Moritz Seider, The Model and how usage affects an NHL player’s on-ice numbers

4 comments

1. Dom’s articles where he talks through model improvements are some of my favorites, even when they aren’t explicitly helping our own players. Glad to see the analytics world coming closer in line with what we see watching the games.

2. I can’t open the article since I don’t have a subscription, but I mentioned this on one of The Hockey Guys recent videos about the Norris trophy front runners this year. Seider doesn’t compete in points with those guys but in my opinion he is a better defender. He starts, I think it was, 58% of the time in the d zone whereas Hughes and makar and somewhere around 40%. Plus he is playing the toughest minutes of the night.

3. This is the Justin Faulk in Carolina effect. By a lot of metrics, Justin Faulk was one of the worst dmen in the league when he played for Carolina, but that’s what happens when you play not only on a roster without defensive depth, but on a roster without any depth across the board. Just as Dom’s model doesn’t paint an accurate picture of players in such settings, I don’t necessarily feel like his adjustments adequately adjust for it either. The fact of the matter is, you can’t easily quantify the cascading effect of a bad roster on a high end player. Guys play worse than what they’re capable of in those settings; we have seen it for years with Larkin.

   You can likely go to any bad roster in the league and pick out guys who will have bad quantitative figures, even accounting for adjustments in the models, but you just know they’re better than that. Keller, Hertl, Reinhart while he was in Buffalo… it goes way beyond who your immediate line/pairing mates are. When the roster is bad, good players are worse for it, and the quantitative analysis will reveal their play as a symptom, not the foundational truth.

4. I feel like that’s fair. He’s treading water often, but his workload is still too much for where he’s at. This has to be addressed at some point. You can’t continuously put your best young players at a severe and intentional disadvantage every night. Sure Seider is learning and growing from it, but I bet he’d grow even further if he wasn’t tasked with this role. It doesn’t maximize his abilities and makes him a lesser player than he should be. Either Lalonde needs to accept that the other pairs need to have a harder role or Yzerman needs to fix a busted blue line with many of his acquisitions that have failed to meet the expectations.