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- Aug 4, 2012
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John Moore is a better possession player than Klein. And I'm no fan of Moore, but the results are clear.
Moore without Klein: 52.2%
Moore with Klein: 49.7
Klein without Moore: 45.9%
Klein has a unique talent for getting his team pinned in its own zone.
This is what I'm talking about. You're just saying "look stats, so ___ is true" without digging any deeper and examining why those stats may have turned out the way they did. In my opinion, that's lazy.
Was Moore playing sheltered minutes when he wasn't on the ice with Klein? Was Klein playing against a higher quality of competition when he wasn't on the ice with Moore? Was Moore getting a higher percentage of offensive zone starts compared with Klein? When Moore was separate from Klein, was he generally paired with better defensemen than Klein was when he was separate from Moore? When they were separate, was one of them playing with poorer quality forwards more often than the other? Was John Moore kept away more from important and difficult defensive situations and zone starts than Klein was? Were the times when they weren't on the ice together moments of the game when one of them either desperately needed a change, or they were the only d-man able to make a change so they were stuck out there with 4 other tired guys? And did that happen more often for one of them based on their ability to make a change or the d-men they were replacing's ability to make a change (these last two, I don't know of any metric for measuring)?
There are so many external factors that play into the reasons behind why the advanced stats end up the way they are that using them to prove a point by themselves is flawed. Ok, I'll stop asking questions and answer a few of them.
Here are some potential explanations for the disparity you posted above:
- Moore received sheltered minutes. Over the course of last season, Moore faced a far lower quality of competition than Klein did.
- Klein also was playing with players of a far lower quality than Moore did throughout the course of the year.
- Moore also had hugely sheltered zone starts. He had the highest percentage of offensive zone starts of any Rangers defenseman last year at over 63 % offensive zone starts. Klein's was right about at 50 %. So is it reasonable to conclude that the times when Moore was away from Klein, he was more often being started in the offensive zone than Klein was when he was away from Moore? How else do we get that disparity?
- Klein saw far fewer minutes paired with high quality players as his defensive partners when he was away from Moore than Moore did when he was away from Klein. Moore played nearly 6 hours of minutes with MDZ, 2 hours of minutes with Stralman, and nearly 2 hours of minutes with Girardi. Klein's most common defensive partner after John Moore - while he was on the Rangers - was Raphael Diaz.
- And that doesn't even consider the guys he was paired with during his time in Nashville. Could it be that because Klein played for a team that was struggling last year for over half his regular season playing time, that this impacted his corsi? Did it help John Moore's corsi that the times he was "away" from Kevin Klein while they were playing on separate teams, that he was on the arguably better team?
(You can find my source material for these items here: http://stats.hockeyanalysis.com/ratings.php?db=201314&sit=5v5&type=corsi&teamid=20&pos=defense&minutes=100&disp=1&sort=HARTp&sortdir=DESC & http://www.behindthenet.ca/nhl_statistics.php?ds=63&s=13&f1=2013_s&f2=5v5&f4=D&f5=NYR&c=0+1+3+5+4+6+7+8+32+33+34+45+46+11+12+13+14+15+16+29+30+31+35+36+37+38+39+40+47+48+49+50+51+52+53+54+55+56+63+67+57+58+59+60+61+62+64+65+66# & http://www.progressivehockey.com/p/blog-page.html)
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