Can confirm Petry is a completely healthy scratch tonight. Not injury related.
— Ryan Rishaug (@TSNRyanRishaug) October 14, 2014
Tonight the Oilers, reputedly an professional hockey club, are going to scratch their best defenseman, Jeff Petry. This follows cold on the heels of the same debacle of an organization sending their most seasoned and inarguably their best defensive option from the youth division of the team, Martin Marincin, down to the minors.
As I argued at the time of the Marincin demotion, this represents the newly minted bemused era of Oilers’ decision making.
After years of abject decision making, the Oilers have embraced a new era of whimsical decision making. I, for one, welcome the change. — Romulus’ Apotheosis (@RomulusNotNuma) October 6, 2014
What we are looking at here is no longer a team of chummy ne’er-do-wells, woefully impoverished in the analytical skills department, bungling up the simplicity of the noble Garden salad… No, no. What we are looking at is a team of chummy ne’er-do-wells, wholly given over to whimsy. These folks are all Ambrosia salad. Absurd and disgusting.
How can we guard against the thought that some evil genius isn’t smirking at us? The famed Cartesian Archimedean Point isn’t going to secure us against this kind of whimsical evil. We are left with the cold comfort that at least someone is having fun stupidly pulling strings the way a toddler plods away at a button-filled toy.
The great and grand joke of it all is the following… Until recently, one felt fairly secure in the knowledge that the coaching staff of the Oilers had some sense about what Petry brings to a hockey club.
Let’s look again at the record:
Recently, Steve Smith, former Assistant Coach of the Edmonton Oilers and current Assistant Coach of the Carolina Hurricanes, sat down with Oilers’ Now Radio Host Bob Stauffer. In part, the conversation turned around Oilers’ defenseman Jeff Petry. Following up on Dallas Eakins’ own late-season defense of Petry, Smith mounted a full-throated, detailed defense of the player. Jonathan Willis goes through the interview and elaborates on the strength of Petry’s play here.
Prior to this season, it appeared, that some kind of game of telephone was afoot between the coaches and management of the Oilers. The coaches were saying, rather publicly, that Petry was a vital member of the team. And, if you don’t trust the coaches words, just look at their actions. A simple test of “who the coach trusts the most on the ice” is to look at who the coach plays the most at even strength. In his 4 NHL seasons, Petry has had 3 coaches (Tom Renney, Ralph Krueger and Dallas Eakins). In his first season, 2010-11 under Renney, Petry played 35 games and averaged 16.25 TOI/60, 3rd best on the team. In his second season, again under Renney, Petry played 73 games and averaged c. 17.21 TOI/60, the most on the team. In his third, under Krueger, he played 48 games (lockout season) and averaged c. 17.30 TOI/60, the most on the team. In his fourth season, under Eakins, he played 80 games and averaged c. 17.00 TOI/60, 3rd best on the team.
Petry has never been outside the top 3 in 5×5 TOI/60 on his NHL team. In the past 2 seasons, he’s also led his team in 4×5 TOI/60 (he was 2nd, right behind Smid, in 2011-12). These are classic indicators of who the coach trusts in a “shut down” role.
So, Petry had the trust of his coaches both on the ice (in terms of playing time) and off the ice (in terms of robust public backing of the player). And yet… Management (based on the short-sighted contract signed with Petry this off-season) would appear to have a different view of the player. That view, if not entirely dim, is several shades dimmer than the view the coaches appear to take. It happens to be a dim view shared by a large percentage of the Oilers’ own fanbase.
For my part, I think the dim view is subtended by 4 overlapping concerns:
1. It’s not really about Petry. The Oilers are a terrible team and Petry is part of that team. In this vein, a common retort an anti-Petry fan offers when presented with his underlying numbers (see, again, this Willis article) runs like this: “Ha! Sure, he’s the best defenseman on the Oilers! That tells you all you need to know about him! Garbage.”
This is simply an argument from association. It’s a common fallacy among sports enthusiasts. X plays on a great team, therefore he’s a great player. Y plays on a terrible team, therefore he’s a terrible player. No one, under pressure from common sense, will hold these sentiments very long – unless, of course, they are willing to forego common sense.
Here’s an example (relevant, I think, to today’s post) of this kind of thinking. It’s Pierre McGuire lusting at the “got what it takes to win” of Scott Gomez
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAYE-YRNphc&w=420&h=315]“The one thing you gotta say about Scotty Gomez, he knows what it takes to win, winning the Stanley Cup in 2003.”
2. It’s about Petry and the Oilers. By rights, a rookie breaking into the NHL shouldn’t be thrown in the deep end. By rights, a journeyman NHL player shouldn’t be asked to play above their demonstrated ability. The Oilers and Petry haven’t enjoyed the luxury of following these basic principles. Petry has never had the luxury of playing at his established level.
This, however, is not the fault of Petry. He has never been and is not currently an ideal candidate for the role of “#1 D.” The fact that he has been put in that role, and at a tender stage of his development, is on the Oilers. Anti-Petry fans consistently muddy the waters on this score.
3. Petry isn’t physical enough. Oilers’ management, related media and fans have long held a preferential place in their heart for the bruising type of defensemen. This has lead to some predictable stupidity, like benching Anton Belov in favor of Mark Fraser.
The problem with this line of thought is that it lacks clarity on a couple of fronts.
i) the most glaring problem is that this line of thought fails to distinguish “style of play” from “effectiveness.”
By looking, almost exclusively, for players that fit a brand (“physical, hard ass, nasty”), one misses an entire forest of information. The “good” players range from Pronger to Fraser and the “Petrys” of the world are simply lumped into the “bad” category.
In general, this kind of thinking asks the wrong questions. It doesn’t matter how you look. It matters how effective you are at what you are doing. In a piece I wrote about intimidation, I argued that if intimidation plays a positive part in moving the puck in the right direction, it is effective. If it doesn’t, then it isn’t and shouldn’t be afforded a handicap in our imaginations simply because it looks powerful.
The fans yelling “Do Something!” and chattering about “nasty, intimidating” players need to get beyond the superficiality of optics.
ii) it romances the accoutrements of competitive events (affects of anger, aggression, humiliation, righteousness, revenge, etc.) at the expense of the goal of competitive events (winning).
This is a line of thought that actually doesn’t mind losing as long as it can paper over the loss with a psychologically redeeming narrative: “we made them pay in blood, sweat and tears for every inch they won!”
4. The big mistake. Steve Smith alludes to this in the interview linked to above (here it is again for those of you too lazy to scroll up).
Edmonton had the puck 40 percent of the night. Jeff’s in his own end; 60 percent of the night he’s chasing guys around trying to play a strong defensive game. Eventually, as you know by the Corsi numbers, eventually you’re going to make a mistake and something’s going to happen.
The idea of the “big mistake” was brought to a head in a recent article by Tyler Dellow (now offline). The big mistake is a kind of hockey play that breaks down and leads to a scoring chance or a goal against. Crucially, however, the big mistake is of a piece with the grotesque. It’s not just that a hockey play is broken, or that a scoring chance or goal is recorded. These occur all the time and don’t rise to the level of the big mistake. What makes the big mistake memorable is the visual extravaganza that accompanies it.
Here’s a pair of “big mistakes” from the last Oilers’ season. First, Grebeshkov gets abandoned in the defensive zone on the power play and things go terribly:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zXySjUlJ0k&w=560&h=315]Second, Belov, at the end of a particularly long shift, gets beat at the blue line and takes an unforgiving pause in his skating.
As Garrett Hohl has argued, a crucial part of the psychology of the big mistake rests on a human “propensity to look for direct causality and responsibility. The tendency to look for a target to blame or extol.”
The big mistake encourages two things that make for poorly informed analysis: 1) it ignores the context of the game as a whole and the events that lead up to the play in question (for example, in the Grebeshkov case above, it forgets all the little plays that led to him being isolated in his own end and without a clear outlet lane); and, 2) it focuses all the frustration of a game, or even a season, into a single event and a single player.
More often than not, the players charged with the big mistake are players who handle the puck a lot, players that take risks. More often than not, these players are much better than their “reliable” “stay-at-home” “up-and-out” compatriots. More often than not, these better players suffer the ire of the context-poor fans, media and management types. An indirect proof of this relation is the “give away” stat, long held up by fans, media and the like to condemn apparently bad defensive players. A quick glance at the leaders in this category from last year (which includes Jeff Petry), tells you all you need to know about this category’s merits in adjudicating defensive reliability––they are almost exclusively the game’s best players:
This season, it sure looks like Dallas Eakins’ noted “Janus-Headed” approach to defense is coming up “stupid, senseless, whimsical and otherwise than good.”
Petry, through two games, currently occupies the low end of the pole of champions. And, now he’s been scratched. Healthy scratched.
Tom Poti
All of which brings me to Tom Poti. My Oilers’ memories are split into two large periods (the latter of which is subdivided many times over): the Oilers of my childhood, the Oilers of the 80s and early 90s; and, the still-romanticized-but-much-less-so-for-a-variety-of-reasons-the-shittiness-of-the-team-chiefly-among-them Oilers of my adult life. In the latter group, I’ve watched three players follow a similar path:
US College hockey; puck moving, good skating defensemen; makes an immediate NHL impact; can’t win over the fans, media or management; traded (or, about to be at any moment); continues to enjoy productive NHL career outside of Edmonton.
Tom Poti; Tom Gilbert; Jeff Petry
Tom Poti was an easy target for Oilers’ management, fans and media. He suffered from severe allergies, which set him apart from “the room” both literally and figuratively (he ate apart from his teammates). For some of the sillier men who cover hockey––those still harboring the attitude of grade school goofs––Poti’s allergies were interpreted as some sign of weakness (Terry Jones felt comfortable calling him a “wuss” for having allergies. Cool story bro!).
On the occasion of Poti’s trade out of Edmonton (to the Rangers as part of a package for Mike York), Terry Jones wrote this column (It is no longer available, but can be read in its entirety in a cut/paste format here).
Let’s go through the relevant portions:
By TERRY JONES — Edmonton Sun
The thing I don’t like about the deal is that Glen Sather was on the other end of it.
Then again, is this the same Sather?
It’s one thing that he just picked up a $10-million US salary for the biggest floater in hockey. But now he’s just traded a low-priced, high-return young talent with a big heart for Tom Poti of whom he once confided “we’ve got to trade this guy before everybody in the league finds out that he’s chicken spit.”
Now Sather is going to turn chicken spit into chicken salad?
What’s the concern here?
That Sather, by trading for Poti… is potentially up-ending the common wisdom (expressed by Sather himself no less) that Poti is downright terrible. This is Jones’ concern. That someone might value his whipping boy.
Poti, I’ve been telling you for many months now, is a guy the Oilers are better off without.
This is the big “I knew it!” pitch. “Haven’t you all been listening to me!?” It’s a not-so-humble-brag mixed with the favorite sports-writer cliche going: “better off without him/addition by subtraction.”
But, this is just padding so far. Let’s get to the good stuff!
You know where I am on the subject of the much-maligned Mr. Poti. I’m the much-maligner. I’m the guy who wrote the controversial ‘Poti’s Gotta Go’ column a couple of months ago.
This is simply redundant. You’ve already tried to claim “leader of the anti-Poti pack.” No need to repeat the claim, unless you need to pad out your column.
He’s scored one goal! And nobody has kept score of all those gigantic giveaways that take the air out of a team and take goalies off their game.
Ah! Sarcasm. Lovely. Here Jones is content to boil his interlocuters (and his insecurity about them is clearly showing here… he’s much less confident in his opinion than he lets on) down to a simple mindless red-herring he can fry up and toss away.
Helpfully, Jones follows his sarcasm up with some unempirical nudging to the reader: “remember that big mistake weeks ago!? don’t listen to those Poti defenders. All they think matters is that one goal! No, this is an accurate description of their analysis! Trust me!”
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Oilers record with Poti out of the lineup this year was 10-5-2. I think they’re better without him.
I seem to remember people making the same argument while extolling the virtues of Cam Barker.
Maybe they’ll miss his minutes (24:32 a game). But not for long. The Oilers have young defensive talents coming up and just traded penalty-prone press-box regular Sean Brown to Boston for another one in Bobby Allen.
Isn’t it funny that the first empirical thing Jones mentions (Poti’s TOI, which surely points to both the coach’s trust and the quality of competition Poti was surely seeing at the time), is downplayed in favor of the Oilers’ favor clutch-purse: “The Oilers have young defensive talents coming up.”
To me the biggest thing with Poti is that he was never going to have ‘`Edmonton Oiler” written all over him.
And, there we have it. We’re right back to Paul Coffey. “Grow a few inches, slow down and for Gord’s Sake HIT SOMETHING!!!”
And, now for the coup de grâce:
The guy has 29 hits this year. He’s a wuss. And I understand why he’s a wuss. He’s had to live his life so careful because of all his allergies and condition, that he plays the game the same. That’s why he has the league’s longest stick. So he can reach in instead of go in.
As the kids say… “I can’t even.”
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