Sam Fels – Page 128 – Faxes from Uncle Dale

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Game #55 – Canucks vs. Hawks: I Make A Lot Of Graphs

By Sam Fels February 7, 2019 1370 0

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Game #55 – Canucks vs. Hawks: Lineups & How Teams Were Built

By Sam Fels February 7, 2019 1410 0

Notes: Coach Cool Youth Pastor should be targeting the bottom six of the Canucks, because it SUCKS. With last change, get your top lines out against them as much as you can, and see if Kruger and Saad can’t deal with Horvat or Pettersson. It’s worth a shot…Pettersson hasn’t stopped, with 23 points in his last 18 games…Roussel has four points in his last three games, and makes a habit of scoring against the Hawks…with Demko hurt Markstrom is going to take just about every start…Stetcher has been sneaky good metrically, hopefully the Canucks underrate and lose him somehow…

Notes: Kampf’s injury is bigger than you might think. He and Saad had dominated possession with unfriendly zone starts, and it’s a real question that Kruger can hold up his end of the bargain, though Edmonton was a good start…Forsling comes back in for Dahlstrom, which makes you wonder who CCYP is going to throw at Pettersson, and pray to god it’s not Keith and Seabrook…Delia and Ward are apparently just going to swap starts, which probably isn’t the worst way to bleed Delia into the league but you know at some point Ward is going to go Cam Ward…Saad has seven points in his last seven…

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Empty Calorie Fun

By Sam Fels February 6, 2019 2848 0

Maybe I’m getting old, but I feel like I have to put a disclaimer at the front of every post that will probably turn out negative. I used to be much more confident in my cynicism. Maybe I’m just trying to be happier as I hurl toward death. Either way.

Let me state that it’s much more fun to watch the Hawks win. Much like any wrestling fan will tell you, things are better when there are stakes and you’re not merely completing the schedule. The fact that the next few Hawks games, and hell, maybe even the rest of them, have something riding on them is enjoyable. I’d really rather this than a full-out tank, simply because the Hawks could never full-out tank and yet they still could finish near bottom of the conference. That might sound hypocritical from someone who was all aboard the Cubs tank and rebuild and also is kind of fascinated to watch the White Sox one. But that’s baseball, where both teams were easily able to flog whatever player they wanted for whatever they could get. Can’t do that in hockey. So whatever. Last night was probably the most fun game of the season, though the Oilers have something to do with that as well.

But what’s most important is that the front office, and maybe the coach, see what exactly is going on here. And though I know better than to think I’ll glean whether or not that’s true from what Stan Bowman says to the press–because he’s highly guarded and not all that eloquent–let’s just say I’m not encouraged.

Take this from Monday’s article at The Athletic from Mark Lazerus (closer than you know, love each other so, Mark Lazerus…) about whether or not the Hawks should have fired Joel Quenneville sooner and what Jeremy Colliton could have done with the extra time. This quote isn’t strictly about that, but when talking about the team now this is what Bowman had to say…

“He said they’re not as bad as their record suggests, that if they had been playing all season the way they’ve been playing the last eight weeks, they’d be ‘right there.'”

In one sense, I guess he’s right. The Hawks in the last seven weeks are 12-6-4. That’s a 104-point pace. Hey, that’s nice! Good even! But as you all know, I’m a process guy. This is hockey. Any team can spasm a run of results anywhere and for just about any reason. I want to know what I’m seeing is sustainable. So…is it? Well, no. Not even close. It’s the same story it’s always been.

Since December 17th, when the Hawks second eight-game losing streak ended and this 12-6-4 one started:

Corsi Percentage: 46.1 (28th)

Scoring-Chance Percentage: 44.3 (29th)

High-Danger Scoring-Chance Percentage: 38.7 (dead-ass last)

That’s not just bad. That’s legitimately terrible. At even-strength, over the past seven weeks, the Hawks have been one of the worst even-strength teams in the league. So how did they get this record? Well that’s easy. Over those seven weeks they’ve got decent goaltending (.926, good for 12th), have shot pretty damn well (9.7%, good for seventh in the league), and of course, the power play.

No, I don’t mean to just dismiss the power play. You can power play your way to a lot of things. The Jackets did it to the playoffs a couple seasons ago. The Sharks used a power play to get to a Final in ’16. The goals still count. But even the power play, process-wise, has only been ok, and nowhere near what its results are. Yes, I get it. It’s a results business, and with Kane, DeBrincat and a suddenly nuclear and Fels-powered Gustafsson, the power play should always out-result its process. But I want to know that these results can last. So over the past seven weeks, the power play…

Shots/60 – 55.9 (7th)

Scoring Chances/60: 50.5 (13th)

High-Danger Chances/60: 17.0 (23rd)

So the power play isn’t creating chances and good ones anymore regularly than middling. What it is doing is burying the chances it gets, at a ridiculous clip of 28%. Over the past seven weeks, the second-best shooting percentage for a team on the PP is Ottawa at 21.6! That’s seven points! That’s the same difference between second and 11th!. To give you some idea of how ludicrous the marksmanship on the power play has been, last year Pittsburgh led the league in PP SH% at 17.0. The year before that it was Montreal at the same 17.0%. Sure, any team can put together a hot couple months. But this 28% just isn’t going to stick around, and there’s nothing to support it when it flattens out, which it simply has to.

Ok, let’s try and find something positive here. It’s stupid to to look at just five games, because any team can do anything over five games. But maybe it’ll be the base for something. Maybe we’ll look back in April with this as a starting point and say that’s when the Hawks started to turn it around structurally. That’s when their even-strength play started to match their play on the man-advantage. So fine, over the past five games:

Corsi Percentage: 48.1 (23rd)

Scoring-Chance Percentage: 46.6 (23rd)

High-Danger Scoring-Chance Percentage: 44.3 (24th)

Nope, still blows! The Hawks, even during this streak, have been a subpar defensive team, and even their goaltending ranks 15th over this limited stretch. What they do lead in is shooting-percentage for these couple of weeks at 13.5. Again, that won’t last.

Look, I want to believe just like you. And teams have stretched out goofy percentages and habits for longer than this. Way longer than this. And maybe Delia gets hot again to even some of this out, or Corey Crawford returns the conquering hero on March 1st and does even better. Stranger things have happened.

And that’s being a bit cold. There are some things in this streak that do portend to a brighter future. Like Dylan Strome, or Top Cat proving not just he’s a top-six scorer but a genuine top-line scorer. Saad and Kampf (before he got hurt). Connor Murphy has been able to take top pairing/dungeon assignments. It’s not a barren wasteland.

But overall, this is pixie dust. And while you would never, ever hear Bowman or Colliton say this (great seats still available!), my fear and expectation is that they genuinely believe something ingrained has changed here. And it hasn’t.

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Game #54 – Hawks vs. Oilers Preview/Postcard Party: And Now Here’s Some Tripe

By Sam Fels February 5, 2019 1587 0

vs.

RECORDS: Hawks 20-24-9 Oilers 23-24-5

PUCK DROP: 8pm

TV: WGN

EdMo Dee: Oilers Nation

The Hawks conclude this post-break, three-game road trip in the NHL’s “Beyond The Wall,” the hellscape that is Edmonton, Alberta (I assume). And when I say hellscape, I really mean the team that you’ll find there. Though a city that cold can’t have that much going on, no matter how much oil money flows or freezes in the streets. I’m sure the Hawks will thank the schedule makers for a five-day trip that spans three timezones and a collective temperature of “go fuck yourself.”

You may have heard about the Oilers, Biggest laughingstock in the league, despite having two more points than the Hawks. If the Hawks were to win tonight most Oilers fans would take being level on points with them as rock-bottom, just to give you a clear vision of what the Hawks are right now. Have the best player in the league as well, these Oilers. Can’t seem to make that count. Recently fired their addled GM two years too late. Now everyone is waiting with giddy excitement to see what drunken, near-sighted clown they hire next. He’ll almost assuredly have played on the Oilers in the 80s, because the one time they tried not to do that they ended up with Peter Chiarelli and his bent vision of reality, which basically involved whatever signing caused him to grab his groin aggressively. So clearly they have to go back to what didn’t work before. God bless this organization.

On the ice, the Oilers have center-depth and literally nothing else. Run CMD, Leon Draisaitl, and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins are by far their three leading scorers, and at various times this season have played with each other. Now they’re all back at their natural center positions, but when you look at what surrounds them it’s enough to make your food turn septic in your digestive track.

Milan Lucic is “skating” with McDavid, except you can’t call what Lucic does skating anymore so much as “thrashing about as the air currents push him ever so slightly.” Alex Chiasson is a second-line winger. Jujhar Khaira and Zack Kassian are somehow on a NHL third-line together instead of loading up on Skittles at a truck-stop somewhere during an AHL bus ride. “Putrid” doesn’t even come close to starting to describe this, and now you know why they are where they are. They’ve broken Jesse Puljujarvi, if he was anything to begin with, and he’s skating with Kyle Brodziak and Brad Malone in a chilling vision of what the future as a tomato can will look like.

It’s not any better on the back end. This is a team that traded FOR Brandon Manning, remember. And he plays. Adam Larsson is parading around the top pairing with a Kings castoff. Darnell Nurse will occasionally flash the modern-Pronger bit we thought he was destined for, and then remembers he’s spent almost all of his career with Kris Russell and retreats into sadness done in blue and orange again. Andrej Sekera wanders the arena looking for whatever fell off of him this week. It’s bleak.

And when the Oilers have threatened to be good in the past, it was because Cam And Magic Talbot could bail them out. He hasn’t this year, and this is where they are. They’re trusting Mikko Koskinen, a 30-year-old whose flights got crossed up and ended up signing here from the KHL rather than try and figure out how to rebook. In Chiarelli’s final act of lunacy, he re-signed Koskinen for three years to kind of just stand there, which is what he does. But his .908 is better than Talbot’s .893.

The Oilers tried to salvage this by hiring Ken Hitchcock midseason, because his track record of success is so blaring over the past 12 years. They’ve gone 14-14-4 with Hitch, a massive improvement over the 9-10-1 they managed with Todd McLellan. You know it’s bad when Hitch is longing for Jay Bouwmeester and Alex OrangeJello again. He gave up his Civil War reading for this?

This is maybe the biggest mess in the league, and whatever stooge they install as GM is going to find it nearly impossible to extricate. There’s barely any money coming off the books in the summer, really only Talbot’s $4M+ hit. And this team has no wingers. Lucic is in Seabrook territory at this point, and Kris Russell isn’t far behind. That is if the Oilers were inclined to move Russell, but they still seem oddly infatuated with him, mostly to sneer at most of the hockey world pointing out he sucks.

And really, that’s all the Oilers have been for nearly three decades now. Most of the hockey world has been pointing out they suck since 1991, and they still point and gloat about five Cups won before most of you could form a sentence. They’re convinced that run that started 35 years ago still makes them ahead of the game and won’t hear otherwise. This organization has accomplished exactly dick since their glory days, save one goofed Final appearance the first year of the lockout when nothing made sense and is something Chris Pronger clearly erased from his memory (the Blues traded him for Eric Brewer, by the way. Take a moment to think about that).

Anyway, tonight’s challenge is simple enough. Hitch will throw McDavid out against Keith and Seabrook as often as he can, unless he still thinks it’s 2013, and he might. Failing that, Forsling and Gustafsson will be similarly tortured. If the Hawks can somehow keep McJesus on a leash, they should have a good chance at this one. The Oilers recently gave up four power play goals in a game, so the Hawks’ PP should barely be able to keep from slobbering when they get their chance.

As for the Hawks, no word yet on who starts but one would hope Delia gets wheeled back out there. Ward’s had two decent starts in a row though and we know Coach Cool Youth Pastor will shit himself if he has to tell any veteran other than Chris Kunitz anything bad, so you never know. Perlini should stay in ahead of Kunitz, but that’s about it.

As we said at the weekend, the schedule is pretty shitty now, so if the Hawks are insistent on chasing playoff spots that don’t really matter, this is where they’ll make their run. With the Canucks and Wings at home next, they could actually put together a substantial winning streak. Then again, this is just about the same outfit that got worked by the Wings at home last year. The Hawks have lost to the Oilers twice already this season, but hey, they’re both under .500 so maybe they’re not good enough to beat anyone three times.

We’re in this together.

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Game #54 – Hawks vs Oilers Spotlight: Second Cousin Of Puljujarvi The Rabbit

By Sam Fels February 5, 2019 1443 0

There are so many decisions that Oilers fans would like to mold into a physical object, make it as blunt as possible, and then use it to beat the recently-departed Peter Chiarelli over the head. The Lucic signing, the Hall trade, the lack of any d-men that truly matter, or the lack of wingers that matter even less, and we could keep going. Stalin wishes he could have scorched the Earth quite like this. But one that goes under the radar a bit, because of his age and hope, is that #4 pick on Jesse Puljujarvi.

It’s always easy to play this game, because everyone misses on someone pretty much every year. And really, the only player that Oilers fans can lament that was there instead of Puljujarvi is Matthew Tkachuk, which stings even more as he’s four hours down the road in Calgary driving everyone nuts (in a good way). Still, it’s almost certainly a different landscape for the Oilers if Tkachuk is running alongside Run CMD and leaving either Ryan Nugent-Hopkins or Leon Draisaitl, or both, to play center. So we’ll leave that there. There’s also the idea of what the Oilers might have gotten for that pick in a trade, given that they were already lousy with young, pedigreed picks. Perhaps that winger or d-man they’ve been looking for for a decade or more?

Oilers fans could excuse that pick if they thought Puljujarvi was handled right. You won’t find one that thinks that, though. Puljujarvi was tossed into the NHL right from draft day at 18, and most agreed at the time that was a leap. The Oilers were still on a seemingly-endless playoff-less streak then, they would make it that year, and were adding talent wherever they could find it for what they knew to be a serious push with a fully healthy McDavid. Figuring Puljujarvi could just ride shotgun at some point might not have been ludicrous, but it was hopeful at best.

And it’s not like every top-five pick goes straight to the NHL. In the past five drafts, Sam Reinhart, Sam Bennett, Michael Del Colle, Dylan Strome, Mitch Marner, Olli Juolevi, Miro Heiskanen, Cale Makar, Elias Pettersson, and Barrett Hayton this year have all taken at least a “gap year.” For some, it’s worked a trick like Marner, Heiskanen, Pettersson. Others are still hoping to prove it was worth the bother, including Strome here in town. There is no hard and fast rule on these things.

Still, those who didn’t come to the NHL right away pretty much made a real impact as soon as they did, and if they haven’t there’s some doubt if they will, like with Strome and Del Colle. Those like Puljujarvi who came straight to the NHL have been impact players from jump street, with names like Kotkaniemi, the dreaded Laramie Tkachuk, Svechnikov, Dahlin, Matthews, Eichel, and the like.

Every player is different obviously, but the thinking is starting to get to be if Puljujarvi were going to be anything, you’d know it by now. 17 goals in 134 games at the top level, and being yo-yoed from the AHL to the NHL is not anything, at least not yet.

When left alone in the AHL his rookie year, Puljujarvi did produce, 28 points in 39 games. Not eye-popping, but the AHL is weird and that’s enough to notice. And that really should have been a platform for him to go on from there. And he hasn’t. And Oilers fans will tell you he still needed more time in the AHL. But these days, impact young players are ready to go pretty damn quickly, or they don’t get there. Maybe they get a year in the AHL, but that’s about it. Look around to most teams and if they have a key piece under 25, chances are they got there pretty swiftly.

On the plus side for the Oilers, Puljujarvi’s lack of sparkle means he won’t make anything coming out of his entry-level deal this summer, and the Oilers need all the cap space they can find. If they can lock him up for even two years on a prove-it deal and he does, that’s production over the investment they’ll be making, which is the exact opposite of everything they’ve been doing. And if he doesn’t, they won’t be out much financially but they’ll be out the opportunity of what they might have had with that #4 pick. And they’ll have to find a way to plug that hole he was supposed to be filling, which could be expensive. Which is how they got into this mess.

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Game #54 – Hawks vs. Oilers Q&A: Matt Henderson From Oilers Nation

By Sam Fels February 5, 2019 1494 0

Matt Henderson is one of the writers at Oilersnation.com. You can follow him on Twitter @archaeologuy.

So the Oilers finally got around to firing Peter Chiarelli. Is there genuine hope now? Or is the fear he may have broken this thing beyond repair? What can a new GM conceivably do immediately?

Hope is hard to kill and the Oilers still have McDavid, Draisaitl, RNH, and Klefbom. It’s not many pieces, but the high end talent is there. I don’t think the team is broken beyond repair, however, it’s going to take a lot of work to remove the anchors that Chia added. Russell and Lucic make up $10M on the Cap and they’re 3rd pairing/line quality at best. The new GM needs to start finding reasonable talent on the wings and a right shot defender to keep Bouchard pushed down the order.

Did Cam Talbot simply die of exhaustion?

I wish I could reasonably explain goalies. They’re weird. I don’t think it’s exhaustion. At least not from playing. His twins were born and his game disappeared. My guess is the changes to his life have more to do with the erosion of his play than because he played too many games. It’s jut a guess though. Goalies are Voodoo.

We always ask about him, because we were fascinated by what he could be, but what has Darnell Nurse looked like under Ken Hitchcock? Is he just never going to be the world-altering beast we thought?

I don’t think he’ll be a world altering beast, but he’s played reasonably well under Hitchcock. Because Klefbom has been hurt it’s forced him into the PP and he’s been picking up points at a solid rate. He has better tools than a lot of players. He’s a plus skater and has a mean streak. I think he’ll be a great 2nd pairing defender. I don’t think that’s a knock on him. If he wants to take the next step he needs to keep working on his outlet passing. He usually skates it out but if the passing improves he could unlock that next level.

What’s the deal with Jesse Puljujarvi? The Oilers seem intent on keeping him in the AHL but Oilers fans tend to think he’s getting screwed a bit.

I’m a big Jesse Puljujarvi fan. He’s a bit like Nurse in that he has unreal physical tools. The Oilers unquestionably screwed up with his development. He never should have seen regular NHL time until this season but the Oilers started the clock on his ELC and his UFA status when he was 18. He ought to have been in the AHL playing 18-22 minutes a night in a top line role learning how to be an offensive difference maker in North America. He has some bad habits that need to be fixed like shooting from way too far out on the rush, but he also has solid defensive awareness. I can’t tell you what his ceiling is anymore, but I think he can still turn into a solid top-six winger.

How does this all play out? Do the Oilers make a deal at the deadline and make the playoffs? Or just more a mess?

Anything can happen, but I fail to see how this team makes the playoffs. If they are trading at the deadline it should be as sellers. If they can move salary from next year out while keeping that small core intact then that’s a huge plus. This team is closer to Jack Hughes than they are being a legit playoff team. If that changes then something miraculous happened.

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Game #54 – Hawks vs. Oilers Douchebag Du Jour: He Can’t Be Killed

By Sam Fels February 5, 2019 1498 0

There’s no limit to how much you can blame Peter Chiarelli for what he did to the Oilers and some of the prime years of Connor McDavid. Run CMD should be carving out memories in April and May that we’ll keep forever, and yet he’ll be in the foursome ahead of you again, most likely. Chiarelli’s biggest problem was a lack of forward, or new, or progressive ideas. He was buried in the idea of hockey in the 90s, where you basically needed an axe-murderer on every line. And yet another one was hiring Ken Hitchcock to try and put out the inferno he created.

Look, Hitchcock lives in Edmonton and was sitting around not doing anything, so he was accessible and bored. It’s not that much out of his life to take the job, and he has nothing to lose. It’s that he was asked that’s so galling.

We have to keep stressing it every time he shows up against the Hawks, but since the Great Lockout of ’05, Ken Hitchcock has no success to speak of. The Flyers booted him quickly when he couldn’t adjust his team to the new ways of the game. The Jackets made the playoffs once, and never won a game. The Blues won three series in five years. And sure, the Blues never finished lower than second in the division, giving him something of a mini-Boudreau record, but this is the sport where no one really cares what your regular season marks are. The Stars missed the playoffs with him.

Hitch will batten things down and no team of his will ever give up too much. If the goalie he has plays really well, they’ll rack up regular season points. But they don’t create enough. They never have. Good teams get up the ice quickly and carry the puck. Can you ever picture a Hitchcock team doing that? Would you fuck. Hitch limits creativity to the defensive end, and any player making a turnover above the red line is sent to a gulag he has built next to the dressing room. Even if the Oilers had the horses to do that, which they should in some form with Klefbom and Nurse, they’re already running in place.

Hitchcock keeps falling upwards, or at least sideways, which given his shape is a real trick. He’s been Mike Babcock’s assistant on two Olympic teams and World Cup team, and you really have to ask why. What are his accomplishments other than just being around like the guy in front of the CVS? What’s so visionary about his system? His contemporary, Joel Quenneville, coached both before and after that lockout, has a bursting trophy-case. And the players he helped develop were upset he was gone. Vladimir Tarasenko threw a three-day rave when Hitch was fired. Seguin and Benn weren’t far behind. Rick Nash ran to New York.

This has to be his last stop, but in the NHL no one ever truly dies.

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Game #54 – Hawks vs. Oilers: I Make A Lot Of Graphs

By Sam Fels February 5, 2019 1236 0

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Game #54 – Hawks vs. Oilers: Lineups & How Teams Were Built

By Sam Fels February 5, 2019 1390 0

Notes: We keep telling you about Kampf and Saad, and they keep crushing it…any chances would see Kunitz slot in for Perlini but that would be pointless…Seabrook and Keith got clocked against the Wild, and Hitchcock isn’t so dinosaur that he won’t recognize what they are and send McDavid at them every chance, so that’ll be fun…Gustafsson and Forsling were actually effective together as a third-pairing, which is what they are…we’re hoping it’s Delia but they could go back to Ward, morning skate was after publish time…

Notes: You can complain about the Hawks wingers, and you should, but good god look at this trash! That’s what plays with McDavid? He should have demanded a trade like four months ago!…Draisaitl has seven points in his last four games…McDavid has 41 points in his last 26 games, only slightly behind the pace Kane has been putting up…Koskinen probably goes tonight as Talbot has been horrible his last couple appearances and Koskinen at least hasn’t turned into putty, and the Oilers will settle for that…they’re already bitching about Manning, which is just delicious…

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