A Plea to John Paddock: Acquire Matt Calvert

That’s a good point, but he’d start in the AHL next year, so the current LW logjam isn’t pressing. Yeah, Hartnell and JVR likely aren’t going anywhere, but maybe Gagne wants too much when his contract is up after next year and bam, we have a need at LW.

I like Coburn. He allows flexibility: He can play 30 minutes of shutdown playoff hockey, or he can play 16 minutes on the third pair during the regular season protecting and teaching our Latvian Wolf.

Those are all reasonable critiques. But I think you’re missing a few things.

First, Brassard’s points per game in Juniors came in the Q, a notoriously high-scoring league. Yes, he played remarkably well scoring 116 points in 58 games. But Phillippe Dupuis scored 108 points in 56 games for the Moncton Wildcats that year. Stanislav Lascek scored 135 points in 64 games for Chicoutimi that year. Maxime Boisclair scored 130 points in 70 games for Chicoutimi that year. How are those guys doing so far in their careers? I agree that context is important.

Second, Brassard’s higher points per game in the AHL is a 42 game sample size. He had a really good 42 games, scoring 51 points. Joakim Lindstrom scored 60 points in 49 games for the same team that year. How’s he doing so far in his career?

As far as his “first, injury-shortened year”, I’m assuming you don’t mean his 2 points in 17 games during the 07-08 season. In 08-09, he scored 25 points in 31 games, good for a 0.81 per game ratio. That certainly is good, except it’s less than half a season. So entering this year, he has a good 31 game stretch, but a rather average 27 points in 48 NHL games (0.56 per game). In fact, that’s not far behind Claude Giroux’s 3-year career 0.59 per game average. Except Brassard followed that up with a third-year of regression. He scored 0.46 points per game this year, nearly cutting his 31 game hot stretch in half. He now has a career points-per game of 0.50, largely inflated due to his good 31 games.

If you wish to hope that he can take those 31 games and make it into a career of over 0.75 points per game, go for it. I’m not saying he can’t do it, but over the course of a full season, he produced at 0.46. James van Riemsdyk’s rookie year this year saw him produce at 0.44 points per game. Ask anyone, he didn’t have a good year. He had a good two months, then couldn’t find the scoresheet. No matter how hard he worked, even creating chances, he has a long way to go to. The difference is that this was JVR’s first year out of college, not a player with 90 professional games under his belt.

The biggest problem with Brassard’s minus-17 isn’t what’s on the face. Plus/minus is not very good. Umberger played above average competition while starting in the offensive zone only 46.7 percent of the time. Despite these difficulties, he had a 3.30 GAON/60. Brassard, meanwhile, faced below average competition while starting in the offensive zone a team-leading 63.6 percent of the time. What’s worse, Brassard finished his shifts in the offensive zone only 49.5 percent of the time. Umberger ended in the offensive zone 49.3 percent. So Brassard started in the offensive and ended in the offensive, Umberger started in the defensive and ended in the offensive.

You also are ignoring his abysmal faceoff percentage, so I guess I will too.

As far as injury problems go, that is something I would not know about. I saw he played in 79 games and drew the conclusion that a) he was healthy enough to play nearly a full season and b) the team had no one better to replace him. Which is where Jonathan Matsumoto comes in.

Obviously, he’s not in the NHL yet. But you have Brassard who has a great minor league record and a rather average NHL record over three years. In Matsumoto, you have a very good minor league record and no NHL record. Maybe Brassard can’t cut it in the NHL – next year will probably be a turning point in his career – and Matsumoto can.

Maybe Brassard is better than he played this year. But as I said in the comments above, I looked at the stats, saw Brassard have a terrible year and pointed him out as replaceable. I did not see that the Jackets signed him for 4 years at $3.2 mil per. That tends to suggest he’s better than how he played this year, but it could also suggest the Jackets signed him before they knew what he was.

In conclusion, I never claimed to be benchmarking Brassard with Matsumoto. I simply looked at Brassard’s NHL stats and suggested a player in a similar position who could outperform him. Without a benchmarking, there’s no need for a common base.

Again, I’m not knocking a guy for coming out of the Q. I’m saying if you’re going to say how great his minor league numbers were, you have to look at players who did just as well as he in the same league or better. And when those players are hit or miss, you can’t just look at those numbers and say “Look how good he is and will be!” It doesn’t work.

And my reasoning is that both players have good minor league numbers. One player has average NHL production which decreased after an injury, while the other has never been given a chance. When you’re looking ahead, you judge players on their most recent performance. Brassard – as an NHL player – is average and declining. Maybe it was just one bad year. But it is what it is: A terrible year for a player that should have been improving. Instead, you look at Matsumoto who has led his terrible AHL team in scoring two straight years.

So if you want to improve your team, you want to look at who will be the better NHL player in 10-11: The guy who has proven to be an average NHLer up to this point, or the guy who isn’t tested.