And sorry for being a dick, lol. The fanboy thing did kind of set me off. Especially when I like Keith as a player, and for how good he has been, but despise the type of player he can be at times. He's sneakily one of the dirtiest players in the league, and I have no respect for that type of ****. I'm the farthest thing from a fanboy of his. I like him cus he's a Hawk. I'd probably hate him if he were on another team. Kind of like a Marchand.
As for numbers, I've looked at them all already since we had this argument with someone else a couple weeks ago. His numbers aren't shining, and don't scream "top pairing" but you have to put it into the context of the team he was on, the goalies he played in front of, etc. When you do that, his numbers are actually great, IMO.
And again, that site has his 3 past years, and the statistics they used for their rankings:
Definitive ranking of NHL’s top 20 defencemen over three seasons - Sportsnet.ca
And that's not including this season, which IMO, is the best of the past 2-3.
I see where you're coming from.
Funny enough, Keith is one of my favorite players ever, so if anything I'd probably be called a fanboy of his discussing him anywhere other than a Blackhawks forum. And I'd probably be much less critical of him in any mixed-fan company too.
And if I wasn't clear (and I probably wasn't cause I was being a dick), my position isn't that Duncan Keith is a bad player, or has aged into uselessness, or the Blackhawks should trade him ASAP, or anything like that. In fact, even the phrase "Keith played bad this year" is harsher than I intend. I would say 'I think Keith struggled this season'. The numbers show he struggled, by his standards, and by top D standards (If you've looked at the numbers, then I won't bother bringing them up unless anybody else really wants to see them).
The funny thing is, despite the joke about me never watching games and only looking at spreadsheets (which I don't mind, for the record, I can wear that as my schtick with a knowing grin), my perception of Keith this season is actually based a lot on the eye-test. Stats are an output, they're results. If I watched Keith and genuinely felt that he was playing well and was merely being dragged down by a lack of support, or bad goaltending, or a systems change, then I would feel differently. And no doubt all of those things are factors. But my concern about Keith is much more about the WHY he struggled. The inputs. The reasons for those outputs... and yeah, that's eye-test stuff, because counting events is counting events. You can't see WHY they happened (for good and for bad).
This season, I saw a lot of instances of Keith trying to do the same kinds of moves, make the same kinds of plays, or make the same decisions as he always has... the kind plays and decisions that made him so great. And it's just not working, because he's maybe getting 90% of the way there, but not quite. Or he pulls it off, but once he does, the players around him catch up so quick that he has no time and space to make a decision, and ends up making a bad play, or he makes a great play, but the opposition just recover faster than it takes him to follow-up. It wasn't like 'oh, he made a bad decision cause he had a mental hiccup adjusting to Coliton's system' it was like 'he's trying the same play he's made dozens of times a game over the last decade, because he still thinks he has the legs to make it work'. And I'm not sure he can.
My concern for Keith is that even if you provide him with great support, he's going to need to adjust a bit for the realities of father time... and those adjustments may yet rob him of at least some of what made him so impactful. And it's not so much a concern, really, as a bittersweet realization that the Blackhawks have been so lucky to have this pillar for so long, that we've been spoiled. That I've been spoiled, and have come to expect ELITE, just because we've just had ELITE as a matter of fact for the last decade. And now ELITE might be aging into merely GREAT, and suddenly building a winner gets so much harder from such a small decline. Like, 'f***, now we're stuck dealing with the same problems as all those other poor schlubs in the NHL'.
My concern is that, I'm not sure you can replace ELITE, with a lot of GREAT. I think you need replace ELITE with ELITE if you want to see similar standards hold, and short of Boqvist and maybe this Byram kid, I'm not sure we have anybody in the pipeline with a ceiling above GREAT. Which is probably why I'm more bullish than most above forking over the money for a guy that has proven to be ELITE and hope the injuries aren't a permanent issue... and why I'm far less bullish on spending UFA premiums for more good to great, rather than saving that money for when we are lucky or smart enough to draft/develop/trade for/sign ELITE.
