Provost

Money puck for me says 18.5.... but it has always been way off from all the other sites, giving us at least double the odds everyone else. I don’t think they have a very sophisticated model at all. They use the games from 2007/08 to 2014/15 for their chance to win games and ignore the first 20 games of the year in their model.... so they are assuming we are a much better team than we are. The rest mostly give around 4%. http://www.sportsclubstats.com/NHL.html https://www.hockey-reference.com/friv/playoff_prob.fcgi https://www.sportsbettingdime.com/nhl/playoff-odds/ http://www.playoffstatus.com/nhl/nhlpostseasonprob.html

.... Sigh.

Jesus... Dubois is jacked if you saw him in that interview ... no wonder he shrugged off our players.

4-2 Canucks... we can’t lose every game! (Can we?..(

Currently we are better than two teams in the league! All is well... clearly. I have followed the Canucks long enough to know that the league is going to change the lottery odds this year and increase the chances of the top 3 getting the top picks (including Seattle who has bought that right with $650 million) and reducing our chance sitting at 4th-6th worst significantly.

If he wants to play on $2-3 million 1 year contracts then why not keep him. He is still our 2nd or 3rd best D on any given night. What I hope is that through expansion we find upgrades on D and make him a spare part to add extra stability and depth rather than a core piece. What I worry about is how bad the D could look without him. We have seen how bad an already porous defence got by removing our two best shot suppression guys in Tanev and Stecher. Take away the next best guy we have at the defensive game and it could get downright ugly.

Not sure if it will be possible .. I do think that if we are going to have a playoffs, teams will want to load up. We “should” be able to leverage the border issues to our advantage with more buyers than sellers on this side. The returns don’t have to be dramatic to still be victories. If we got a 3rd, 4th, and 5th for Pearson, Sutter, and Benn respectively, that would represent a big win.

We are discussing all those concepts... that is literally the point of the forum. If we took your logic , we should shut it down entirely since nothing we say really matters. Doing it based on reality should be at least a consideration. I would be surprised if this management has considered it all. Way harder to be unemotional when you job is at stake, I know I couldn’t be. Lots of GMs allow themselves to get sucked into the mirage of being in a playoff hunt much longer than they really are.

Only on this forum can someone haughtily take offense to someone posting verifiable facts and objective reality... and do it without a blush, Sorry that the actual mathematical truth is in discord with your feelings... the great thing about truth is that it doesn't particularly care about your feelings. "The Playoffs are Almost out of Reach" Yes they are... all the models range from about 4%-10% chance at this point. That is verifiable objective reality. It makes me sad too, but you getting so angry to attack the messenger is silly. http://www.sportsclubstats.com/NHL.html https://www.hockey-reference.com/friv/playoff_prob.fcgi http://www.playoffstatus.com/nhl/nhlpostseasonprob.html https://www.sportsbettingdime.com/nhl/playoff-odds/ https://theathletic.com/2318775/2021/02/20/nhl-stanley-cup-playoffs-projected-standings/ I can't believe I have to explain this to (maybe?) grown adults. It is important to consider actual reality in order to make evidence based decisions and inform our opinions. In this case, folks really need to put their minds towards how the team can best set itself up to win... and that is almost certainly not going to be this year. We can all hope and wish for it not to be the case... but is very likely to be the case. Keep in mind that I am just talking about making it into the playoffs at this point being extra-ordinarily against the odds... that isn't even broaching the subject of actually winning the Cup. Accepting objective reality lets you make rational evidence based decisions like not wanting any trades to happen to "right the ship" in the short term. In addition it lets you consider a plan and what moves would actually have a higher likelihood of helping the team win in future seasons which aren't already mostly out of reach. Start thinking about our rentals and having conversation with teams about trade possibilities... especially US ones that would need to make moves well in advance of the deadline. Nashville is 4 games under .500 just like us and are already putting it out there about becoming sellers. It takes time to mark trades so we should be putting out the word right now that we are soon to become sellers. We have opportunities to improve our team for future seasons. That will involve exiting as many veteran players as we can when prices are at their highest at the trade deadline (like happens every year). Benn, Sutter, and Pearson are ideal rentals.... Baertschi even possibly. I would give the team another week or two (probably after the March 6th Toronto game which is half the season) to be at or above .500... and if not, then start actively selling off as many players to US teams as possible before many other teams get into "sell" mode. Get as many draft picks or expansion protected prospects as possible as the return, retain salary to lubricate the deals and make it easier to get a better return. The reason we want to send those players to US teams is that Canadian teams making a push for the playoffs at the deadline are going to be stuck trading with JUST other Canadian teams. Those Canadian teams will just be us and Ottawa. If the only pure rental players left on this side of the border are Ottawa's "Gudbranson, Stepan, Reilly, and Anisimov" (because we have already sold off our rentals) and there are 5 teams wanting to stock up... suddenly we have a solid chance of creating a market for Roussel and Beagle even though they have term left. A team looking to get into a playoff spot and in an arms race with other division rivals may well accept that extra year of term because they don't have any better options. Why do this earlier rather than at the deadline? Because we would be selling before most teams decide to, AND MORE IMPORTANTLY if we do it in early March we can ditch enough cap space that we can actually suddenly absorb a good deal of the Petterson and Hughes ELC bonuses and not push them into next season... even with Ferland's LTIR That wouldn't be the case if we waited until the trade deadline as most of the contracts would have been paid. That benefit will be worth WAY more to our team moving forward than a 2-4% chance at making the playoffs. 50% of the season left means that by moving just Sutter, Pearson, and Benn... you can gain up to $5 million dollars in cap savings which puts us under the ceiling. If you can subsequently move any of Roussel, Beagle, Hamonic, or Baertschi you are paying most of those ELC bonuses which are going to cost us depth again moving forward beyond this season. ... but you know... hey ignore all that and go with what makes you feel better so we can make bad decisions and affect the future of the team.

Shrug... I mostly do, the guy has some weird crush on me ever since the first time I made him look silly. I had gotten tired of seeing him bully other folks with just complete nonsense, and he has stalked my posts ever since out of desperate frustration to “get a win” and have a few folks to like his posts. I am wrong sometimes... certainly not as often as he is... but we all are. The difference is how aggressive he is about being wrong and how he doubles down with the same tricks to avoid admitting that he always turns out to be wrong.

Yeeesh I hope this game goes well. We are worse than Ottawa over the last 10 games... something needs to turn around. We will be losing more ground tonight just by sitting at home when Edmonton and Calgary play each other and get guaranteed points.

He is trending upwards all the time... don’t you pay attention?!!

If it wasn't for such a long term and for a player his age... sure. We can get out from under Jake's contract pretty quickly and there are a lot better/cheaper options than Henrique that will become available before expansion that teams can't protect that could fill our 3C role.

Couldn't be bothered to actually click on the links hey... naturally. The TSN links have all been taken down, but other links referencing those are still left. even "Hockey Rob" (the PHWA member and professional sports writer) who was quoting the various TSN predictions is vastly more qualified than you are as an expert... so not quite sure your mocking is working very well. Please give even the slightest bit of citation for why you have any valid or meaningful level of knowledge or expertise which puts you in a position to judge relative expertise? That is one do the most amusing parts about your constant whining about every hockey writer, former player, former executive, coach, professional analytics expert, etc that disagrees with you.. you are sitting in your basement rage posting about them when you are drastically far below even the worst of them as an “authority”. Complete hubris. Please cite anything from a legitimate source suggesting that Roussel, Eriksson, Sutter, and Beagle are a strength of the team... you always want everyone else to do your work for you but never provide anything. the next link on Google... https://www.si.com/hockey/news/instant-buyers-remorse-the-worst-contracts-handed-out-from-2018-free-agency https://theathletic.com/2272679/2020/12/27/canucks-season-preview-2021/?utm_source=vancouver is awesome&utm_campaign=vancouver is awesome&utm_medium=referral ... still waiting for your "expert" sources suggesting those players are not a weakness of our roster? crickets again as always. It is funny that one of your tactics when made to look foolish is to try to bury that post behind a bunch of nonsense in hopes that other people don't bother reading it... don't worry, I will keep it ready as a cut and paste each time you pull the silly oZone and Dzone stats out to make a fake point.

ok...here is just the first page of Google. All the predictions were that we were likely to miss the playoffs despite having the best defenceman in the country, and some of the best high end talent. Do some work and go back to all the radio and TV commentary about our roster, lack of depth at the bottom end, and poor value contracts that fill it. I know in your mind each one of those people is stupid (as you have repeatedly said), but they just know more than you. ... as for the Ottawa rumour... it was a response regarding one posted on this actual thread ... oh, and I am sure you won't read my above post because you either wouldn't understand it or would never admit that just about every post you have made about a player's stats has relied on a complete flight of fancy and basic math errors on your part. https://theathletic.com/2166869/2020/11/06/nhl-teams-contract-efficiency-grade-2020/ https://thehockeywriters.com/canucks-worst-contracts-2020-21-beagle-sutter-eriksson/ https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/canucks-spent-money-wrong-time-players https://theathletic.com/1901503/2020/07/01/the-10-worst-free-agent-signings-in-vancouver-canucks-history/ https://www.sportsnet.ca/nhl/breaking-canucks-contracts-outlooks-player/ https://twitter.com/RobTheHockeyGuy/status/1349199352309239808/photo/1

You keep regurgitating these same couple stats over and over again when they don't mean what you are trying to suggest they mean at all. They aren't defined the way you think and don't tell you what you are incorrectly inferring about the players... and this is why you are always wrong on your player assessments. You keep using them as the main hallmark of player usefulness. I know most folks don't really care about the details of stats... but if you are going to believe what someone posts, take a minute to read this so you can know why they aren't telling you the truth and are trying to make numbers lie to make a predetermined opinion rather than using numbers to inform their opinion. oZone start% is a tiny, extremely limited stat (and it is also just 5 on 5 shifts, but you keep leaving off that part). It doesn't mean that only 24.1% of Beagle's starts are in the oZone and that 75.9% of this shifts start in the dZone...that is the way you keep presenting it, that he is somehow getting the hardest defensive minutes because he is taking most of the team's tough defensive assignments. That has 0% truth to it. It isn't a matter of opinion... it is just the definition of the stat and how it is calculated. oZone% (5v5) and dZone% (5v5) simply measure the ratio of a small subsection of a player's shifts. It ignores all shifts that start on the fly and that start in the neutral zone... which is most of them. Just that fact in and of itself makes the stat of only relatively insignificant importance because it takes away anywhere from 50-80% of any particular player's shifts and entirely disregards them from the measurement. In Beagle's case for the above stats, you are ignoring 77% of his total 5v5 shifts by using that stat... so it only measures 23% of his 5v5 workload. Making sweeping authoritative statements while ignoring 3/4ths of a player's on ice performance is ridiculous. In truth, only 18% of Beagle's total 5v5 shifts start in the defensive zone.. not the 75.8% that you infer the stat actually means. That is because most shifts start on the fly or in the neutral zone... and your favourite stat doesn't account for that. If you add in all strength shifts, that oZone% stat only represents 3% of his total shifts... combine it with the dZone% number and it is only 17% of his total shifts that your "major" and most important stat is even measuring. Even with the limited use that stat has, which is to give a little sense of how a player is deployed... using the ratio (%) instead of their actual usage leads you even farther down the wrong path. At 75.9% dZone % (5v5), you could be led to believe he is getting by far the hardest defensive usage on the entire team because no other player is anywhere near that bar. That isn't true either. Horvat has had exactly the same number of dZone (5v5) starts as Beagle at 61 shifts this year... and Horvat's dZone% is 57.4%...almost 20% less than Beagle's 75.9%... the dumb dzone% starts stat is just a way to lie about relative usage and importance to the team because it corrects for the fact some players are on the ice way less and inflates the importance of those players since in reality, they just aren't leaned on as much because they are on the bench. Again, your ignorance of what the stat means keeps leading you to overestimating the importance of players like Sutter, Beagle, Gudbranson, etc.. who are sitting on the bench (translation: not helping their team during that time) a lot more than the better players. To illustrate why you favourite stat is even more ludicrously useless. Boeser has a massively "protected" Dzone % start of just 30% this year, almost the mirror of Beagle's "massive" defensive responsibility of 75.9%. Boeser has 25 dZone starts to Beagle's 61 over the entire season so far. That represents just a 1.7 shifts per game difference in how many dZone starts they are getting, and that is about the widest difference in that stat you are going to find. Most players range from 45%-55% oZone/dZone%... and that represents way less of a difference representing far less than a shift a game between them. So your entire house of cards when you tout a player at 45% dzone usage being sheltered and a guy at 55% being given the hard matchups is simply completely bogus as it represents such an insignificant difference between the two players' actual time on the ice. Last year where we actually have a big enough sample size to be useful (another basic flaw of yours.. using sample sizes that are too small to have statistical relevance), Horvat had 259 shifts (5v5) start in the dZone... and Beagle only had 171 shifts (5v5) start in the dzone... clearly that means Horvat's dZone start % must be massively higher than Beagle's right... he was relied on to take the toughest defensive zone match ups FAR more often than Beagle? Nope... Horvat was again relatively "sheltered" compared to Beagle with only a 57% dZone start % compared with Beagle's 77% dZone start%... how strange if that stat even remotely captures how tough their defensive usage is like you keep suggesting. Oh and again, look at those pure numbers. 171 shifts for Beagle over an 82 game season is just 3 shifts a game that number is capturing... or about 2:30 of his 15:30 minutes per game playing time and ignoring the vast bulk of his usage and actual time on the ice. Another example to show how ludicrous using that stat is... Petterson last year had an incredibly sheltered 22.5% dzone% starts last year! Stunning how much he was protected compared with Beagle's usage! Except Petterson had 60 dZone shift starts that season as well... which represent about 1:00 of his time on the ice per game... just 1:30 less than Beagle's. That is the tiny difference that stat is measuring EVEN when picking the widest variation that exists between players like I just did. If you measure Pearson's 53.5% Dzone Start usage to Virtanen's 48%...in your world that means one is sheltered and one is used much more defensively... in the real world you are just looking at a difference of one shift every two games between the two for how they are used even though the stat seems to show a big difference in their usage. Now as for the entirely flawed way you try to relate the Corsi% to the oZone% and dZone% to come up with some relative value of a player's outcomes vs. usage. As above, the one stat is only measuring a tiny fraction of a player's actual time on ice which even to start makes that comparison meaningless. Even more basic an error you are making is that they aren't measuring the same population (denominator)... which means is it absolutely a basic statistical error to use them in relation to each other. People who just regurgitate numbers without understanding them see that they are both a % so think that means they are comparable. That just isn't true at all... they need to be measuring the same population (total number of 5v5 shifts for example) to be able to be put side by side and used together like you are (incorrectly) doing. They have nothing to do with each other. You keep suggesting that having a higher Corsi than oZone% start means they are performing well... you defend players with a low Corsi because they get more dZone% starts (as above... less than a shift a game difference in almost every instance). That is just not correct and just not knowing what the numbers represent and how to use them. A player's dzone% may have some impact on their Corsi because it shows they might be slightly more used in the defensive zone... but really explains very little of it because it reflects such a small number of shifts and an even small amount of difference between players. Forget your favourite stats of those oZone and dzone%... they are just WADR (in your terms) to try to justify your take on a player and mean almost nothing, certainly not what you purport they do. Beagle takes a lot of PK minutes.. we know that means he spends more time in defensive assignments, stick with that. Your favourite stats exclude that entirely.

It isn't impossible that they are doing the waiver prior to a possible transaction with retained salary. At half the price lots of teams would probably be interested, even with the term left... or in a deal where they have to take bad cap back to even it out (I hope not us with that term and age... he is not the ideal 3C for us) They aren't at the cap once you factor in Kesler's LTIR, so there doesn't seem to be any cap specific reason. They have two guys coming off LTIR soon who are on conditioning stats... so maybe there are some inner workings cap wise they are trying to work out.

Names like this on the waiver wire show how much cap hits matter right now. It is unlikely that anyone claims him with that contract, even though he would be an upgrade on more than one of the 13 forwards on most teams. Guy scored 26 goals, 21 at even strength last season, 0.61 PPG in 3rd line minutes and he is on waivers today.

Except it isn’t the absence of something, it is the existence of something I am asking him for. If you read the thread.. he is the one using logic that would require chasing down the absence of evidence. He said I was wrong and his reasoning was that there were probably hockey experts who didn’t think our bottom 6 was amongst the worst in the league... that He made a claim... then him supporting it with a shred of evidence isn’t an unreasonable ask if he wants to be taken seriously. Why would I chase around trying to prove that something doesn't exist if he hasn't bothered to show that it does exist... aside from something he pulled out of his imagination. I pay a lot of attention and try to do the homework to inform my opinions... the universal opinion of all the pundits/writers/hockey folks going into the season was that we were a top heavy team that would rely on our high end talent to make up for a terrible and overpaid bottom six. They haven’t been as bad as expected so far this season... but that is because the bar was set so low. We are still one of the very bottom teams in the league once you factor in games played. Our bottom six is a big part of that failure.

Can we agree that Seattle can take as many of our exposed players as they want? That would indeed be a blessing. As it stands they probably take a guy like Lind or someone who is on an expiring contract and won’t do us any favours by taking real money off our hands. With the way the market it depressed and money will still be tight, it would be far smarter of Seattle to not take on any more big money contracts than they are required to. They can actually accrue a bunch of assets by having 30 million in cap space available to “rescue” teams that are tight against the cap post expansion. What would Tampa give them to offload one or two of Johnson/Palat/Killorn? They are $3.5 million over the cap already with only 15 players signed. What would Vancouver give to ditch the last year of Eriksson’s contract?

Right now the answer to why Hoglander seems so good seems to be the company he hangs out with. He is like the skinniest kid at fat camp or the tallest dwarf. The rest of the roster has been mostly inconsistent to downright bad.... so standing out in that crowd isn’t that hard. Last year he wouldn’t look like such an anomaly with his consistent level of effort... we had that with half our roster. That has gone off the rails this year for whatever reason or variety of reasons).

Yikes... if you have to resort to misquoting me and lying... that is a bad look on your level of desperation. “The sum total of hundreds of years or hockey knowledge by actual experts gives a good sense of objective reality. Our bottom 6 is universally considered to be amongst the worst in the league... those guys make up most of it.” So as a grammar lesson... the “universe” was defined by the previous descriptor as the opinions presented by the experts in the hockey world (... oh, and “world” is not actually a planet in this context if you get confused on that point too). “Amongst the worst bottom 6” does not mean the very worst and that no team could be worse. That is just not how sentences and words work. So yes, if you don’t understand the language (and hey if you are ESL don’t worry about it, that is understandable ignorance)... no one was suggesting that undiscovered aliens in a far flung galaxy think our bottom 6 is the very worst in the league. Please feel free to cite a source from a hockey expert stating they don’t believe that the Canucks have one of the worst bottom 6 in the league. I will stand corrected on that point once you have something other than frustrated snarkiness to actually offer. All that random and incorrect silliness from you aside. If your entire counter argument is reduced to trying to (incorrectly) pick apart grammar because you are frustrated by having no rational way to refute the actual point under discussion... then you need to really walk back into reality and take a really good look at the chances this team has. Those odds are worse this morning than they were yesterday when I posted this... and will be worse by the end of tonight when one of Calgary and Edmonton get two more points... with the loser even possibly getting a third point. If you (wrongly) are worried about me not knowing English... you certainly don’t understand math and about focus in that instead. If your name/handle is a built in an apology for why you are wrong... then apology accepted, and kudos for putting it right out there for the sake of efficiency. That probably saves a lot of time explaining your problems.

We didn’t look that good....

We will drop another couple points back in the race this weekend as Calgary and Edmonton play each other and one of them is guaranteed to get points out of it... the literal point of my OP and how this season works... too many guaranteed points between the three teams we are chasing. It isn’t impossible... but highly improbable. I have high hopes for the trade deadline actually. Values get inflated and 3rd/4th round picks are nothing to scoff at. That should be the going rate for Sutter and Benn. Pearson maybe even better then that. The picks themselves don’t have a ton of value since 3rd rounders are low odds to become meaningful contributors... but I believe those type of picks will be the exact currency we need before expansion to pick up a couple of D that teams can’t protect. Soucy, Foote, Gudas, Borgen and a whole host of big boys will be available for mid round picks. If we can get a few of those picks at the deadline to use as currency, we are golden. Add in the possibility of Tryamkin coming back as a 3rd pairing guy and we have an entirely remade defence in one offseason.