Thursday, February 7, 2008

Thursday Morning Cupcheck - Why Free Agents Suck

By Todd Maternowski

Top of the morning, hockey fans! Last week we dove into the Pacific to see the wonderful new flora and fauna, and came up gasping for air from the disappointingly polluted brine. This week, I was going to dedicate this column to Gary Bettman's brand-new foray into film-making, Jackin' 2: Electric Wristabaloo, when I was suddenly distracted by the insane amount of trade and free agent speculation in the hockey buzz circles. One name in particular kept popping up, dominating the sports radio airwaves as well as flooding the interwebs: that name is, of course, Tony Hrkac. Will Tony Hrkac come out of retirement to add some irreplaceable scoring ability to some lucky contender? Only time will tell, but when Hrkac's name is mentioned in civilized hockey company, you can cut the tension with a chainsaw.

After Hrkac, a few lesser-known names from hockey's sordid past keep popping up: among them, Peter Forsberg and Vincent Lecavalier. For those fans who are straining to remember either of these two long-forgotten hockey wraiths, here's a quick pointer: one led the league in scoring as recently as 2007, while the other one redefined the word "unsportsmanlike" for an entire generation of NHL fans.

Both are at the pinnacle of the hockey-rumor world: NHL GMs want them, while NHL forwards want to be them. Lecavalier is Tampa's young stud, scores a lot of highlight-reel goals, and, fortunately, is the only one of Tampa's three incredibly-overpriced players lacking a no-trade contract. Bully for the worst team in the NHL! Being Captain on a last-place team and scoring lots of goals makes one a hot commodity in NHL circles: plus, at 6'4" and 219 pounds, he's a dream machine for any team's PR department, sortof like Tom Brady if Brady quarterbacked the Miami Dolphins.

The best thing about acquiring Forsberg is the free pacifier

Actually, come to think of it, exactly like Brady quarterbacking the Dolphins. More on that later.

And Forsberg? His last shift for an NHL team came in Nashville's once-again-pathetic first-round exit in the 2007 playoffs. He did have 4 points in those 5 quick games, but for that team to go out so quickly was a direct indictment of the Swingin' Swede. Before that, in stints in Colorado and Philly, Forsberg made a name for himself in three critical areas: skating around in circles for ten seconds at a time in the offensive zone before launching weak backhanders at the net, tweaking his groin/hip/ankle/vagina, and accomplishing the nigh-impossible task of both "being the strongest skater on the ice for either team" and "getting launched across the ice twenty feet when an opposing defenseman brushes his elbow." In that last category, he was most impressive: sure, there are some players who have made a career of falling down to the ice in order to bawl their way to a call, but Forsberg took that wusstastic move to new, never-before-witnessed levels of intensity.

Of course, all this skating and falling took its toll on the player, who, at 34, has played just one full season in his entire career. But teams are clambering all over themselves for a shot at signing the Swarthy Swede: after all, point-a-game players are almost impossible to come by: the Dallas Stars, for instance, have only two of their own. Fortunately for the Stars, however, Forsberg has turned down their offer. While for real Stars fans this was cause for rejoicing, for the nattering ninnies of negativism, it was one more loss, one more reason why the Stars will never be as good as the Flyers or Maple Leafs.

Frankly, when it comes to trades and free agent signings, I'm with Tom Landry: if the other team is so willing to get rid of him, then there's a strong possibility that your team won't want him either. Short-sighted fans constantly treat their NHL team as if they were putting together an All-Star team on EA Sports '99: they mistakenly assume that high talent ratings are the sole mark of value for building a team and winning consistently.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. That sort of thinking will net you nothing but an entire team of Kamensky's, Bure's and Samsonov's. It will also net you nothing but an 11th place finish and a payroll higher than 9 of the 10 teams that finished above you. Don't believe me? Just ask the Toronto Maple Leafs, New York Rangers and my EA Sports '99 team, the Cthlulu Hoppies.

The real problem with hockey for the fans is the same that exists for NFL linemen: there's no easy-to-understand statistic that quickly conveys how much someone is truly worth to his team. Goals and assists are nice, but deceptive: of the top 20 goal-scorers in the NHL this morning, only 5 play for first-place teams in their division. The five top-scoring teams in the NHL are Detroit, Ottawa, Montreal, Philly and Dallas: Detroit has one top-20 scorer, Ottawa two, Montreal and Dallas one apiece, and Philly zero. Obviously team-scoring is a far more crucial to winning than having one guy dominate the stat sheets.

A better statistic for determining value might be the much-maligned plus/minus: of the top 15 individual players in that stat, 10 of them are playing for first-place teams. Of course, almost all of them are with one of two teams, either Detroit or Ottawa, but considering those are the top two teams in the NHL it shouldn't be too surprising that they are so far ahead of their competition. Of all the "individual" stats, plus/minus is probably the best overall indicator of success. Is it perfect? No! Is it better than anything else we've got? Probably!

Does that mean that Dallas should concentrate on acquiring players with really high plus/minus in the off-season? Actually, that's a decent question, since those are likely the players who benefited the most from playing on successful teams, rather than racking up a bunch of garbage goals in stat-padding losses. But some fans don't like to think that way: This guy scored 18 goals for the Atlanta Thrashers last year! Who cares that his plus/minus was -45, this guy is a golden god!! Also, you don't know what you're talking about. Adding a guy with talent is more important than adding a guy who will be a good fit in the locker room. I'll take 20 goals over guys getting along any day!

I pity you, fool! Take this example: say you work in an office, and spend your time at work reading hockey columns on the internet all day. Suppose your boss goes out to your competitor and hires their most productive employee. Suppose then that this employee does a fair amount of work for your company, but doesn't talk to you, tells the boss when you're reading hockey columns and borrows your pencils without asking. Also, he sleeps with your wife and beats your kids before spitting strangely-colored mucus in your face. Are you going to work well under those conditions?

A tireless work ethic is great, but a pact with Satan works just as well

Continuing that example, suppose your boss instead hires a hockey-lovin' gal who's not so bad on the eyes, laughs at all your jokes and puts free pencils on your desk when you're not looking. She's not half as productive as the jerk, but as a result of the hiring you're more likely to look forward to going to your crappy office job than before.

There is no difference between your work and a hockey team: unless you, like me, work alone inside a steel cage buried in Pegasus' backyard and are fed twice daily through a tube --actually, that may describe half my readership-- there is no fundamental difference between your cubicle-farm office job and a team of NHL athletes. The same principles of teamwork, group dynamics, and leadership still apply. The only real difference is that nobody is filming the results of your work and showing them to dozens of people on Versus. If they ever did, though, you can rest assured that anonymous viewers will angrily denounce the way you took that client's phonecall, and demand you get traded to India for a Customer Service Rep To Be Named Later.

So then, who is worth trading for? For a fan, it's difficult to say. There are no statlines for "works well with others" or "gives effective emotional support to teammates." However, I will say this once again: there is no roster in the entire NHL that lacks the talent to win the Stanley Cup this year. All NHL teams have roughly the same level of talent, it's just a matter of having the right things fall into place that determine a winning team. Detroit, for example, is lauded for having exceptionally "talented" forwards like Datysuk and Zetterberg. Of course, they forget to mention that Datysuk was drafted in the 6th round and Zetterberg the 7th, behind nearly 200 more "talented" players. The real success of those two is due to the top-notch organizational skills of the team they play for, being brought up around a ton of cagey veterans, and a tireless work ethic. The gas stations and Burger Kings of Canada are littered with former players who were vastly more "talented" than Datysuk and Zetterberg, yet decided it was more important to get wasted with road-hard puck bunnies than wake up early every morning to work on skating drills. The same can be said of any profession, including rock bands, firemen and Evangelical preachers.

Should the Stars trade for someone? If the price is low enough, and they feel the guy will be a good fit, then by all means pull the trigger. The Anaheim Ducks traded for Brad May and some minor leaguer before making their Cup run last year, while Nashville traded the farm to Philly for a guy who scored 15 points in 17 games and then left. Stars fans can hope that Les Jackson and Brett Hull ("The Hulkson") are smart enough to realize what they have and stick to their guns rather than make some disastrous Ladislav Nagy-type debacle of a trade.

That's it for this week's Cupcheck. Tune in next week when I go apeshit over the Stars' trading Turco, Zubov and Lehtinen for Martin St. Louis and Brad Lukowich.

Related stories

• Thursday Morning Cupcheck - Six Ways to Make Hockey Safer (Feb. 14, 2008)
• Week-in-view: Won’t you be ours? (Feb. 7, 2008)

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• Hockey > NHL > Stars

Comments

kirk Anonymous

Darn! Based on the Don Cherry fashion shot on the front page, I thought you had the poop on a certain D Magazine writer's love life.

8 months, 1 week ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )