What’s A Jordan Eberle Worth?

Hello all!

This is my first article for Oilers Rig and I’m excited to be writing for an Oilers’ audience again.

Some quick background: I’ve been an Oilers fan all my life going back before the dynasty days and began writing on them (and sports in general) back in 2008, and blogging on the subject of grown men chasing vulcanized rubber on a sheet of water al-dente. For the past few years I’ve been shilling my half-baked ideas on Flamesnation and am a regular pain in the ass presence on Lowetide’s blog and twitter (@CodexRex).

I wanted to start off with something that has been eating at the souls of Oiler fans for several years now and never really seems to go away: should the Oilers trade Jordan Eberle?

We’ll see if I get a chance at a second article.

The Oilers are an unbalanced team, we all know this. They need defense. Again, we all know this.

So it seems every year we ask the same questions and every year the same names keep cropping up.

Is Eberle a reasonable asset to move to attain that D? Does it leave the team overexposed on the wing? What kind of defenseman could Eberle get in return? Why doesn’t Jennifer Connelly return my phone calls?

I’ll see if I can answer those questions in this article.

When I start discussions like this the first thing I like to do is hammer out a shared point of reference. So, we need to establish what Eberle is as a forward (1st line or 2nd?) and then proceed from there to determine the relative value of that asset.

After we do that we can branch out and figure out what that asset is worth today relative to the asset we wish to acquire, for the sake of argument let’s suggest a potential 1st pairing right-handed defenseman who is under the age of 28. For the sake of simplicity we’ll leave out the contract situation and assume that some solution to that would be worked out by the general managers involved as those sorts of arcane details are outside our scope.

What is Jordan Eberle?

To be a 1st line winger in the NHL you have to be able to produce points consistently and effectively against strong opposition. Ideally you would like also to be more than a passenger on a line and someone who actually drives play and scoring.

For that I went to IPP, or individual points percentage, provided by Puckalytics who define it as the “individual points percentage and is the # of points a player has divided by the number of goals scored while the player was on the ice.”

So how does Eberle compare in this regard? Take a look:

Jordan Eberle has established a level of play that arguably places him among the top scoring wingers in the NHL. If we assume that there are four top wingers per team, that gives us 120, narrow it down to the 1st line and we have 60, now go just by right-wingers and you have 30. The lowest Eberle ranked amongst the league outside of his rookie season was 42nd overall which would place him as a very good 2nd line winger, the rest of the time he is as much a 1st line winger as nearly any other recognizable name in the league.

That is something.

Now if you want to say that Eberle doesn’t have a complete 200-foot game, that is fine. He isn’t Marian Hossa, but he wasn’t ever going to be. However, having limitations on a skill set isn’t the same as having a complete lack of that same skill set. He isn’t the best defensive winger, but that doesn’t mean that that aspect of his game is entirely absent. So for the sake of a shared dialogue let’s put aside the absolutes and focus on what he can do.

Okay, so we’ve worked that out, but we might also be helped along by seeing if we can find an historical comparison for Eberle.

Head to Head Comparisons

After some casting about, I settled on Petr Sykora as a reasonable historical comparison. Here’s why:

Career data taken from Hockey-Reference.com

Eberle and Sykora are similarly sized right wingers, similar skill set, if we account for Sykora’s playing during the dead-puck era where goalies bought their jerseys from Trevor’s Tent and Awning Supply down on Argyll Road then the shooting percentages are fairly comparable as well. They played about the same number of games per year and their respective averages of points per year, Time on Ice and point per game rates were close if not identical.

I limited the data to the first five seasons following their rookie years in order to keep Sykora’s numbers within the scope of our information on Eberle thus far.

So for our purposes, we’ll say that Jordan Eberle of today is roughly equal to Petr Sykora of 1998 to 2002.

Next we’re going to look at a career event of Sykora’s that is surprisingly informative for our purposes: Sykora was part of one major trade during the peak of his NHL career.

On July 6th, 2002 he was traded from New Jersey to Anaheim along with Mike Commodore, J.F. Damphousse, and the rights to Igor Pohanka for Jeff Friesen, Oleg Tverdovsky, and Maxim Balmochnykh. (source)

At the time, Sykora was 26 years old and had just finished his fourth consecutive 20+ goal season, despite dropping his points total significantly to 48 from previous year’s 81 pts. He was clearly an effective scoring winger with a good career ahead of him.

Tverdovsky was a fairly significant young offensive defenseman the same age as Sykora, and a year removed from back-to-back 50-point campaigns with Anaheim. He was a former 2nd overall draft selection and was known as a shorter (6’1”, per Hockey-Reference.com), stocky point-producing defenseman who would be a key member of the Devils’ 2003 Stanley Cup win. At his peak, Tverdovsky was a 1st pairing, point-producing defenseman who could pass and skate at an elite level. Legends of Hockey describes him thus: His skating, puck handling, and lethal shot have made him a dangerous foe on the power play as well as five-on-five.

Up until this time, Tverdovsky was most notable for being one of the players sent to the Jets in return for Teemu Selanne. He eventually re-joined the Ducks only to be moved for Sykora.

Tverdovsky’s NHL career was curtailed due to injuries and a desire to return to play overseas.

Also in that trade was a young Jeff Friesen, valued at the time because he was a veteran winger with a scoring background. He was entering what should have been the peak of his career though his production would drop off significantly after the trade; until that time he had consistently put up between 50 to 60 points for the Sharks.

Going the other way from Friesen, Mike Commodore was a young defensive defenseman prospect, barely established at the NHL level. He was a good throw-in on a deal like this and it is something we can look at when we revisit what shape an Eberle deal might take, should it come to pass.

Now with regards to the Sykora/Tverdovsky trade, it is important to remember that at the time there was no salary cap and prospects were thrown around like candy because the bigger teams were very clearly in the “here and now” phase. That Sykora and Tverdovsky were essentially the same age is the important thing to take from this trade, as well as the forward-for-defenseman aspect, because those are the elements we will be carrying forward in trying to find targets in an Eberle trade scenario.

During his peak Tverdovsky did something that was extremely valuable to NHL teams – he scored on the powerplay and at 5 on 5. He passed the puck well and he was built solidly to withstand the kind of physical punishment that was the hallmark of the NHL during the late 90s and early 00s. During his career received votes for both the All-Star game and the Norris trophy in 1997, 2000 and 2001.

Today’s most valuable defensemen are those that can either skate the puck out of the zone or make clean, simple passes. They must be able to defend with both their bodies (hits) and their sticks (positioning) and they should have an offensive element to their game, even if demonstrated only by assists. There is also a premium set today on right-handed defenders because of their scarcity.

So let’s look for a few of those and see what we find.

The most likely available right-handed defensemen this summer are rumoured to be Travis Hamonic, Sami Vatanen and perhaps Kevin Shattenkirk.

Here’s a rough comparison of the three with Tverdovsky included for comparison:

As you can see, each has positives and negatives. Hamonic is the true defender of the group signed long term to an affordable contract while Vatanen is the younger offensive defender turning RFA and Shattenkirk the more established offensive defender one year away from free-agency.

Without getting into the morass of which stats we can use to adequately evaluate defensemen (for that I strongly recommend you head over to BecauseOilers and read Darcy McLeod’s in-depth examination of potential right-handed defensemen for the Oilers) I think for the purposes of our argument we’ll focus more specifically on the data listed above.

The table above is meant to provide some insight into the players relative to each other but also to help inform us on the players themselves so that we can erase any reputational bias and focus on what they can actually do well and not so well:

• Hamonic is the safe bet as a top-pairing right-handed defender with size and an ability to add offense at a level that is essentially minimal for that role in the NHL.
• Vatanen looks like a player a team could pick up for a reasonable price and could pan out as a 2nd pairing offensive star.
• Shattenkirk is a good buy for a team that needs to win right away and has the cap space to spend on a future Brian Campbell-type player.

Drawing Conclusions

It seems reasonable to suggest that Shattenkirk as a 1st pairing right-handed defender who can score, assist and prevent chances against at a high level is the best fit for the Oilers via trade. He is still relatively young but his contract status should be cause for concern as it sets up an imminent problem for free-agency, re-signing and cap concerns.

Darcy’s review of defensemen (link is above) identified Hamonic as the true 1st pairing defender over Shattenkirk, whom he identified as a 2nd pairing guy, so this small examination I’ve provided is hardly meant to be comprehensive or the last word, but rather to identify a range of targets whose value we can now discuss in relative terms to that of Jordan Eberle.

The sad fact is that either of those two defenders would likely immediately become the best defenseman on the roster.

Is there a trade that could be made there involving Eberle and Shattenkirk? Perhaps, but the two clubs would have to sort out the issues surrounding roster depth, contract status and the salary cap.

However, the point of the exercise was to try and determine the relative value of Eberle and I think we can make a fair argument that Eberle for Shattenkirk represents real value for both teams when we restrict ourselves strictly to age and performance and anyone arguing that the Oilers need to add something is likely falling prey to the perception of value because Shattenkirk has been playing for a competitive Blues team while Eberle has been associated with the perennial- draft lottery Oilers.

So after nearly 2000 words written on hockey players and statistics, I think I’ve found out why Jennifer Connelly is giving me the cold (but oh so beautiful) shoulder.

*sigh*