No one has answered me in the Twitter-verse about how Zaitsev, who has issues exiting his own zone that have been detailed out by some stat-a-holics in the Leaf Blog-o-sphere, is worth defending as a guy who has had hard use in areas that don't fit his skills but had an appreciable bump in his metrics playing with Jake Muzzin is yet Ristolainen, with similar issues and yet even WORSE use and QOT is a giant cow pie.
I appreciate you having pulled those numbers. Context matters. I love me some RAPM, but it has to be looked at in the context of the team a player is on, the role they are being used, their deployment, and teammates. The poster-boy for "get this guy off my team, he's dead" to "hey, Cooper is a genius" has to be Girardi pre-and-post buyout. I keep hearing how players don't change their spots, yet I keep seeing these charts with variability from year to year. And I keep seeing guys who are crushed in those charts getting contracts and being in demand in the hockey world -- which might be old school mentality that they are valuing visual keys that aren't important for actual results, but I have a feeling someone looking at a player being deployed in shut-down role vs. someone being deployed in an offensive role who is viewing the context of it would notice. And the context would be decisive.
Short answer: I agree.