ChirpEd- Trade Deadline Ups and Downs

WRITTEN BY SENSCHIRP READER- KarlssonFan

Hey Chirpers, KarlssonFan here with an in-depth look at our trade deadline deals, with a particular focus on the Burrows-Dahlen trade. I hope you enjoy it!

It was an interesting 3 days for Sens fans as Dorion and co. treated us to 3 not-insignificant moves leading up to the 3pm March 1^st deadline. Before I get into the 3 moves the Sens made at this year’s unexciting trade deadline, I need to make a few things very clear, because they will affect how you as readers interpret this post:

First, I will be judging the 3 trades individually. Each move will be examined as if it was the only move the Sens made.

Second, I will be judging the 3 trades as they happened on the particular day. I will ignore everything that happened after the trade. This means that if Burrows gets 5 points in his first 3 games with us, it will have 0 impact on my analysis of the trade. Similarly, if Lazar is demoted to the AHL immediately, it will have 0 impact on my analysis. I’ll get into this “judge a trade when it happened” idea towards the end of the article.

Third, I will be ignoring all budgetary concerns. I will not talk about the effect of Burrows’s contract on our financial situation, and I will not talk about Lazar’s impending new contract. I will also not talk about the expansion draft.

I will be talking about the value that went in and out for each trade, and how each of the pieces can help us for this playoff push (as well as how the pieces will help or could have helped in future seasons). I decided to go chronologically, because a) it makes sense, and b) it’s always nice to end on a positive note.

First up: Alexandre Burrows for Jonathan Dahlen

This is the big one. The controversial one. The one that the Sens got universally blasted for. Before I analyze the move, I really need to stress 2 things:

-The trade was not for a rental who was then extended. The Sens traded for a player who had 2 more years at $2.5 million left on his contract. They are not separate, because the trade never would have happened without the extension.
-Jonathan Dahlen is not “a 2^nd round pick”. He should not be compared to other 42^nd overall picks. His draft spot has nothing to do with his real-world value. He should be compared to similar prospects who put up similar numbers, and that is what I’ll do.

Okay, let’s just cut to the chase: this trade was atrocious. Absolutely atrocious. The worst trade in recent memory other than the Phaneuf monstrosity.

Many of you have probably never seen Dahlen play a hockey game outside of the WJC, and neither have I. It’s tough to judge prospects who play overseas, because they get less media coverage, and there are far fewer comparable players in Sweden compared to, say, the OHL. However it’s important to realize that not seeing a player play because he lives 7 time zones away should not in any way diminish his value in our minds.

I want to compare the Burrows-Dahlen trade to the Erat-Forsberg trade of a few years ago, because the similarities are eerie. As I’m sure you remember, Washington wanted a player for a playoff push, and gave up a good young Swedish prospect who was lighting up the 2^nd Swedish league. And last Monday, Ottawa wanted a player for a playoff push, and gave up a good young Swedish prospect who was lighting up the 2^nd Swedish league.

This isn’t going to be an in-depth comparison; I’ll save that for comparing Burrows to other deadline acquisitions. We’ll look at the season the players were traded, as well as the seasons before. Note that the first seasons for Forsberg and Dahlen are their draft seasons, and they were both traded in their draft+1 seasons.

So it looks like the Erat-Forsberg trade, which was universally blasted, was actually better for Washington than the Burrows-Dahlen trade was for us. Erat was 1 year removed from a 58-point season in which he scored at more than double the rate of Burrows 1 year before his trade. Erat slowed down the season he was traded, but he was still miles ahead of Burrows in terms of production. On the flip side, Dahlen outperformed Forsberg in their draft seasons, and also in their draft+1 seasons when they were traded. Their draft positions have nothing to do with anything at this point. They are no longer draft picks ranked by a number, they are hockey players ranked by their contribution to their teams in the real world.

Oh and Burrows is 4 years older than Erat, and has 2 years left at $2.5M, keeping him here until he’s 38. So however bad you think the Erat-Forsberg trade was…ours was worse.

Okay, this is the part where I compare Burrows to the other similar deadline deals this year.

First, we’ll look at scoring. I’ve included Burrows’s rank among these 5 players at the bottom. I’ve also sorted them by what I believe to be the biggest deadline haul, with the best return at the top:

G/60 is Goals per 60 minutes of Ice Time, P1/60 is Primary points (Goals and 1^st Assists) per 60 minutes of Ice Time. It is a more accurate way of measuring scoring because it controls for differences in games played and minutes per game. Burrows is middle of the pack for both goal rate and point rate at even strength, but has 0 power play points this season. Some of that is because he has the fewest PP minutes of these 5 players, but if Drew Stafford can get minutes on a Winnipeg team full of offensive stars, you’d think Burrows could get minutes on a terrible Vancouver team with exactly 3 good offensive players. Overall, this is not a good look for Burrows compared to these other guys, some of whom were traded for next to nothing.

Next, we’re going to look at a couple of stats that are underused compared to scoring and possession, as well as context and usage stats.

*all stats in this table are 5v5 except Pen.Diff, which is all situations

Pen.Diff: Individual Penalty Differential, or (Penalties Draws – Penalties Taken). Positive number means they draw more penalties than they take.
Avg.Dist: Average Distance of shots taken by individual. Smaller number means closer to the net, which is better.
DZS%: Percentage of shifts started in the Defensive Zone. Bigger number means used in a more defensive role.
QoC: Quality of Competition faced, based on Shot Attempts. Bigger number means tougher competition. (Author’s Note: I hate QoC. I think it is basically useless and says nothing. As you can see from the table, the difference between #1 and #5 is 0.56. That’s a tiny difference. But I know some readers bring up QoC in every player debate, so here you are. I still hate it, though.)
QoT: Quality of Teammates, based on Shot Attempts. Bigger number means better teammates. (Author’s Note: As you can see, QoT varies a lot more than QoC; difference between #1 and #5 is almost 4.5. I don’t hate QoT nearly as much as QoC for this reason. It actually says something.)
PDO: (Save Percentage + Shot Percentage) while the skater is on the ice. Basically always regresses to the mean long-term, meaning that significant deviations (+/- 1) from the average of 100.00 are usually “luck”. Skaters have very little impact on goalie sv%, and therefore cannot control most of PDO.

Overall: Burrows has a negative penalty differential, which is unfortunate. Given that the average PP% in the NHL is about 18%, roughly 5.5 penalties leads to one goal against. Not the end of the world, but you’d like to be positive. In this group, Burrows is 4^th in terms of shot distance, which means on average his shots are further from the net. This does not take into account factors such as shot angle. Burrows gets relatively easy usage compared to the others here, as shown in his lower DZS%. He faces the easiest competition (marginally), but has the weakest teammates, which is no surprise seeing as his team was bad. He’s right around 100.00 for PDO, which is good to see, because it means that his scoring numbers aren’t inflated by unsustainable factors. Overall, though, not very impressive.

Next, we’re going to look at possession and scoring chances. If you hate stats, please skip to the next bold headline. If you like stats, if you are open to new ideas, or if you like to learn things, please continue reading.

*all stats in this table are 5v5

Rel.CF%: Percentage of Shot Attempts that a player’s team takes with the player on the ice vs. off the ice. Basically, how does the player affect possession relative to the rest of his team?
Rel.SF%: Same as Rel.CF%, except for shots on net.
Rel.SCF%: Same as Rel.CF%, except for Scoring Chances.
Rel.xGF%: Same as Rel.CF%, except with Expected Goals. Expected goals are calculated using shot volume and shot quality, and assuming a league-average goalie in the opposing net. Let’s use an example:

If team A takes 20 “average danger” shots with player X on the ice, and allows 20 “average danger” shots, player X will have an xGF% of 50% because if both teams had equal goalies the expected goals For and Against would be the same for the same number of shots of equal danger.

If team A takes 20 “higher-than-average danger” shots with player X on the ice, and allows 20 “average danger” shots, player X will have an xGF% of greater than 50% because if both teams had equal goalies, you’d expect the team with the higher-than-average danger shots to score more goals.

Similarly, if team A takes 20 “average danger” shots with player X on the ice, and allows only 15 “average danger” shots, player X will have an xGF% of greater than 50% because if both teams had equal goalies you’d expect the team with more shots to score  more goals.

So a Rel.xGF% of +1 means that your team’s xGF% is 1% higher when you’re on the ice vs when you’re off the ice (which is good).

iCF60: Individual Shot Attempts per 60 minutes of ice time. Basically, how often does the player shoot the puck?
iSCF60: Same as iCF60, but for scoring chances.
ixG60: Same as iCF60, but for expected goals. Calculated by accounting for low-, medium-, and high-danger shots (including factors such as shot distance and angle) and assuming a league-average goalie. How many goals would we expect this player to score per 60 minutes based on the type and quantity of shots they take?

These results are very interesting for Burrows. He seems to have a negative impact on shot attempts despite taking a lot of shots. And he seems to have a positive impact on scoring chances and expected goals despite having a relatively low individual impact. It looks like he takes lots of low-danger shots, but contributes to his linemates having better quality shots. He also may lower scoring chances against better than he lowers shots against (that classic “keep shots to the outside” idea). Overall he has a positive impact when he’s on the ice, but he doesn’t stand out compared to the other players who went for cheaper at the deadline.

Overall Thoughts About the Trade

Let me be clear about something: we got a player who will help us this season, especially given the abysmal state of our bottom-6 before the deadline. Will he still help us when he’s 37 and making $2.5M? That is much more debatable. History says “no”, since very few players have a positive impact at that age, and most who do are former All-Stars who regressed to “average”. If anyone points to Jagr playing well at 44 as a counter-example…yeah okay, but he’s a freak of nature who is 2^nd all-time in points. He is the exception. Most players are out of the league by 37, which is why it’s harder to point to 200 examples of bad old players.

So after all that, what do I think about the trade? I hate it. Dahlen was doing very, very well in Sweden, better than Filip Forsberg was doing at the same age. Everyone wants to say “he’s never played in the NHL and he never may”, but that goes for Nolan Patrick as well. Good prospects are good prospects, and they are very valuable in a salary cap league. And Dahlen is a good prospect.

Burrows is old, and is only going to get older, slower, and worse for the next 2 years. That isn’t an indictment of the player, that’s the reality of aging athletes. If he didn’t have to come with an extension, would I have liked the trade more? Absolutely. I still wouldn’t like it, but it would be more palatable. But, alas, he did come with an extension, and he’ll be 38 when it’s up. It’s very possible that in the last year we’ll be paying $2.5M for Chris Neil 2.0.

Furthermore, Burrows cost way more than other players who could have had a similar impact for our team. Eaves plays the same position, is better than Burrows in most of the stats I looked at, has more goals and points, has been excellent on the PP, and cost less than Burrows did (if Anaheim makes the conference finals, they give up a 1^st, which would be 27^th-30^th overall. If Anaheim doesn’t make the conference finals—which is more likely—they give up a 2^nd, which would be in the 50^th-overall range). I’d argue that Dahlen is worth at least the 27^th overall pick, likely more. On the other hand, Parenteau is about equivalent to Burrows on many of these stats, and went for a 6^th round pick. Which is peanuts compared to Dahlen. We definitely overpaid for Burrows compared to the rest of the forward market.

Again, let me be clear before I am decimated in the comment section: I do not think Burrows is a bad player; he is definitely going to help our team given our forward depth. Also, I am not looking at anything Burrows has done since the trade. I am not using hindsight to judge the trade, because Dorion didn’t have hindsight when he made the trade. And to anyone using his strong recent play to justify the trade, a word of caution: it’s easy to get caught up in the hype over a very, very small sample size. He played way more games for Vancouver this season than Ottawa, so do not be so quick to dismiss those games.

Grade: D

Viktor Stalberg for a 3^rd Round Pick

This trade is less exciting. Typical deadline rental for forward depth. I’m not going to go into nearly as much detail as I did for Burrows, both because I have a life and because you have better things to do.

I’m not going to post numbers for Stalberg, just regular old English to give your brains a break:-Stalberg has a slightly negative impact on shot attempts, shots, and expected goals

-Stalberg has a slightly positive impact on scoring chances
-Stalberg takes fewer shots, and is expected to score fewer goals than Burrows, but he gets as many scoring chances
-Stalberg has a penalty differential of -1
-Stalberg gets lots of hits, for those who care about that sort of thing
-Stalberg had relatively easy usage in Carolina at 5v5
-At 5v5, Stalberg scores about the same as Burrows, but gets fewer assists
-Stalberg barely played on the PP in Carolina
-Stalberg played about 1min30s per game on the PK, and did not do very well in terms of limiting shot attempts, shots, scoring chances, or goals, compared to his teammates. However it is important to note that Carolina had a very good PK, which makes him look worse.

So how do I like this trade? I like it a lot more than the Burrows trade, because we gave up a lot less. I think Stalberg is a good bottom-6 player who can probably help our PK and who should definitely help the 4^th line. We may have overpaid a little bit compared to other deadline acquisitions, but the difference between a 3^rd rounder and a 6^th rounder isn’t huge. I like this deal as a depth addition which we definitely need for the playoffs.

Grade: B

Curtis Lazar and Michael Kostka for Jyrki Jokipakka and a 2^nd

I am going to basically ignore the depth defensemen switch. Kostka is a career AHLer, and Jokipakka is at best a 6^th D, likely a 7^th or AHL guy. Slight upgrade for us, but pretty insignificant.

Shipping out Lazar, a former 17^th-overall pick, is obviously the big story here. Initial thoughts? I love it. Lazar is a very bad hockey player. Maybe one day he’ll be a half-decent 3^rd line winger, but that’s his ceiling, I think.

I’m going to compare Lazar to the entire league for these stats, because it paints the best pictures.

Here are Lazar’s league ranks out of the 406 forwards who have played 200+ minutes at 5v5 this season. His percentiles are in parentheses. For those who aren’t familiar with percentiles, it’s the percent of people who are worse than you. So if you’re in the 50^th percentile, you’re better than 50% of people. 99^th percentile is the best you can get, and 0 is better than nobody.

-Relative shot attempts: 397^th (2.2)
-Relative shots: 369^th (9.2)
-Relative expected goals: 387^th (4.7)
-Relative scoring chances: 382^nd (5.9)
-5v5 Goals: T-last (0)
-5v5 Points: T-last (0)
-Individual shot attempts: 365^th (10)
-Individual expected goals: 388^th (4.4)

Well that’s really bad. He has 0 points at 5v5 and is in the bottom 10% of the league for all possession stats. He also generates very few individual chances. He’s played 100 career PP minutes with 2 points, which is bad. His career PK performance is average at best in terms of limiting shots, chances, and goals. Simply put, he is not an NHL player at this stage.

Getting a 2^nd and a depth D upgrade was a steal for an under-performing former 1^st-round pick. His value should have been about 0 given his career offensive numbers, and especially his numbers this season. You can blame his linemates all you want, but his linemates actually have points (Kelly has 4 primary 5v5 points vs 0 for Lazar). I love this trade, and I’m glad to see we didn’t hold on to a bad asset until his value was nothing, a la Cowen. It’s too bad we didn’t get a 1^st (I hope Dorion didn’t think that the D upgrade was worth passing up on a 1^st) but to get anything of value for Lazar was a coup.

Grade: A-

Overall, it’s undeniable that the moves we made this deadline will help our team for the remainder of the season. The Burrows-Dahlen trade is going to come back to haunt us, but getting Stalberg, Jokipakka, and a 2^nd for Lazar, Kostka, and a 3^rd was excellent on Dorion’s part.

Overall Trade Deadline Grade: B-

My thoughts on why it’s important to judge trades as they happened, rather than using hindsight or recency bias:

The hockey media is constantly (CONSTANTLY) judging moves based on hindsight, and it makes me mad every time. There is nothing wrong with looking at a trade a year later and saying, “wow that really didn’t work out for team X”. That’s fine. You just can’t look at a trade a year later and say, “at the time everyone thought team X won the trade, but wow that player has been terrible recently, so the trade was bad and the GM sucks”.

Let’s use an example:

Colorado trades star centre Nathan MacKinnon to Ottawa for prospect Logan Brown and this year’s 2^nd-round pick acquired from Calgary.

What would the reaction to this trade be? It would be the instant obliteration of the Avalanche management team and infinite praise for Dorion. Ottawa gets a star 21-year-old top-line C and gives up a prospect and a pick. Ottawa wins this trade 100% hands down every day of the week.

Fast forward 4 years:

Ottawa C Nathan MacKinnon has declined rapidly since the trade, and hasn’t cracked the 50-point barrier since. Meanwhile, Logan Brown has posted 2 consecutive 80-point seasons, and the 2^nd-round pick has become a rookie-of-the-year candidate.

Now what would the media say about this? They would say, “wow I guess that trade actually sucked from Ottawa’s perspective even though we all thought it was awesome at first, Dorion really messed up”, and they would all be wrong. The trade has not changed. It is still a star 21-year-old top-line C for a prospect and a pick. Ottawa still won the trade. It just so happens that MacKinnon suddenly became mediocre, Brown exceeded expectations, and Colorado found a gem in the 2^nd round of the draft. You can’t use today’s information to go back and judge trades from 4 years ago. Maybe Colorado “won” the trade because it worked out better for them in the end, but it doesn’t change the fact that their GM made a TERRIBLE trade.

Another pet peeve of mine is when people look at the player that was ultimately selected with a draft pick and use that to judge a trade involving that draft pick. If Carolina ends up selecting a hidden superstar with the 3^rd-round pick we gave them, it doesn’t mean we made a bad trade. It just so happened that their scouts lucked out on their pick which had a small chance of being an impact NHL player.

Finally, recency bias. Burrows has played well the few games he’s been with Ottawa, scoring some big goals, but that has nothing to do with the trade as it happened. We traded for a player with 9 goals in 55 games. The trade is not suddenly better because he has 3 goals in 4 games for us at the time of writing. Same thing happened with Weber-Subban. Weber was a points machine for his first month with Montreal and everyone in the media was praising Bergevin and saying “oh look actually Montreal won the trade!”. Predictably he slowed down and Subban picked up, and suddenly Montreal didn’t win the trade by a landslide anymore. That trade was stupid, and Weber’s first 15 games don’t change that.

The hockey media is obsessed with hindsight-judging trades and it drives me crazy. We should only judge trades based on the information that was available at the time of the trade, because that’s what the deal was based on. Maybe it comes out later that Dorion has psychic abilities and knew that Burrows was going to score 15 goals in the playoffs and lead us to a Cup. Then we can apply that new information (that Dorion knew at the time of the trade) to judge the trade. Otherwise, we should just look at it the way the GMs looked at it at the time of the deal.

Author’s Final Notes:

If you didn’t read this, I really don’t care what you think about it, so don’t tell me that I wasted my time or that stats are stupid.

If anyone has criticism about my methods or opinions about anything I wrote here, I encourage you to comment, preferably in a polite and non-confrontational manner, and we can have a civil hockey discussion.  If you actually suffered through the whole thing, I really appreciate it, and I sincerely hope that you learned something new.

Thanks as always for reading, and GO SENS GO!

*all stats from corsica.hockey except for probably a few that I got elsewhere and forgot about.