie Simmer suffered a broken Jaw on a crosscheck to the face in front of the net at the hands of Wilf Paiement and Paiment as I remember didnt even get penalized,

It was just what they lived with on a daily basis

believe what you want easton, at least now people know you were full of it

Anders Lee is 5th of all active NHL players in career shooting percentage ahead of Malkin Crosby and Kucherov. and yet easton says it has nothing to do with Lee's style of Play and is not sustainable....yeah right. the guy just cant admit he was wrong

That's the game changing info you were holding onto? Compelling stuff.

Once again, you're putting words in my mouth. I never said that Lee's high shooting percentage "had nothing to do" with his style of play. I think that's a big part of why his career average is 14.6%. It's certainly not because he's beating goalies clean from 35' out. And, as I've already stated, I don't think 14.6% is an unreasonable expectation for him moving forward.

You're implying that his career shooting percentage of 14.6% is somehow evidence that he'll be able to maintain an 18.5% pace because of how highly that percentage ranks among active players. It's not. Ironically, his very high ranking among relative players at his current 14.6% average is a better argument for why 18.5% is unreasonable than it is an argument for it being something he can sustain.

You keep dodging around it, but there's a massive difference between using his style of play as a justification for him maintaining a 14.6%, which is already at the upper limit of what elite, active shooters maintain, and using it to justify him maintaining an 18.5% one, which literally no active player maintains. They are not equivalent arguments, or equivalent positions.

Lee is actually 12th among active players in shooting percentage, minimum 160 games played, BTW. I'm not sure what cutoff you used to place him at 5th on the list.

 

[72hockey guy]

That's the game changing info you were holding onto? Compelling stuff.

Once again, you're putting words in my mouth. I never said that Lee's high shooting percentage "had nothing to do" with his style of play. I think that's a big part of why his career average is 14.6%. It's certainly not because he's beating goalies clean from 35' out. And, as I've already stated, I don't think 14.6% is an unreasonable expectation for him moving forward.

You're implying that his career shooting percentage of 14.6% is somehow evidence that he'll be able to maintain an 18.5% pace because of how highly that percentage ranks among active players. It's not. Ironically, his very high ranking among relative players at his current 14.6% average is a better argument for why 18.5% is unreasonable than it is an argument for it being something he can sustain.

You keep dodging around it, but there's a massive difference between using his style of play as a justification for him maintaining a 14.6%, which is already at the upper limit of what elite, active shooters maintain, and using it to justify him maintaining an 18.5% one, which literally no active player maintains. They are not equivalent arguments, or equivalent positions.

Lee is actually 12th among active players in shooting percentage, minimum 160 games played, BTW. I'm not sure what cutoff you used to place him at 5th on the list.

i didnt, yet you keep trying to discredit Lee, I took it directly from Hockey reference so You obviously didnt use a reliable source

NHL Active Leaders and Records for Shooting Percentage | Hockey-Reference.com

and if you bothered to look at the list of players i provided all of them had several seasons of over 20% until the physical punishment they sustained either forced early retirement or they changed
their style of play,

many of those players when interviewed after their careers, said that if they had to do it again, they wouldnt have changed because it was a pure battle of wills between them and the goalie, Kerr in fact once said:" I lived to see the fear in the Goalies eyes"

that quote was taken from the the book, The Complete Handbook of Pro Hockey 1985 by zander hollander

so your entire methodology was completely flawed

which is why I kept using the parallel of centers in the NBA, being closer to the goal will lead to higher shooting percentages. its just common sense.the thing is it takes a special player to do it because they take incredible punishment

it begs the question how will you change your story if and when Lee does it again? will you call that an outlier too?

 

[72hockey guy]

..

 

[PWJunior]

What’s Lee’s skating ability like?

Not great, at least it has improved over the years. It takes him a while to get going, decent enough top speed. As far as strength on his skates, he's a freaking tank. He's a big who does all his work in the paint, his size/strength is a big help in puck battles.

 

[EastonBlues22]

i didnt, yet you keep trying to discredit Lee, I took it directly from Hockey reference so You obviously didnt use a reliable source

NHL Active Leaders and Records for Shooting Percentage | Hockey-Reference.com

and if you bothered to look at the list of players i provided all of them had several seasons of over 20% until the physical punishment they sustained either forced early retirement or they changed
their style of play,

many of those players when interviewed after their careers, said that if they had to do it again, they wouldnt have changed because it was a pure battle of wills between them and the goalie, Kerr in fact once said:" I lived to see the fear in the Goalies eyes"

that quote was taken from the the book, The Complete Handbook of Pro Hockey 1985 by zander hollander

so your entire methodology was completely flawed

which is why I kept using the parallel of centers in the NBA, being closer to the goal will lead to higher shooting percentages. its just common sense.the thing is it takes a special player to do it because they take incredible punishment

it begs the question how will you change your story if and when Lee does it again? will you call that an outlier too?

My numbers also came from Hockey-Reference => HERE I know exactly what went into the list that I compiled, and clearly every player on my list is currently active except for Hudler. He didn't play this year, but I honestly don't know if he actually retired. I have no idea what standards they used for yours, but there should be more names on it than there is.

What list of players did you post? Please post it again. I saw three or four names dropped, but no list. Was it before I entered the conversation?

Yes, shots taken closer to the goal having a higher shooting percentage is a common sense thing. The problem with your argument is that you're using a reasonable general premise and a handful of anecdotal cases to support a very specific empiric conclusion that otherwise has no hard, supportive, rigorous data behind it.

Nobody who works with stats or who conducts studies would consider this to be an acceptable methodology for supporting the empiric claim you are making. What's more, the sort of data that you are inferring exists simply is not accessible to us as fans, so we can't actually test it to see how repeatable it is among "qualified players," what sort of specific shooting percentages can be expected at various distances from the net (and how much impact shot type has on those percentages), how repeatable those percentages are from year to year, etc.

You take issue with the numbers I worked with, but you're not working with numbers at all. There are no calculations, and there are no hard numbers. It's essentially an anecdotal argument. That's fine for what it is...but it's not the empiric argument based on a superior methodology that you're passing it off to be.

If it's enough to convince you, then that's fine...but you shouldn't be expecting it to convince anyone else, especially when the hard data and study results that we do have access to paints a picture that strongly suggests the opposite.

Change my story? What's to change? Statistics deals with probabilities, not absolutes...something you should understand if your mathematics background is what you claim it to be.

I've repeatedly said that I'm simply discussing what I think it likely to happen, and that unlikely things can, and do, happen. I've also explicitly said (multiple times) that Lee could certainly fall into that group. That doesn't make it likely to happen, and it doesn't make me "wrong" that it was unlikely to happen even if it does happen.

Put another way, I can say that it's unlikely for me to flip a coin and have it come up heads 10 times in a row...but on average once every 1024 times someone tries, it will actually happen. If it happens, I'm not wrong in saying that it was unlikely to happen. It was objectively unlikely to happen, regardless of which result was actually produced.

I'm not saying (or meaning to imply) the probabilities between this illustration and our greater discussion about Lee are equivalent. I'm just trying to illustrate a point.

If the next three or four years Lee averages 18.5% or better, something that should be pretty unlikely given the arguments that I've laid out, I'll happily eat crow that I was wrong.

If Lee's shooting percentage regresses over that span, how will your story change?

 

[57special]

So anyway, I wonder what the Isles could get for Lee...

Charley Simmer, apparently.

 

[57special]

Not great, at least it has improved over the years. It takes him a while to get going, decent enough top speed. As far as strength on his skates, he's a freaking tank. He's a big who does all his work in the paint, his size/strength is a big help in puck battles.

This^Also, he's just about the perfect net front PP guy. Soft hands, big, and tough.

 

[72hockey guy]

..

 

[72hockey guy]

Nobody who works with stats or who conducts studies would consider this to be an acceptable methodology for supporting the empiric claim you are making. What's more, the sort of data that you are inferring exists simply is not accessible to us as fans, so we can't actually test it to see how repeatable it is among "qualified players," what sort of specific shooting percentages can be expected at various distances from the net (and how much impact shot type has on those percentages), how repeatable those percentages are from year to year, etc.

it does make you wrong because you didnt even try to make your data relevant it was too broad and undefined. relevancy and validity are arguably the 2 most important factors in ANY Statistical analysis. you wouldnt include goaltendersand defenseman in a study of Shot percentages among forwards, yet by your own words you included ALL Players.

you ignored relevant data given to you several times by other posters about Lees style of play which intrinsically factors in to the relevant results , because it can be shown that the subset of forwards who play as Lee does (predominenty within 5 feet of the net) have significantly higher shooting
percentages than those who shoot from further away. YOU chose to do that.

therefore your conclusions which you drew from your predeterminined parameters, were flawed.

even an idiot can draw the obviouse conclusion from datasets that Shot percentages from high danger scoring chances as defined here:

Shot Quality And Expected Goals: Part 1.5 | Corsica

as any one can see in the included graphic high danger shots taken from certain areas improve shot percentage the data is irrefutable

as you can easily see the yellow area which is where lee makes his home is significantly higher than anywhere else

you deliberately chose to ignore that data

and when you choose to ignore pertinent data it calls into question your conclusions

and its funny for something that not available to fans (your words, not mine) I found it easily enough. seems to me you just didnt try

just as i found the data for the most closely comparable players to Anders Lee

Craig Simpson
Charlie Simmer
Paul MacLean
Blaine Stoughton
Rob Brown
Tim Kerr
Ray Ferraro
Rick Middleton
Anders Lee

what I faulted you on was your complete lack of effort, several Islander fans told you before I even entered the conversation that your entire premise was invalid, because you didnt consider his style of play, and where the location of the preponderance of his shots are taken

You chose to ignore them

 

[Sidney the Kidney]

So anyway, I wonder what the Isles could get for Lee...

Tim Kerr.

 

[72hockey guy]

Tim Kerr.

he basically is the modern day equivalent of Tim Kerr, if not Lee then your own Patric Hornqvist is certainly right up there, He like Lee has certainly been underappreciated for years.

but then again I dont need to tell you that

 

[AvatarAang]

What’s Lee’s skating ability like?

He scored 40 goals who cares

 

[Jester9881]

Well, that's just factually incorrect. Two seasons is a blip on the radar of a career.

Regardless, I'm curious to hear your reasoning for why the two full years immediately preceding this most recent two, where he averaged 10.5% over 156 games, is an aberration while these last 163 games are not. It seems to me that you're simply picking and choosing which two year sample you believe more.

That's certainly a valid opinion, but it's not an empirical one. We'll just have to agree to disagree if that's the case since our approaches are incompatible.

Edit: Discussions involving math are not generally well-suited for pithy responses. More comprehensive replies would eliminate a lot of the misunderstandings and misinformation that's out there.

Well, besides the fact that you are referring to his rookie and sophomore seasons.... his sophomore year dragging that number down greatly. Are we going to punish him because he went the NCAA rout and didn't get a start in the league until he was 23? Is he the only player to suffer a sophomore slump before improving on his rookie year?

Two seasons is a blip on a 600-1000 game career..... Anders is only 343 games into his career. So yes, 163 games out of 343 (more than half his career) is a large sample size.

 

[Jester9881]

What’s Lee’s skating ability like?

Stride isn't pretty, and acceleration is avg to below avg. His top end speed is pretty decent and will actually take defenders by surprise now and then. It isn't a strength by any means, but it's fine for his style of play and doesn't hurt the team. He doesn't need to be agile because if he needs to get somewhere with the puck he just goes through people.



You can get an idea by watching this.

Edit: go to 4:45

 

[Finnislander]

You can get an idea by watching this.

Edit: go to 4:45

If someone trades for Lee its because of the goal after that breakaway on the video (5:15). Thats Anders Lee.

 

[CodeE]

For the millionth time, the problem with comparing Lee to everyone else in the NHL is that you ignore his particular skillset.

It's like looking at a pigeon and going "I don't care that that pigeon is flying right now, it won't fly in the future. I've seen elephants that don't fly, dogs that don't fly, dolphins that don't fly, alligators that don't fly. Using that as evidence, I can conclude pigeons cannot fly because very few animals have the ability to fly and pigeons are an animal just like all the rest of them. You want to bring up hawks, doves, eagles, sparrows: well I'll counter by saying rhinoceroses and tuna don't have the ability to fly."

 

[Brock Radunske]

Brock you're one of the most savvy of leaf fans. So I'm honestly surprised you're making the same mistake Easton blues made. No Lee does not drive the offense, it's a fair point, I won't dispute that. But he is not expected too. Limit your viewing of him to the style of player he is. That is the only way you can fairly evaluate him. That was why Easton was so wrong. He used metrics that in no way had anything to do with his game. In basketball do you judge point guards by blocked shots or assists? Do you evaluate Centers by steals or by rebounds and blocked shots? You know the answer. If you use the wrong metrics you can't fairly evaluate the player. That's all I'm saying.

Lee doesn't play the style of game that typical forwards play. So if you want to evaluate him fairly, compare him to players who play the same style. It's not as if the end result of his style isn't one of the most important aspects of the game. Aren't scoring goals, and preventing goals the two most important aspects of any hockey game?

Lee's style isn't dependent on Tavares, because no matter who his center is, his game isn't going to change, he's still going to do his dirty work within 5- 10 feet of the net, using his size and bulk to outmuscle defenders and forwards to redirect the puck, that's his game. That's his style. Now if you want to say as he ages he may physically wear down, that is a valid concern. And one no one can predict.

But this crap about using metrics that you evaluate typical forwards by has to stop, they are no more as relevant to Lee as are teets on a donkey. Looking At Lee and Expecting him to ever put up 50 assists is never gonna happen. He's too busy fighting for and keeping his position in close and distracting Goalies and defenders, to ever be an assist magnet. So why judge him on that. That's not in his job description, and it never was.

The only people who do that are people like Easton who are predisposed to knocking him by using metrics that may apply to most forwards. But really have no bearing on Lee because he's not that kind of forward. Lee is an old fashioned power forward. Not finesse one like Tarasenko, who idiots try to sell as a power forward in today's game, Tarasenko is no more a power forward than I am a ballarina.

Judge Lee on who he is, and what he is, not by forwards who play a totally different game. Easton deliberately tried to obscure Lee's contribution by using metrics that Lee doesn't even use. And what's worse WAS NEVER EVEN EXPECTED TO. That's dishonest.

do you judge pitchers by how many homers they HIT. If course not. Only an idiot would do so. So judge Lee on what He does and is meant to do. Not on what isn't even in his job description, and you can't do that if you don't consider his style of play.

Comparing him to Forwards who play a Different game is just as stupid as judging a pitcher based on how he hits.

Hey 72HG, I can't actually see the posts by the user you're referring to so I definitely wasn't defending them.
I do agree about your points on style. It's a fair statement to say that Lee's style (front of the net scorer) probably doesn't depend on a center as much as other style and maybe Neal isn't the best comparison. It's just tough to find a guy of that age with those numbers without the pedigree of a top prospect.

Just out of curiosity, what would your comparable be? Maybe a more physical JVR or a prime Vanek? I don't watch a ton of Islanders games so I can only base my comparisons on position and stats but I'm open to some direction on this.

 

[AvatarAang]

For the millionth time, the problem with comparing Lee to everyone else in the NHL is that you ignore his particular skillset.

It's like looking at a pigeon and going "I don't care that that pigeon is flying right now, it won't fly in the future. I've seen elephants that don't fly, dogs that don't fly, dolphins that don't fly, alligators that don't fly. Using that as evidence, I can conclude pigeons cannot fly because very few animals have the ability to fly and pigeons are an animal just like all the rest of them. You want to bring up hawks, doves, eagles, sparrows: well I'll counter by saying rhinoceroses and tuna don't have the ability to fly."

 

[CodeE]

It's a pretty straightforward analogy there buddy. Most 3rd grade classrooms would be able to figure it out.

 

[Colt55]

Hey can i offer you a Jaybo at 25% retention and Vladimir sobotka (or another left winger not Fabbri, Schwartz, ) for Lee?

 

[iggy]

As an Islander fan, I can`t understand why people think he would be available. Consistent 30 to 40 goal scorers are not easy to come by. Lee should be part of the core of the Islanders. With guys who can set up plays like JT (if he resigns) and Barzal, we need guys that can put it in the net. If you have to move offense, I would rather see Bailey, Nelson, buy out Ladd, go.

 

[Sidney the Kidney]

As an Islander fan, I can`t understand why people think he would be available. Consistent 30 to 40 goal scorers are not easy to come by. Lee should be part of the core of the Islanders. With guys who can set up plays like JT (if he resigns) and Barzal, we need guys that can put it in the net. If you have to move offense, I would rather see Bailey, Nelson, buy out Ladd, go.

Because I think the point of the thread is using Lee to acquire a much needed top four defender. The three guys you mention don't have the kind of value to land a top four defender, especially the last two.

 

[72hockey guy]

Hey 72HG, I can't actually see the posts by the user you're referring to so I definitely wasn't defending them.
I do agree about your points on style. It's a fair statement to say that Lee's style (front of the net scorer) probably doesn't depend on a center as much as other style and maybe Neal isn't the best comparison. It's just tough to find a guy of that age with those numbers without the pedigree of a top prospect.

Just out of curiosity, what would your comparable be? Maybe a more physical JVR or a prime Vanek? I don't watch a ton of Islanders games so I can only base my comparisons on position and stats but I'm open to some direction on this.

its kind of hard to come up with a present comparable because hes a throw back player. its a style we saw a lot more of in the 80s, he reminds me of tim kerr, who would park himself in front of the net and just wouldnt give ground. hes got thick sturdy legs and he just out muscles people to get position for redirects and screening the goalie, he obviously has good hands, because he seems to be able to dig at the puck in heavy traffic

like I say, hes not the type who will wow you with tape to tape passes and his skating is nothing to write home about, in fact compared to most his skaking is rather poor but he is as strong as an ox and gets where he needs to on the ice. his game is all about his hands and his sturdy frame

 

[Brock Radunske]

its kind of hard to come up with a present comparable because hes a throw back player. its a style we saw a lot more of in the 80s, he reminds me of tim kerr, who would park himself in front of the net and just wouldnt give ground. hes got thick sturdy legs and he just out muscles people to get position for redirects and screening the goalie, he obviously has good hands, because he seems to be able to dig at the puck in heavy traffic

like I say, hes not the type who will wow you with tape to tape passes and his skating is nothing to write home about, in fact compared to most his skaking is rather poor but he is as strong as an ox and gets where he needs to on the ice. his game is all about his hands and his sturdy frame

Franzen?

 

[iggy]

Because I think the point of the thread is using Lee to acquire a much needed top four defender. The three guys you mention don't have the kind of value to land a top four defender, especially the last two.

Understood. But weakening an area of strength to fix an area of weakness might be counter productive.