Nosek was also extraordinarily good on faceoffs, which made him somewhat more valuable than most, usually-fungible, 4th line C.
Bruins Offseason
- Thread starter MiracleOfO2704
- Start date
Would they have been better off if they had signed Phil Danault and Jaden Schwartz instead of the 5 guys they did bring in?
First, you still have to pay the other three spots, so you have $11.3mm to spend, not $14mm, assuming you are paying min to the other three spots (assuming $900k/spot). Second, you have to factor in the downgrade from those five to the min spots as well, as well as the lesser amount of depth in the system as a result of using AHL folks for the last three spots.
Not to say they didn't make personnel mistakes with the back end of the roster, but it is unrealistic to think the team would cram as many $5mm+ players on the roster and have the 4th line and 3rd D-line be all kids. At that point, you'd be complaining that Sweeney didn't build any depth into the roster, in case of expected injuries.
Would the downgrade from Nosek to a McLaughlin type not be worth upgrading Haula to Danault? Just as an example from that offseason.
I think you can pack the 4th line with vet mininmum and ELC guys. I'd rather spend extra for the dudes that are going to play 15 minutes a night in the playoffs instead of the guys who will play 8 minutes.
Given they just traded a better version of Schwartz in Hall I'd say no. Danault is also going to be an albatross of a contract in a year or two.
Nosek to McLaughlin doesn't even cover a Haula to Danault, Foligno to McLaughlin does but I wouldn't use those savings to overpay Danault for 5 yrs. I'd rather have Zacha and his contract than Danault and his so I think Haula worked out very well. McLaughlin is a completely different player than Nosek who filled a specific role and filled it well. Do you want McLaughlin taking important defensive draws or key PK mins?
Separate from the particulars of Nosek v McLaughlin (or the additional value some 4th liners offer), I think this raises an interesting question. It's nice to have a dominant 4th line. BUT, considering the likely allocation of minutes in the playoffs, is it optimal? IOW, does a bottom-tier 4th line (I'm just assuming that "vet minimum and ELC guys" = "bottom-tier") run a real risk of undermining the regular season in any significant way?
The downgrade from Forbort (3 yrs, $9mm, last 2 yr $5.5mm tot) to Zboril (2 yr, $2.3mm) was significant. Forbort had a specific role and did it well. I have no issue with the Forbort signing; he's a good 3rd D-line/specialty fit. He averaged nearly 18 min/pg last year (15 min/playoff pg)
The downgrade from Nosek (2yr, $3.5mm) vs. McLaughlin (2yr, $1.5mm) was significant. Nosek had a specific role and did it well. He averaged 12 min/pg (reg season & playoffs).
Haula (2yr, $4.75mm, only yr with BOS was $2.25mm) had an uninspiring year and was flipped for Zacha. That's a win in my book.
The Foligno contract (2yr, $7.8mm) was terrible when it was signed. He was clearly on the decline.
I thought Reilly (3yr, 9mm) was going to be better than he's been. Obviously, in retrospect, a big miss but at the time I thought he was going to be top 4 D-man.
The ability to run out four solid lines was one of the main reasons the Bruins were able to dominate the third period last year. Most teams could barely run out 2-3 solid lines. A dominant 4th line also matches up with another team's 1st line and allows your 1st line not to have spend as much ice time versus the other team's 1st line. Boston's issue vs. Florida was the substantial injuries to key players.
The reason last year hurt so badly is due to an opportunity that may not come around again. You had 2 players both top two line forwards who came back at ridiculous under market deals just at a final chance to win. Getting Bergy and Krecji to play at essentially a combined 3.5 mill is the gift of all gifts. Their agents probably wanted to strangle them. If they were paid their true market value, what’s the guess, they would have cost about 13-15 mill last year. It essentially gave the B’s and extra 10 mill to play with, which allowed them to pack the roster with well paid veterans. Last years roster would have looked so different had Bergy and Krecji been on a full ticket.
Forbort was one of the worst 5v5 defenders in hockey last year despite sheltered competition. Gudbrandson esque. Theres likely zero downgrade to Zboril. It would be hard to downgrade that role.
Plus the downgrade could also have been to Reilly, not Zboril. I'll never understand why they signed both.
Didn't see it posted yet, but per Pierre LeBrun, Bruins have shown their annual interest in Noah Hanifin again. It stems from an article in The Athletic, but of course the issue with any acquisition is managing the cap space. He adds the Panthers (rolls eyes) are interested as well & are offering Anthony Duclair+.
https://theathletic.com/4650722/2023/06/29/nhl-draft-no-trades-lebrun/
https://theathletic.com/4650722/2023/06/29/nhl-draft-no-trades-lebrun/
Hanifin is signed for $4.95 million this year then is a UFA. It's somewhat doable, especially if Calgary retains. I'd imagine if Hanifin comes in, Grzelyck would be leaving either in the deal or elsewhere so it's not all that difficult to make the money work.
Kinda fits the Bruins core on defense. He's 26, LHD. Assuming they'd extend him, the defense would be Lindholm - McAvoy ; Hanifin - Carlo for the next 4+ seasons.
Kinda fits the Bruins core on defense. He's 26, LHD. Assuming they'd extend him, the defense would be Lindholm - McAvoy ; Hanifin - Carlo for the next 4+ seasons.
Where are you seeing data that says Forbort was one of the worst defenders in hockey last year? I'm not criticizing, just genuinely interested.The advanced data I'm seeing likes him much more defensively, ranking him top 40 last season in XPGA/20 5 on 5 (out of 200+ defensemen with over 500 minutes). His OZ starts were low, as well (2nd lowest on the team), so he wasn't sheltered on zone starts. There is some statistical evidence he played against easier competition, but vs opposition data has so much noise (it's a fluid game where you play short periods against a metric shit ton of different players) that I had trouble seeing where it helped when I was working. It may be better now.
Even as constructed, it feels like the defense for the next half decade makes a full rebuild basically a non-starter to me. The top 4 alone right now is likely enough to keep them in the playoff hunt by themselves.
That said, as much as I envy Sweeney/Neely for their jobs, I don't envy the decisions they need to make this and next offseason to try to keep this team actually competitive. Having no real picks this year, and no seemingly generational talents to step in (i.e. Pasta/McAvoy) is going to make it a difficult climb.
I wasn't speaking purely as "defense" when I said defender but I don't think his defense was very strong. I obviously don't have access to the things you have but here is where I'm coming from:
xGA/60 - he had the worst number here of all the regulars on the bruins last year. I suspect there is a lot of team effect happening for him but that could just be my bias. He did start in the D zone a large percentage of the time, but he started in the D zone the 4th most shifts on the bruins and only 1 shift per 60 more than Gryz.
xG% - not only did he have the poorest xGA results on the team, but hes an absolute zero on offense. His xG% of 45.5% was the 30th worst number in the NHL that played 750 minutes (I usually use 1000 min but Forbort only played 750).
The shot data is worse.
Im sure the QOC is noisy but all the models have his as bottom tier (25th percentile ish) and I think we can back this up anecdotally with how frequently he was out there against bottom 2 lines at 5v5.
I also think the micro stats back up his bad defense but I have let my all three zones patreon lapse. When I last looked he was the worst player against the rush, the worst at retreivals and the worst against a forecheck on the team. Maybe more data in the second half of the y ear changed that, but I doubt it.
Im interested in your feedback but my opinion is that making an argument that Forbort is a good defender lies solely in the performance of his team and is a difficult argument to make otherwise. prepared to be wrong but it may alter my worldview.
I dont want to pick nits with research that I'm not capable of doing, but I dont think there's much argument that he was worst on *the team* in most D categories. How does he stack up league-wide? For example, with the xG%. 30th worst out of how many? I would expect that an even distribution of Dmen would have one of the bottom 30 on every team. I'm not trying to suggest that he was good, but while his mistakes were usually more glaring than most, and he probably made the most of them among *Bruins* defensemen, he seemed to be a standard-issue bottom-pair guy who played a lot of PK minutes on a good PK team.
I like it, I feel like the hard cap system and the contracts are the easiest to figure out of all the major sports, but the biggest problem is that it's been flat for like 4 years now.
Agreed.
The NBA salary cap requires an advanced degree to even begin to understand.
The NFL cap is bullshit, with the ability to convert salaries to bonuses, and dead years, and guarantees, and whatnot.
MLB - lol.
The NHL is straight forward. They just don't have enough money.
Thanks for the excellent response! I'm still not clear where you're getting your data, but it looks like it may be Natural Stat Trick. Is that correct?
The data I'm looking at, which is not the Bruins internal numbers (although they are also more kind to DF than NST), show Forbort with a > 50% XPG%, and in the top quartile in expected goals against per 20 minutes (out of 211 defensemen with 500 or more 5 on 5 minutes). Having said that, DF was slightly below league average in expected goals for, and last among the 7 Bruins defensemen with over 500 5 on 5 minutes. He was also next to last on the Bruins expected goals against (Orlov was worse). He had the lowest XPG% among the regulars, with the 2nd lowest OZ start percentage (Carlo was lower). Relative to team he was nothing special 5 on 5.
If I'm being honest, I was not a big fan of Forbort's signing. He's not a puck mover (tons of dump outs of his own end), has weak pass completion percentages on outlets (which he uses a ton), and has very low puck possession. He's strong on contested loose pucks, and was very good on the PK with the 8th lowest expected goals against per 20 minutes among the 123 NHL defensemen with over 100 minutes in shorthanded situations (4th on the Bruins, however).
But I guess what I find interesting here is how much the publicly available systems can differ from the more advanced. I'm old and losing interest, but still think it would be cool to do a comparison of the different hockey metric systems, looking at how similar their results are, and how their expected goal data compares to actual on ice goals over a longer (3 year?) period. Also, Zboril, per the data I'm looking at, was a significant drop down from Forbort, with a 45% XPG% and expected goals against 0.20/20 minutes higher than Forbort's.
What's unfortunate is that the other major sports league regularly experience increases in their respective salary caps. The NBA, for example, is expecting a rather large increase in about 2 years. NFL's cap has grown steadily throughout the years. The highest tax threshold for MLB has similarly grown. I don't know enough about MLS to comment.
NHL's cap keeps getting stuck going sideways. Ruins the fan experience for me to see not just one but several good players be either traded for nothing or simply be allowed to depart. But NHL always has been by far the most poorly run league of the continent's sports.
I don't have time for a great response here at the moment but i'll check back in. I wanted to answer your question though. It's NST.com data. I think all the public models dislike Forborts game. Dom and EH both rank him replacement level overall and top down has him as a bottom quartile defender.
I assume the internal bruins numbers are better than NST but I can't imagine they are so good as to explain their inexplicable love for the player. I expect we live with another year of potato hands D and giving up a bunch of goals because he can't move his feet. Blech.
Did he happen to hear how in the world they could possibly make the cap work if they signed him?
$13.5 million to fill out.
Marchand - Coyle - DeBrusk
XXX - Zacha - Pastrnak
XXX - XXX - XXX
XXX - XXX - Greer
Lindholm - McAvoy
Grzelyck - Carlo
Forbort - Zboril
Swayman
NHL RFA: Swayman, Frederic, Lauko
Marchand - Coyle - DeBrusk
XXX - Zacha - Pastrnak
XXX - XXX - XXX
XXX - XXX - Greer
Lindholm - McAvoy
Grzelyck - Carlo
Forbort - Zboril
Swayman
NHL RFA: Swayman, Frederic, Lauko
Missing Ullmark on there.
If Bergeron and Krejci don't come back for somewhere close to the vet minimum, this roster is going to be significantly less talented than it was last year. They'll still be competitive for a playoff spot given what's still there, but next year will be a get in and see what happens kind of year.
Next year when the cap goes up, there's a pretty juicy FA class as of right now.
--Auston Matthews
--Anze Kopitar
--Steven Stamkos
--Sebastian Aho
--Elias Pettersson(RFA)
--William Nylander
--Sam Reinhart
--Mark Scheifele
--Jake Guentzel
--Rasmus Dahlin(RFA)
--Noah Hanifin
--Elias Lindholm
--Tyler Toffoli
--Brandon Montour
--Martin Necas(RFA)
--Chandler Stephenson
--Matt Beniers(RFA)
I wasn’t counting him because it’s not official. If the $900K is true then it’s $12.6 million to fill the rest with one fewer XXX.Have we already forgotten Lucic?
I did forget Ullmark.
A goalie is the only thing that makes sense. I don’t think Grz fetches a 1st. Maybe DeBrusk but that seems unlikely with Hall gone.
I've been wondering how high they are on Carlo. They might see him as a bit fragile. I'm thinking that he's a sleeper player to be moved.
Pittsburgh’s #14 for Ullmark would make sense. They have cap space and a need in net. The Bruins need to clear cap and wanted a first. Pittsburgh might have had the guy that they wanted drop to them.
Felger has been saying for days that the Bs and the Pens are talking Ullmark, so maybe.
We’re getting the band back together!
View: https://twitter.com/darrendreger/status/1674896926783807488?s=46&t=23orJRFkAhpzRtm4p3-oEw
View: https://twitter.com/darrendreger/status/1674896926783807488?s=46&t=23orJRFkAhpzRtm4p3-oEw
