Doughty and Malkin must be the problem on their teams too
Video analysis indicating that their minuses pile up because they hemorrhage the puck to the other team with impunity would indicate that they are a problem.
I'll be putting something like that together for Ristolainen this offseason, methinks, I always like to do one big video project.
Plus-minus does suck for individual players. Which is why it's just as goofy to say "well good player x also has a bad plus minus, therefore Risto's can't be because of his own problems" as it is to say "Risto sucks because of his bad plus-minus."
The appropriate way to do this is notice a severe statistical outlier, and decide to look closer at the situation because it exists.
FTR, Pittsburgh fans have hated Malkin's defensive zone play and effort this season, so it sounds like those minuses are well-earned. I guess he and Kessel have been a nightmare back there.
But the idea that Drew Doughty and Ristolainen have the same root issue is laughable to anyone who's ever focused on the two of them to watch how they play hockey.
Risto can be a useful player if hopefully our FOURTH regime in his time becomes the first one to even try to make him one. Risto for Miller/Cernak makes this team a lot better though if we don't ever intend to do that. I agree with the sentiment that we should get a capable NHL defenseman if we make this trade, but I don't think people realize just how easy it will be for this defense corps to be better through forced-balancing rather than leaning heavily on two pilons. Nobody needs to follow Crosby around themselves all night for 27 minutes. Split that shit up. Even if the Penguins score 4 goals in this method, it's better than the 5 they scored the other way. Et cetera.
The issue is that, when Risto does his patented clear to the other team, the problem doesn't just fix itself 45 seconds later when we finally get the puck back. The extra, needless time spent defending doesn't get reset. It piles up and adds to the hockey game's banked amount of dead legs and momentum, stuff that's unquantifiable but affects every subsequent shift. From a forward standpoint, in the games that we had 10-22-28 cycling for days against other teams' top lines, getting nearly 60% shot and scoring chance shares, our top line would come out onto the ice with the team already having the puck, and with tired defenseman back there, and we were doing things like being in the top half of the league in scoring, and having a guy pacing for 60 goals and the like. Stuff actually banked up in our favor because of this line, even though they didn't score themselves. The opposite happens when you have a defense pair that is guaranteed to be caved in for 1:30 each shift. You finally can scramble the next line out there, and their job is to first settle things down, then try and get the puck, and THEN try and do something with it, usually barely being capable of doing the second thing in that list before their 45 seconds are up. It is so often that Ristolainen's own choices are the fault for this, and have nothing to do with the fact that better players exist on the ice with him while he's passing up on his wide open teammate to hand the puck back to the other team.
