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Yesterday, I stumbled upon
TSN's -- Who's Better? feature -- a bracket-style, single-elimination tournament featuring sixteen of the best players under the age of twenty-five. Although simplistic in nature, some of the match-ups -- like the two I'll touch on in a bit -- are pretty intriguing.
Some of these polls -- especially through new-age media -- often turn into debates on value and which piece you'd prefer to build your franchise around. However, this one's pretty explicit about what it wants, and that's for the collective hockey fan base to choose the better player of the two -- nothing more, nothing less.
The sixteen players are currently drawn-in as follows (via TSN):
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Sidney Crosby v. Jamie Benn
Drew Doughty v. Alex Pietrangelo
Jordan Eberle v. Phil Kessel
James Neal v. Jonathan Toews
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Claude Giroux v. Anze Kopitar
Erik Karlsson v. Kris Letang
Taylor Hall v. Tyler Seguin
John Tavares v. Steven Stamkos
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It doesn't take a rocket scientist to rationalize that the inevitable championship match-up will be between Sidney Crosby and Steven Stamkos -- even if a name like Claude Giroux or Jonathan Toews offers an interesting alternative.
While the results may appear to be cut-and-dry, I was pretty surprised with some of the early results, specifically in the round-one draw between Jordan Eberle and Phil Kessel.
When I look at these two names, I see two of the best snipers in the business. Eberle's coming off a simply sensational season -- 34G/42A, quickly becoming a cornerstone of the Edmonton Oilers franchise.
Make no mistake about it -- Eberle's one of my favorite players in the game. If the poll was about who I'd build my team around, I'd probably consider Eberle here.
However, I'm not entirely sure I can get on board with the 55% of voters who believe he's the better player
right now when paired against Phil Kessel. Kessel's taken an unfair beating in the hockey media at times because of the trade fallout between Toronto and Boston, but all he's done is simply score and score often, developing into one of the premier offensive talents in the game.
Kessel's numbers, too, look to be quite sustainable. His 37G/45A season last year was his best as a professional, building on three prior seasons with Boston and Toronto where he scored at least thirty goals a season. With Kessel, you have Eberle's productivity over the longer sample, but even the peripheral numbers suggest the Madison, Wisconsin player is probably the better of the two right now.
As I alluded to earlier, Jordan Eberle's wild season and past production -- especially in those high-leverage moments -- has rightfully endeared himself to hockey fans everywhere, but one has to wonder if those numbers can sit in a holding pattern, or even less likely, improve over the next couple of years. Eberle's shot percentage sat at 18.9% in 2011-2012 -- a ridiculous 7.4% improvement from one year ago.
This kind of shot percentage is an extreme outlier and will inevitably regress to the mean. Recent examples include Toronto F Nikolai Kulemin and Anaheim F Ryan Getzlaf, both of whom watched their numbers fall from the ridiculously lucky to the ridiculously unlucky in one quick season.
That's not to say Jordan Eberle can't be a seventy-six point player, though -- there's plenty of variables in play, including the overall productivity of his team. Should the Edmonton Oilers improve, Eberle's numbers will improve. And, a third year of player development should make Eberle a better overall player in general -- another way of counter-balancing potential regression.
When I look at his body of work, from the junior ranks to the professional ranks, I see a first-line forward that's capable of scoring forty goals with the right pivot. Hell, he put thirty-two behind netminders without much help. Right now, though, I'm a bit skeptical as to how he'll have performed one year from now.
Phil Kessel, on the other hand, has floated right around the league average for forwards three years running. So, while Kessel is consistently a thirty-goal scorer, he's never really benefited from the luck factor in one single season, although his thirty-six goal run with Boston was a bit on the high end.
For reference, here's the league average shooting percentage on a year-to-year basis:
With his three-year sample, Phil Kessel's numbers -- point totals, and percentages -- are pretty indicative of his overall play. As elite scoring forwards, Kessel and Eberle created a bevy of scoring opportunities on a nightly basis, but Eberle -- in the smaller sample size, with nearly double the league average shooting percentage -- almost certainly benefited from a lucky season.
So, why so much emphasis on shot percentages and the like? Well, forwards are rightfully judged on the kind of offensive numbers they put up, and I've really championed the idea that the game of professional hockey is a volatile one, often driven by luck. There's too many bounces to not account for this kind of unpredictable, unquantifiable presence in the scoring department.
One way to counteract such volatility? Scoring opportunities -- and plenty of them. Create a quality number of scoring opportunities on each night, and players will score at a fairly consistent basis over the course of their career. Some seasons, the numbers may be driven backwards by ugly shooting percentages -- other seasons, the numbers may be driven forward by great shooting percentages. Look at the career splits, though, and the numbers are often right near the mean.
Advanced measurements also suggest similar analysis.
I've talked a bit about PDO, but just as a refresher:
PDO is the sum of "On-Ice Shooting Percentage" and "On-Ice Save Percentage" while a player was on the ice. It regresses very heavily to the mean in the long-run: a team or player well above 1000 has generally played in good luck and should expect to drop going forward and vice-versa.
Phil Kessel's numbers were pretty unimpressive, and otherwise, right around the league average. His 992 PDO was knocked down by a brutal on-ice save percentage of .895 -- almost identical to the number posted by Tim Connolly. His on-ice shot percentage was pretty solid at 9.65%, and one would expect his numbers from here on out to stay at or around that mean for the majority of his prime playing career.
Jordan Eberle? He benefited from the same kind of positive hockey karma that surrounded the likes of Chris Kelly in Boston. The .900 on-ice save percentage is pretty sub-standard, and right around the unluckiest -- joined at the hip by Taylor Hall and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. However, his 12.84% was miles ahead of any other player -- forward or defenseman. For a parallel, consider Ales Hemsky, who maintained a 7.04% on-ice shooting percentage last season. His 1028 PDO was sixteenth-highest in the NHL of players with seventy or more games played.
And, before anyone asks -- the adjusted corsi numbers based on quality of competition are nearly identical.
The driving point? Jordan Eberle and Phil Kessel had comparable seasons(76 PTS and 82 PTS, respectively), but only one really had the puck bouncing his way on a nightly basis. In a vacuum, where both players score at the same rates relative to their overall skill and luck entirely mitigated, I'd wager that Phil Kessel out-scores Jordan Eberle next season by a decent margin.
When it comes down to it, there's an incredibly favorable argument for choosing Jordan Eberle as the player you'd build your team around. He's younger, better defensively, and almost certainly has the better overall game at the age of twenty-two when compared against Phil Kessel at the age of twenty-two.
Right now, though? I'll take the twenty-four year old Kessel, who has truly become one of the game's best scorers.
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Another interesting debate will surely fire up when the voting for the first-round draw between Erik Karlsson and Kris Letang fires up. On one side, you have an unbelievable offensive talent that won the Norris Trophy at the age of twenty-one. On the other side, you have one of the best two-way defensemen in the game, whose only professional hurdle appears to be the injury bug that's followed him of late.
Much like Eberle above, one has to wonder whether Karlsson can truly sustain the kind of offensive production we witnessed one year ago. A wild ride, unquestionably, but the metrics across the board were pretty inflated. Over at
NHL Numbers (
h/t T6S), Kent Wilson had a pretty interesting collection of numbers about Erik Karlsson and what history would suggest:
Erik Karlsson was on the ice for a league high 90 goals for at even strength. He contributed to 50 of those goals, for a league leading individual points percentage (IPP) of 56% amongst defensemen. Here are some other defenders who have contributed to 50% or more of their team's ES offense recently, plus their IPP the very next season:
Duncan Keith went from 0.50 to 0.26 in '10-11
Ed Jovanovski went from 0.52 to 0.30 in '08-09
Cam Barker went from 0.50 to 0.30 in '08-09
Steve Montador went from 0.57 to 0.31 in '08-09
Brett Lebda went from 0.50 to 0.21 in '09-10
Again, the league average for regular defenders over four years was an IPP of about 29%. Most league leaders sit around 35% on the blueline and the year-over-year correlation of IPP for rearguards is just 0.24. Last season, Nik Lidstrom's IPP for Detroit was just 27%. Duncan Keith, who was at 50% during his aforementioned career season, sat at 35% for the Blackhawks in 2011-12. Only a handful of defensemen crested 40% (Matt Carle, Ryan McDonagh, Dan Boyle, Kevin Bieksa) and only two others broke the 50% barrier with Karlsson (Byfuglien and Keith Yandle).
So, in short - getting an IPP over 50% is difficult, rarely duplicated and dependent to a non-trivial degree on factors outside of a player's talent level.
Again, this is really putting the argument of player v. player in a numbers-only vortex. Even if one owns that Erik Karlsson may not score seventy-eight points again next season, most would probably comfortably own that he's already the better offensive defenseman between the two. After all, Letang's numbers, led by a career-high fifty points in an eighty-two game season, came with a loaded Pittsburgh Penguins lineup -- one that's far better at dominating possession and creating scoring opportunities through obscene talent than the Ottawa Senators.
Defensively, I've argued that Erik Karlsson's game is a bit underrated, especially with the way the media often paints him with the broadest of offensive-defenseman brushes. However, Letang's a bit more polished on the back end, and Dan Bylsma loves utilizing him against some of the tougher competition. In 2011-2012, his Corsi Relative QualComp was a bit deflated, and some of that had to do with the injuries he played with and subsequent protection from top-lines. However, a year prior in a healthy, productive season, Bylsma used Letang much in the same manner as he did Brooks Orpik, except Letang still drove possession well when he was on the ice.
Perhaps the sickest part about Letang's production is that, in the small fifty-one game sample he logged last year, he still managed to tally 42 PTS(10G/32A). His 0.83 PPG average was probably one of the only players in striking distance of Karlsson's 0.96 PPG average, although the 0.13 gap isn't exactly a tiny margin to overcome.
Both players are pretty comparable in talent, but much like the Eberle v. Kessel debate, it pins one blue-chip prospect(Eberle --> Karlsson) against a similarly productive, slightly-older name(Kessel --> Letang).
To me, this argument comes down to two points: If Erik Karlsson's numbers aren't sustainable, what kind of production is? Can he consistently score sixty-plus? Maybe. Probably.
Second: How much does playing in Pittsburgh with a loaded-Penguins team help Kris Letang relative to how much an average Ottawa team helps Erik Karlsson? Should Letang's value be scaled down because of the talent around him, or should he be recognized as one of the cornerstone pieces of a great team -- the kind of cog that makes everything work on the blue line?
If the argument is who to build a franchise around, I think the consensus would vote Erik Karlsson. In terms of who is the better player right now, though? That's pretty damn close.
Let's hear your take on both player debates in the comments section.
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Thanks for reading!
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