RFAs, the Series - Episode 5: Frank Corrado

Continuing on from the previous episode on Sam Carrick, we're going to talk about former Vancouver Canuck: Frank Corrado.

Oh, what could have been. Image courtesy of www.vancouversun.com

This pre-season, the Vancouver Canucks management decided that there wasn't room on their team for the future superstar defenseman, so they placed him on waivers. The Leafs were successful in claiming him on waivers, and it was at that point that the Frank Corrado ERA began.

Much better. Image courtesy of www.foxsports.com

Obviously, I'm overselling to poke fun at the Canucks, so let's pull back to reality and truly evaluate Frank Corrado.

After a succession of posts where there was no NHL advanced data to go on, we finally have a player who has played enough games to have a meaningful sample size. But, since advanced metrics don't really factor into contract talks much, I'll be skimming them over. This series is for contract analysis, not full player analyses. Unlike Peter Brandt in Moneyball, I can't do 47 51 player evaluations in one day (despite reminding a lot of people of Jonah Hill). 

So, here's a fun little graph from Corsica:

Graph taken from http://www.corsica.hockey/skaters/. Data is Score, Zone and Venue adjusted from 5v5

This is a distribution graph. So, the big hill part is how the league spreads out in terms of rel xGF% (possession stats with shot location data factored in). You can see the peak of the hill, and most of the area of the hill, is on the negative side of zero.

Meanwhile, Frank Corrado (the solid blue line) sits on both the right side of the peak and the right side of zero. This is good news. It means that, in terms of rel xGF%, Corrado is better than the majority of the league.

He's not in the elite portions of the graph near the far right, but above average is a good sign for the 23 year old defenseman. 

Corrado faltered slightly in the more traditional scoring stats, scoring only 6 points in 38 games. However, it still seems he has had a respectable season.

So, what?

How does Corrado fit into the organization's future? 

He's young enough to fit the timeline, so that's not of concern. Where the concern comes in is the glutton of young, bottom-pairing defensemen that the Leafs have. Harrington, Percy (who I wrote about here), and Connor Carrick all are worthy of NHL time. Loov and Valiev are right on their heels as well. Not to mention potentially adding free agents to the mix (Zaitsev, anyone?)

It really seems to come down to lefty vs. lefty and righty vs. righty. Harrington vs. Percy, Carrick vs. Corrado. I'll go ahead and assume the Leafs want to leave those battles to training camp and not try to decide them in the offseason. As such, it makes sense that they would try to bring him back.

But, at what dollar value? What length of time?

Here are the 3 typical perspectives, ideal, realistic and pessimistic:

Ideal: 1 year at $700k AAV

Corrado played only half a season, and only scored 6 points. He really doesn't have a strong case for a lot of money. He's coming off of a $632,500 contract, so this would be a small raise for him. It's not really NHL money, but remember, this is the ideal case.

Someone may make the point that I compared Corrado's situation to Percy's here, and yet Percy's ideal contract was $900k and Corrado's is $700k. The disparity, for me, comes from the fact that Corrado got a legitimate NHL shot and, by traditional metrics, was average or worse. The success of Percy's AHL campaign vs. the lack of such success of Corrado's NHL campaign. Once again, remember, this is the ideal case.

Also, I'm just now realizing that the "Ideal" case should have been the "Optimistic" case this whole time. Whatever, who needs directly opposite words when you have other synonyms, right?

Realistic: 1 year at $900k AAV

Now we're talking about getting close to bottom-pairing, "Stuart Percy" kind of money. It's still a 1 year "prove it" deal, but it's enough money to say they think he belongs. This seems a very agreeable number for Corrado's contract.

Pessimistic: 1 year at $1.5M AAV

Yet again, we're going to reference the Percy post, because I'm bringing back the strategy of paying Corrado more than he's worth to prevent him from being claimed on waivers. Once again, in this pessimistic case, we're assuming he's not good enough to make the team and are trying to protect him as such. It's a sneaky strategy, but one that could pay off for the Leafs if opportunity were to open up for Corrado later in the season (like if Matt Hunwick gets traded partway through the year, or someone has a long term injury). 

Conclusion

I think it's fairly obvious at this point that Corrado comes back to the Leafs organization next year, and since he's waiver-eligible, he will probably make the big club. I'm excited to see what he can do in a full-year campaign. I'm also really excited to see how these battles for the couple D-man spots on the Leafs roster shake out. It will be a very interesting preseason, undoubtedly.

Stay tuned for the next episode, where we'll talk about young goaltender and former Twitter funny-man, Garret Sparks.

RFAs, the Series - Episode 1: Nazem Kadri

This kicks off what's going to be a long series covering the Maple Leafs' current restricted free agents (RFAs) and what should be done with them.

The Leafs cleared out a lot of contracts they didn't want anymore in the Grabner and Phaneuf trades. This leaves them with a good amount of room for next season to stay under the 50 contract maximum. As such, a lot of these are going to be suggestions of bringing players back. The question will then be for how much and for how long.

Today we're going to talk about Nazem Kadri, the electric, sandpaper-type center for the Leafs.



The most prominent word that comes to mind for some with Kadri this season would be "disappointing". For me, it's "encouraging" or even "advantageous".

As I covered in part in my fanpost on Pension Plan Puppets, Kadri is having a weird season. The graphs there show his low shooting percentage, and his high possession numbers. The shooting percentage is something we're likely to see rise back to his career average, Here are the relevant images from that post:

Year	iCF60	SVACF60	SCF60	xGF60	GF60
2014-15	15.17	57.84	29.78	2.62	2.5
2015-16	19.92	63.94	33.13	2.69	2.05
Differential	4.75	6.1	3.35	0.07	-0.45

The basic conclusion was, that because of this data (really good possession numbers and really low shooting percentage) he'll likely be able to score much better next season. 

I'm glossing over the data analysis because most of it is in the post I mentioned. So go check that out if you want the nitty gritty on what these numbers mean.

Because of all of this, the Leafs have an opportunity to take advantage of Kadri's lack of production to get a good offensive center at a cost-effective price.

So, what?

Good question.

What do you do with that? 

Of course, I want to say he's a really good player who is snake-bitten but there's some legitimate arguments that his career production has never been at top-line level, barring his shortened season (where he had the opposite case of a very high shooting percentage with very low possession numbers). 

The logical thing to do is assume he's somewhere in the middle. An offensive-minded, blood-boiling centreman. 

As much as I love advanced statistics, though, I don't believe they factor into contract negotiations as much as I'd hope. A lot of what a player's value is is perception of impact as opposed to actual impact. As such, I haven't proposed comparables and will, instead, look at each player in as much of a vacuum as I can create.

His current contract is a one-year, $4.1 million deal. I'll propose and break down ideal, realistic, and pessimistic cases for contracts below.

Ideal: 4 years at $5 million AAV

This is where you really take advantage of an opportunity. Argue to him that his production stunk and you don't think he's that good. But you want to give him some comfortability and see if he can flourish without worrying about his contract. Who knows, it might work?

This deal is really nice because it buys 2 years of UFA time where Kadri's negotiating position is much stronger. It also aligns so that the timing isn't lined up with the expiration of Marner or Nylander's contracts. 

Realistic: 1 year at $4.1 million AAV

Bring him back on the exact same deal. It's not going to be feasible to give a young, confident player a pay cut. This is the best non-long-term case. Argue his production sucked so he doesn't deserve a raise, but he's getting an opportunity to prove he deserves one. He realistically doesn't deserve one after this season anyways. This is nice because, again, it's not lined up with Nylander or Marner.

Pessimistic: 2 years at $4.75 million AAV

In this case, Kadri successfully convinces management that he's worth a raise and is part of the future. I'm certain all parties understand it wasn't a good season, but we know his possession numbers are really good, so his agent could utilize that tool to win over management. 

This deal is unfortunate because it brings Kadri right up to UFA expiration. So the contract after this one would be much more expensive. Or, potentially, you lose him when you can't afford him anymore. Certainly pretty far from the ideal case, but not out of the realm of possibilities

Conclusion

There are certainly many opportunities to sign Kadri back to the Leafs. I, personally, would jump all over the opportunity to bring him back, even at the pessimistic contract. As with every post in this series, we'll have to wait and see.

Stay tuned for Episode 2 where we'll talk about Stuart Percy.

The effects of Matt Hunwick on the Maple Leafs' blueline

Analyzing WOWY stats for Matt Hunwick with Dion Phaneuf and Morgan Rielly

Image courtesy of mapleleafs.nhl.com

One of the Maple Leafs several depth pick-ups this past off-season, Matt Hunwick has begun to play an important role for the Maple Leafs. Now playing top pairing minutes with Morgan Rielly, his effects on the team are much more important than that of the depth defenseman he was brought in to be. At 21 games in, we've reached a point where we can start to analyze possession numbers to predict the fortunes of the franchise for the remainder of the season.

So how has Matt Hunwick been doing?

Truthfully, not as good as he should be. When he was brought in, Hunwick was sold as a bottom pairing defenseman who can help suppress shot attempts. That sounded perfect! These are the players the Leafs have lacked in recent years.

Unfortunately, he has had an overall negative effect on the players around him so far. Here are his With You/Without You (WOWY) stats for this season with his two most common D-partners, Morgan Rielly and Dion Phaneuf:

Stats taken from stats.hockeyanalysis.com.
Follow David Johnson on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/hockeyanalysis

For those who haven't seen this type of data before, here's what this means. Both Morgan Rielly have had better possession (CF%) and production (GF%) without Matt Hunwick than with him. The blue bar, in all cases, is lower than the orange bar. This is not a good thing for Matt Hunwick.

The first question we have to ask is why is this happening? Is Matt Hunwick bad? My answer to the latter is, in general, no. And, to the former, I have a few hypotheses.

Note: This trend continues for any other defenseman Hunwick has played with, but the TOI hasn't been significant enough to consider it for analysis

Hypothesis 1: Jake Gardiner is amazing

It's entirely possible that the cause of this is that, when Rielly and Phaneuf haven't been with Hunwick, they've been with Gardiner. We know, and have known for a long time, that Jake Gardiner is near-elite when it comes to possession metrics. Hunwick could very well just be a victim of not being as good as Jake Gardiner.

Hypothesis 2: Hunwick is an offensive hindrance

We can't put all the blame on Gardiner being good. When looking deeper into the CF% and GF% WOWYs, you find the big shift is in Corsi For and Goals For. We knew coming in that Hunwick's strength was in shot suppression, and he has improved that area for Dion Phaneuf. Perhaps, while he's effective defensively, he's hindering the team offensively. We know he has 0 even strength points, his only assist coming on a powerplay goal (he gets, on average, 7 seconds per game of powerplay time, so I imagine this will be one of few PP points for Hunwick).

Hypothesis 3: Hunwick is being exposed to too tough competition

Last season, Hunwick was a bottom pairing defenseman with the New York Rangers and had pretty good results that led to excitement that he was being brought in to Toronto. But he's been put into an entirely different role in Toronto as a top-pairing defenseman. Against Dallas, he and Morgan Rielly were steadily outplayed by the Seguin-Benn line (as most pairings are), and the same goes for the top lines of Pittsburgh, NYR, and Montreal. 

This could be for one of two reasons. Either Mike Babcock has a serious misunderstanding of what Matt Hunwick is, or he's being showcased for a trade. I want to believe it's the latter, but given that Hunwick is on a 2 year deal, he'll likely be back next season, and this makes me lean towards the former: Mike Babcock has been misusing Matt Hunwick.

These 3 hypotheses can definitely co-exist in different amounts. It's impossible to say which of the three is the more driving factor. In the end, Hunwick has not been terrible, but we know for a fact that his partners have had better results without him, and that's something the Leafs should definitely keep their eye on.