Oh yeah Suomela has done nothing compared to Melker, totally legit to bench him over Melker.
Hmm lets see. Suomela vs Melker 5v5 stats
PTS 4 to 1 Suomela
Shots- 27 to 17 Suomela
ICF- 45 to 22 Suomela
ISCF- 25 to 16 Suomela
Penalties taken- 4 to 2 Melker
Penalties drawn- 2 to 0 Suomela
CF% 59 to 52 Somela (and better in every other possession stat as well by a landslide)
GF% 66.66 to 33.33 Suomela
Outside of like blocked shots, I do not think I saw a single solitary way in which Melker has been better than Suomela.
You bring up this last week for when Suomela has not done much, fine, its also when the whole team has done **** all because Deboer lost his mind when Thornton came back and started ****ing all the lines up. However for all the uselessness that Suomela has displayed in the last week according to you, Melker has STILL been objectively and subjectively worse. There is no defending a healthy scratch for Suomela over Melker unless he is a little banged up.
Honestly, there is no point in even arguing this or trying to quantify things. As soon as somebody says "DeBoer is an NHL coach, I think he knows better than you.", it's time to no longer try to quantify or argue anything. This is basically Heed Vs. DeMelo all over again.
There will be people who will say "DeBoer is an NHL coach, he knows better than you. Heed made a dumb mistake and deserves to be benched." There will also be people who say "While Tim Heed had a poor game, or made one egregious error, DeMelo has had more poor games and has made more egregious errors. Every single underlying metric, be it one as simple as points or +/-, or one as complicated as team relative xGF%, suggests that Tim Heed has been significantly better." At this point, we are pretty much just regurgitating which group we belong to.
There is no point in even acknowledging that Suomela has slowed down marginally over the past 3-4 games, because in doing so, you imply that he should be held to some different standard than DeBoer's favorites. Melker Karlsson has slowed down significantly over the past 90-110 games, why does he get a pass? Not to mention that Suomela at his best, is significantly better than Melker at his best, or that Suomela at his worst is significantly better than Melker at his worst. The answer is that Melker gets a pass because he is the coach's favorite, and the coach plays favorites. People defend this logic by saying that the coach is a professional, and therefore every single one of his decisions - even one that might be based on bias and favoritism, rather than logic - is immediately the correct decision.
It's the same reason why it was never worth debating what Tim Heed had to do to get in the lineup over Dylan DeMelo, or considering (like ON4 often did) that Tim Heed had come into camp with poor conditioning numbers, or considering (as PF did) that he got beat wide by Virtanen. Yes, Heed made errors, but other players made similar or worse errors, had inferior performance metrics as a whole, and got played ahead of him.
The performances of these players (Suomela Vs. Melker, Heed Vs. DeMelo) are both visibly and quantifiably so far apart from one another that it is reasonable to suggest that something other than merit is factoring into the decision making process, and that the one making the decisions is, at the very least, imperfect and prone to criticism.
