bleedgreen
Registered User
We offered him six million by most accounts. Which was barely a raise after being a high scorer. We did not offer him a generous amount of money. Any team in the league would’ve paid him six.2 things: First, earnings isn't just an aside, it's everything. Contract efficency is how you maximize skill on a team. Dougie is getting paid an asinine amount of money for the value he offers to a team. Slavin is flat out underpaid. Part of that is absolutely that the league overvalues offensive defenseman. Maybe part of that is some advanced stat saying offense is more valuable than pure defense, but mostly I think it's just 'ooh, shiny'.
Which leads me to point two: We don't use public models much, if at all, and Tulsky has completely dismissed shot attempt based stats and has said we have not used them at all for years. And stats tend to bias towards what they can measure, and measuring offense has a lot more data points than measuring defense, so a lot of those "offense is more valuable than defense" conclusions are likely significantly influenced by measurement biases. Tulsky may not buy that for one second. Or he may, but may have found that focusing on defensive skill gets so much more bang for your buck due to the league misvaluing those skills that it's worth the tradeoff.
But it should shock no one that we'll take an elite defensive D over the one dimensional offensive guy who you have to pay twice as much money every day and twice on Sunday.
And remember, we were prepared to pay Hamilton a generous amount of money, and more than Slavin. Other teams in the league were just willing to go to absurdities because they saw what Edmonton did with Nurse and decided that that was the recipe for success.
Slavin is pretty poor comparable. He was signed early on a gamble he’d keep developing, and it was one of the first contracts like that. He’s not underpaid on that contract, he was overpaid when it started. It wasn’t the undervaluing of defensive dmen vs the overvaluing of offensive guys at the time. We offered him a medium sized bag in hopes of avoiding paying him much more later and it worked great.
I don’t know that I’m any more comfortable giving Slavin a max deal then I am with Pesce/Skjei.