So... Let's talk Konecny

[deadhead]

No single stat is perfect. Game score tells us Jake is a solid 2nd liner at 5v5, his production says 1st liner. There are not many guys in the NHL that all of GAR, GS and scoring itself will tell you are actual 1st liners, even if alone each says around 90.

There are like ~15-20 guys in the NHL who put up great scoring, relative underlying stats and raw underlying stats consistently.

Case in point, over the last 3 seasons here are the players over "1st line level" in all the following areas:

1.9 P/60
+2.00 CF Rel
+2.45 ExGF Rel

Leaves you with 30 players... without the raw stats included.

If you want to be a top team, you can't have a 1st line composed of players in the top 90, a 2nd line from 91-180 and so forth.
A team composed of average players in each tranche would be an average team.

You want to be in the top third or so in all areas, obviously, there will be some divergence, maybe you have an elite 1st line, or elite top D-pair.
Or you lack those elite players but have a 3rd line better than most team's 2nd line and beat them with depth.
But using that as a baseline, I'd say:

1st line players should be in the 1-45 group, totaling say 90 or so (i.e. 10th, 35th, 45th)
2nd line from 46-135
3rd line from 136-225 or so.
In other words, you don't want players on any line who are below average league wide for that line.

We have crude metrics for defense (baseball has the same issue in calculating WAR). xGF% and EV GAR try to account for it, not perfect measures, which is why you want to use multiple measures. But you want to try and account for it.

Scoring does matter, and goal scoring more than assists (there's about 2.25 points per goal, but one goal per goal).
But defense also matters. Most scorers tend to be below average to average defensively (self-selection, scorers are more likely to get PT with below average defense than nonscorers), so those who are above defensively should be ranked higher than their point totals.

PP scoring matters, but more of a unit measure since individual PP scoring for most players is primarily determined by opportunity, not skill (which is why PP GAR is a good check on raw PP scoring statistics).

 

[deadhead]

You do not get to the level of player Jakub Voracek is in ANY sport without dedicating your life to it and working hard.

Yes, natural talent is involved, but Jake has had a career where he has been arguably a top ~20 winger or so in the NHL for a SEVEN year span. So few players in history can say that. And when all is said and done he should probably be in most peoples top 8 wingers ever to play for the franchise.

Not everyone can be Jaromir Jagr or Eric Lindros.

Players have different levels of compete.
Some is probably genetic, some is maturity.
How often do you see a player suddenly blossom and then the stories: "well, I didn't take the game seriously, then after . . . I woke up, got serious about training, stopped partying every night and turned my life around."

Allen Iverson was a great competitor but never became the player he should have been because he lacked the discipline to improve his game.
Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, King James, these guys put as much energy into working out and practice as they did in games.
One reason I think Provorov will be a great player is he has that kind of work ethic, which allows a player to continue to improve past their physical peak at 24 or so, refining their game, delaying their physical deterioration and then being able to adjust to it.

 

[Appleyard]

St. Louis's "total GAR" of their best 3 fwds - not even their 1st line - as you have seemingly coined is 135. So a middling second line off your method.

Malkin and Backstrom going off just GAR are worse than Lindblom and should be on a 3rd line off your method.

And good for us that going into next year our top 6 forwards are all above average in relation to their peers around the league in multiple of those stats!

 

[Appleyard]

Players have different levels of compete.
Some is probably genetic, some is maturity.
How often do you see a player suddenly blossom and then the stories: "well, I didn't take the game seriously, then after . . . I woke up, got serious about training, stopped partying every night and turned my life around."

Allen Iverson was a great competitor but never became the player he should have been because he lacked the discipline to improve his game.
Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, King James, these guys put as much energy into working out and practice as they did in games.
One reason I think Provorov will be a great player is he has that kind of work ethic, which allows a player to continue to improve past their physical peak at 24 or so, refining their game, delaying their physical deterioration and then being able to adjust to it.

But you literally get a snippet of these peoples lives and no real insight behind the scenes...

And such stories are a small percentage. Hence why when they happen they are very visible in the media. Most athletes at any level dedicate their lives to it, spend insane amounts of hours training, refining skill, not eating and drinking specific things at specific times.

You dont get as insanely strong, so skilled, and as great a skater as Jake is without countless hours for 20+ years doing that!

 

[Ruck Over]

Saying he's not a first line guy when he has been a great first line player doesn't compute.


Is Voracek not a first line guy now?

Well, like, what's the number say? Because a team can only have 1 first line, 1 second line, etc. etc. So if TK is on the first line, then it is obvious that Jake is not a first line player.

E.g. Malkin is the league's best 2C. Case closed, provided his and Crosby's health is adequate. (It's still very embarrassing for Malkin though that he routinely gets shut down by some 3C who has never even scored 40 EVG in a single NHL season.)

80 point player not a 1st line guy.

You know who else is not 1st line material. Patrick Kane. Spent most of his career on the 2nd and gets gross amounts of ozone starts. Below average defensively

How about Malkin. Hes definitely not 1st line material

THIS GUY GET"S IT!

@Must be the big brain.@

Well if we are going off the underlying stats such as ExGF Rel, CF Rel etc then Lindblom is a 1st liner in those metrics and scored at 2nd line pace last year. As he is top 45 across the board since entering the NHL. Yet he is not a 1st liner.

I mean, going off GAR alone Andrew MacDonald was the 5th most valuable Flyer last year... GAR is a nice stat, but it also relies heavily on "measures of what happened" as opposed to expected results based off bigger, steadier samples. And it struggles to divide "effects" at times between team-mates who spend a lot of time together.

No single stat is perfect. Game score tells us Jake is a solid 2nd liner at 5v5, his production says 1st liner. There are not many guys in the NHL that all of GAR, GS and scoring itself will tell you are actual 1st liners, even if alone each says around 90.

And Lindblom is no-where near the player Jake is. And Jake is still a positive in those stats over the last few years as well.

There are like ~15-20 guys in the NHL who put up great scoring, relative underlying stats and raw underlying stats consistently.

Case in point, over the last 3 seasons here are the players over "1st line level" in all the following areas:

1.9 P/60
+2.00 CF Rel
+2.45 ExGF Rel

Leaves you with 30 players... without the raw stats included.

It is difficult to be good at everything in the best league on earth, and if you are you are not just a 1st liner, but a star, an elite player.

Jake is a 1st line player. It is quite clear overall.

You are wrong sir, please retract your statement. Delete the quoted post, post-haste. I feel as though everything you said was bollocks.

#ObviousHeelTurn

 

[BobbyClarkeFan16]

Giroux, Konecny, JVR = BAD AND ALL KONECNYS FAULT, HES NOT A REAL 1ST LINER

I thought it was marginal fourth line player that lacks discipline and no drive....

 

[deadhead]

But you literally get a snippet of these peoples lives and no real insight behind the scenes...

And such stories are a small percentage. Hence why when they happen they are very visible in the media. Most athletes at any level dedicate their lives to it, spend insane amounts of hours training, refining skill, not eating and drinking specific things at specific times.

You dont get as insanely strong, so skilled, and as great a skater as Jake is without countless hours for 20+ years doing that!

You'd be surprised how many professional athletes get by in their 20s with bad habits on pure physical talent.
I remember my 20s, when I could party all night and get to work the next day, now if I did that I'd be crawling to the bathroom the next morning!
And that's one reason you do get athletes who don't train as seriously as they could, because for a while they get away with it, though eventually it catches up to them.

Now it's not as frequent as it used to be, because the competition is tougher, but Richards/Carter sure had a reputation for doing off hour bicep curls!

 

[Striiker]

I thought it was marginal fourth line player that lacks discipline and no drive....

We're lucky Hakstol turned him from a 4th liner into a great scorer LITERALLY OVERNIGHT... or at least thats what I was told.

 

[Appleyard]

You'd be surprised how many professional athletes get by in their 20s with bad habits on pure physical talent.
I remember my 20s, when I could party all night and get to work the next day, now if I did that I'd be crawling to the bathroom the next morning!
And that's one reason you do get athletes who don't train as seriously as they could, because for a while they get away with it, though eventually it catches up to them.

Now it's not as frequent as it used to be, because the competition is tougher, but Richards/Carter sure had a reputation for doing off hour bicep curls!

I was on a national u-16 and u-17 programme that was prepping players for an Olympics in which we were basically guaranteed to lose every game and we pretty much knew like ~5 years out. It was not pro, people were having to work alongside their funding when they got to the u-18, u-21 and senior programme (though some managed to get pro spots outside of the UK to help, albeit with pretty low incomes, like say $20-25,000 a year for playing sport, albeit none of them cared). 8 of the 13 man Olympic squad I played with or against at some point, including 3 I trained with 3 days a week and 2 I trained with once a week, and was coached by another one of them at one point.

Yet everyone was training 28+ hours a week. Did people drink and have fun? Yeh, from time to time. But even as 15 and 16 year olds the ones who made it were waking up at 5am 6 days a week to swim before school and then go straight from school to 2 hours training a night. If you don't do that, you don't make it. Along with being vertically challenged at 5'11, and not a national level swimmer, I could not hack it once it ramped up because as a 16-17 year old my girlfriend and school were more important. (that and a partially torn ACL) Not like I would have "made" it anyway!


And Jeff Carter - I don't think you will find many a better conditioned athletes than him. People have lives too, as they should do. But he used to destroy the Flyers pre-season physical tests and is a physical freak.

Yeh, in every sport there are guys you hear about who have issues. But it is a minute amount.

 

[Appleyard]

And when has Voracek ever had even any smoke in those kind of regards?

The guy is a horse who plays long shifts, can log big minutes, is a great skater, very physically strong, is captain of his national team and assistant captain for the Flyers, never had any off ice issues either. And every player I have spoken to when they mention him speak highly of him. Carter Hart and Oskar Lindblom even brought him up themselves as a guy who had helped them coming into the NHL!

The only reason I feel people have some strange perception of him is because he literally says what he thinks and never sugar-coats it. Which is often what people wish for with athletes, and he is one of the few who says it how he thinks it is.

 

[BobbyClarkeFan16]

You'd be surprised how many professional athletes get by in their 20s with bad habits on pure physical talent.
I remember my 20s, when I could party all night and get to work the next day, now if I did that I'd be crawling to the bathroom the next morning!
And that's one reason you do get athletes who don't train as seriously as they could, because for a while they get away with it, though eventually it catches up to them.

Now it's not as frequent as it used to be, because the competition is tougher, but Richards/Carter sure had a reputation for doing off hour bicep curls!

You have to be in shape to harness that physical talent. Carter was a physical specimen that kept himself in immaculate shape. Having worked with one of his parents and having witnessed him work out religiously in the training facilities that my previous employer had, he was one of the few that put in the time and effort to keep in shape. As for the whole "off hour bicep curls", he was never out of control that was made out to be (especially when his parents were often weekly visitors in Philadelphia -> I worked on an IT Service Desk and often did a lot of remote access work for them while they were visiting in Philadelphia). You'd figure that if he were a problem in Philadelphia, he would have been a problem everywhere else as well and he'd be bounced out of the league by now......

 

[deadhead]

Carter has said he's changed since he got married and no longer hits the town on a regular basis.

Teammates say partying cost Richards, Carter their Flyers positions

I mean a lot of these stories can be found, even on the Athletic, from the players themselves talking about their younger selves and how they took their talent for granted.

Voracek if I remember showed up out of shape a few years ago.

One thing Voracek has never been, however, is one of the better conditioned players in the NHL. While with the Columbus Blue Jackets, former coach Scott Arniel said of Voracek to the Columbus Dispatch, ""The biggest thing that is holding him back is his conditioning. I think this guy can be an elite player in this league if he gets himself in shape."

Voracek got more serious about staying in shape once he came to the Flyers. Even so, he caught heat for his conditioning after the lockout in 2012. Voracek joked that he perhaps he'd enjoyed his mother's home cooking a little too much while playing for HC Lev during the lockout. Scott Hartnell, who also admittedly reported to the Flyers in less-than-ideal shape after the lockout, joked that Voracek and himself were candidates for "fat camp."

HockeyBuzz.com - Bill Meltzer - Meltzer's Musings: Voracek, Berube, Barnes, Quick Hits

 

[Adtar02]

If you want to be a top team, you can't have a 1st line composed of players in the top 90, a 2nd line from 91-180 and so forth.
A team composed of average players in each tranche would be an average team.

You want to be in the top third or so in all areas, obviously, there will be some divergence, maybe you have an elite 1st line, or elite top D-pair.
Or you lack those elite players but have a 3rd line better than most team's 2nd line and beat them with depth.
But using that as a baseline, I'd say:

1st line players should be in the 1-45 group, totaling say 90 or so (i.e. 10th, 35th, 45th)
2nd line from 46-135
3rd line from 136-225 or so.
In other words, you don't want players on any line who are below average league wide for that line.

We have crude metrics for defense (baseball has the same issue in calculating WAR). xGF% and EV GAR try to account for it, not perfect measures, which is why you want to use multiple measures. But you want to try and account for it.

Scoring does matter, and goal scoring more than assists (there's about 2.25 points per goal, but one goal per goal).
But defense also matters. Most scorers tend to be below average to average defensively (self-selection, scorers are more likely to get PT with below average defense than nonscorers), so those who are above defensively should be ranked higher than their point totals.

PP scoring matters, but more of a unit measure since individual PP scoring for most players is primarily determined by opportunity, not skill (which is why PP GAR is a good check on raw PP scoring statistics).

Not a good idea to question appleyards use or knowledge of stats.

Jake has been a top 20 winger for seven years. NoT a FiRsT lInE pLaYeR

 

[Adtar02]

This is priceless

 

[deadhead]

Jake
2013-2016:
ES: 39, 48, 32
CorsiRel: 6.8, 7.3, 3.5
E +/-: ---, 14.7, 6.7
+/- total: +7
xGF/60: .148, .171, .228
xGA/60: -.168, -0.017, -.046
EV GAR: 11.2, 8.4, 5.9
PP GAR: 3.8, 4.3, 2.9

2016-19:
ES: 38, 50, 48
CorsiRel: 1.5, 1.5, 1.2
E +/-: 1.9, 5.5, 3.3
+/- total: -30
xGF/60: .014, .073, .054
xGA/60: .081, .083, .119
EV GAR: -3.3, 3.9, 0.8
PP GAR: 1.9, 2.8, 1.6

That's a huge shift.
One explanation I thought of was the decline of Giroux, 2013-16: ES 49, 36, 38, then 26 in 2016-17.
While Voracek fell off that last year, he had a great season the year before when Giroux was slipping.

The last two years he has bounced around, half of 2017-18 with G and Couts, then replaced with TK.
This last year he also bounced between centers, played his best with G and Couts, but struggled with Lindblom and Couts almost as much as with Lindblom as Patrick.

 

[bobbythebrain]

Carter has said he's changed since he got married and no longer hits the town on a regular basis.

Teammates say partying cost Richards, Carter their Flyers positions

I mean a lot of these stories can be found, even on the Athletic, from the players themselves talking about their younger selves and how they took their talent for granted.

Voracek if I remember showed up out of shape a few years ago.

One thing Voracek has never been, however, is one of the better conditioned players in the NHL. While with the Columbus Blue Jackets, former coach Scott Arniel said of Voracek to the Columbus Dispatch, ""The biggest thing that is holding him back is his conditioning. I think this guy can be an elite player in this league if he gets himself in shape."

Voracek got more serious about staying in shape once he came to the Flyers. Even so, he caught heat for his conditioning after the lockout in 2012. Voracek joked that he perhaps he'd enjoyed his mother's home cooking a little too much while playing for HC Lev during the lockout. Scott Hartnell, who also admittedly reported to the Flyers in less-than-ideal shape after the lockout, joked that Voracek and himself were candidates for "fat camp."

HockeyBuzz.com - Bill Meltzer - Meltzer's Musings: Voracek, Berube, Barnes, Quick Hits

And Byfuglien swelled to 320lbs over the summer

You are blowing conditioning way outta proportion here it seems in Jake's case

We know guys like Kessel and Buff can show up outta shape and still perform. Yet you elude that when Jake shows up slightly outta shape, it costs him an extra 40 points and huge downgrade in advanced stats

Jake does what he does based on pure talent and hockey IQ. His conditioning is just a small part of it. Years of hard work don't suddenly dissapear and affect him so drastically over a summer of moms home cooking

 

[baudib1]

You have to appreciate the hard work and insane amount of dedication it takes for deadhead to reach these levels of pure comedy gold.

 

[bobbythebrain]

You have to appreciate the hard work and insane amount of dedication it takes for deadhead to reach these levels of pure comedy gold.

 

[deadhead]

And Byfuglien swelled to 320lbs over the summer

You are blowing conditioning way outta proportion here it seems in Jake's case

We know guys like Kessel and Buff can show up outta shape and still perform. Yet you elude that when Jake shows up slightly outta shape, it costs him an extra 40 points and huge downgrade in advanced stats

Jake does what he does based on pure talent and hockey IQ. His conditioning is just a small part of it. Years of hard work don't suddenly dissapear and affect him so drastically over a summer of moms home cooking

Now you're engaging in conspiracy theory thinking.
My explanation for Jake's falloff have nothing to do with conditioning, you just made that up out of thin air, his conditioning issues were back in 2012-13.
What I don't know, and neither does anyone here, how much was Giroux's decline/move to LW, how much was Jake.

 

[bobbythebrain]

Now you're engaging in conspiracy theory thinking.
My explanation for Jake's falloff have nothing to do with conditioning, you just made that up out of thin air, his conditioning issues were back in 2012-13.
What I don't know, and neither does anyone here, how much was Giroux's decline/move to LW, how much was Jake.

Say what now? Did you take something and lost some memory?

You went from saying Jake is not a 1st liner and pulled up some handpicked stats, and when challenged and without a reasonable doubt got owned, reverted to how he doesn't try half the time and this pre-dates to his time in Clb, and how his lack of conditioning was a major indicator of his dedication. Then you went on to insinuate he doesn't try for the Flyers enough because he has a history of not being professional enough, but did for the Czechs

No conspiracy theory needed I'm afraid. You are all over the map, it's clear you needed to scramble b/c you got owned by APY, and can't keep track of what you say, well, b/c simply you are too stubborn to admit you are completely full of s***

 

[kudymen]

No matter how many threads this topic spreads over, it is an.. interesting opinion to hold. As an opinion, I am not going to tell you to change it. But its ridiculous how many cherry picked stats, how many times too, have been needed to try to prove (and fail) a hot take over and over and over and over again.
You know why we are not in the playoffs? Because by these shitty measures we have literally no 1st liner and none of our prospects will grow to that status.

 

[Prongo]

I’ve never seen a person just never admit they were/are wrong. Just a little self awareness goes a long way....

Edit: Grammar is good with this one.

 

[Adtar02]

It’s kinda sad in way.

 

[Rebels57]

Why you people keep giving him the attention he craves is beyond me.

 

[Curufinwe]

It shouldn't be that hard for someone to admit that Konency turned into a top 6 forward as a 20 year old, but when that person can't even admit that Hak was a bad coach, I guess we can't expect too much.