News Article: Why The Penguins Aren’t Playing Derrick Pouliot

[Ogrezilla]

I can't help but think they should have dedicated some of the season to getting Pouliot comfortable on the right side. You know that Maatta-Letang is your top pairing, Dumoulin is a LD and there aren't any RHS RD in the org that would ever be in the top 4 or even other top 4 potential prospects. They only have one more season of Daley and he wasn't here for a good chunk of the season.

They eventually got Schultz who is a RHS RD, but he's a project and highly questionable as a top 4 defenseman. But why weren't they trying to get Pouliot to fill that obvious hole going forward? And I remember how disastrous his preseason was and that his other issues needed to be addressed.

yeah, I hope that's something we have him work on this off-season and next year. We need to know if he will be able to replace Daley long term in that spot or not.

 

[hooverdam]

The author of this article is using that stat completely incorrectly. This is what happens when people who don't really understand advanced stats use them to make a point.

There's a reason advanced stats people look at usage and CF over time as a whole and that's because it's more predictive that way. Individual game stats are often all over the place and there are too many variables that CF can't account for on a game to game basis. It's essentially the same reason everyone hates +/- as a stat now, though with +/- the problem is much starker.

You can look at an individual game and say "oh look, Pouliot had a bad possession game" or "wow, Pouliot had a great possession game!" but you can't draw many conclusions from that until you have a bigger sample size. Not even "inconsistent"; are you all prepared to call Letang inconsistent over this stretch as well?

Pouliot has been a great possession player while up here; you don't have to manipulate stats to argue for or against that. And I really don't think this coaching staff cares one way or the other. This is the head coach who said he didn't like "the possession time" of the Crosby-Kessel combination, then proceeded to watch K-C-H get Corsi-murdered for the next several games before they found some equilibrium again.