The signing of David Legwand is kind of funny -- it was the only move out of a half-dozen
suggested or implied by Bruce Garrioch that wasn't either a bad or horrible idea. I wrote just a few hours before the signing:
Legwand sort of intrigues me. Depending on the price, the idea isn't horrible. And the team does need a center. So I'll call this today's 'exception'.
Amazing.
I'm glad I didn't expand on that point much yesterday, because it allows me to touch the bases today. The quick summary: Ottawa bought low on a top-six center who still has a couple of years in the tank, and the contract they inked Legwand at was excellent, excellent value.
Legwand follows the neverending theme of useful hockey players who are either tossed aside or sold (be it via trade or through unrestricted free agency) at pennies on the dollar due to
PDO and randomness.
And, really, what else could it be? We are talking about a second-line center who has averaged 0.63 PPG over the last four seasons. He's come out on the plus-side of relative possession in two of the last three years despite some sort of unfavorable deployment. I don't see anything in the counting or underlying numbers to suggest that he's tailed off wildly.
Here's the only thing NHL general managers saw, though:
One more! You're probably betting that Legwand saw an unlikely percentage of shots also find the back of his net on-ice, too. You would be correct.
Most people know that looking at one year of shooting percentages at the individual or on-ice level and drawing conclusions is a fool's bet. There's so much variance in hockey that it's impossible to control for a lot of this stuff. So, we generally prefer to look at multi-year averages. And for a guy like Legwand who is established, we really can jump to the 'unlucky' conclusion if a number is wildly disparate from career splits. Which it is, on both sides.
His individual shooting percentage hit a career low last year, despite being an 11% career shooter. Still, not a huge fall-off. Even if you assume he's a 9.5-10% shooter or so the next couple of years, betting on a guy at $3MM AAV for two seasons is a pretty solid bet.
NHL GMs only see the blue bar from the first graph though, because that's what translates into the points column. Legwand was brutalized in the on-ice shooting percentage department -- his most common linemates just dragging him into shooting percentage purgatory, and his assist margins probably taking quite the dent.
The on-ice save percentage was also comically bad last year. Teams converted on a ridiculous percentage of shots when Legwand was on the ice, and again, it wasn't really near a fair number from what we know about the player. On-ice SV% does a great job telling us of what happened last year, but
tells us nothing about next season. Keep this graph in mind:
It's not repeatable.
All this to say: Legwand's a good player, not a great one. But again, an established guy who fluked into a 970 PDO last year hits market and he's bought for probably 60-70% of what he's worth.
So, it's a good bet by Bryan Murray, even if there may be issues surrounding him with talent in the immediate future. He's going to give you second-line center production.
The only question, I think, is what happens down the middle. You know have Zibanejad, Smith, Lazar, and Pageau all in the mix. Maybe Zibanejad moves to the wing in the top-six to bolster Legwand's side. Maybe Zibanejad stays at 3LC and Lazar moves to the wing on L4.
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Ottawa Senators Blogger • 
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