Islanders Bits: Nabokov Rests; LeBrun Digs You

Why? Don’t want the better lottery chance?

And well said.

I personally think there’s zero chance of making the playoffs without some blueline upgrade that mortgages a piece of the future. However, since the regulars in comments discuss this team day and night every day, I figure part of the fun is in sketching out scenarios after each game and run of good or bad luck. It beats repeating the same thing every day.

Besides, it is crazy to see the bubble struggle. Florida and Washington atop their division one day, in the 8th seed the next.

I mentioned this in my post last week, but hopefully Garth isn’t blinded by some good play when he can add a piece that could help us in the future with a deal of a veteran at the deadline.

Although the way Nabby’s playing, eventhough trading him is definitely the right move, its hard to watch him go. His play should definitely up the ante though and we may make out nice. Kind of like that Osgood for Papi….no, not like that.

RIP

he’s played well, but i’ve seen a different level from Nabby. Nabby has a long history of being an elite goaltender and he’s shown he can still play at that level. Im not willing to put my trust in a career AHL goalie whos appeared in a total of 42 NHL games. Not if we’re going to be talking playoffs and being serious about it. Montoya’s never played more than 48 games in one season and he’s averaged 37 games per year since 2005-2006. He’s already been hurt twice this year. To ask Montoya to play at his highest level for around 60 games sounds unrealistic to me. So we’d have alteast 22 games split by Dipietro and Poulin. Sounds like playoff disaster to me.

I really don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Hillen, Gervais, Martinek > Staios, Eaton, Mottau

That Reese looks so good when he plays, makes me think that letting go of Hillen for nothing (he was an RFA) might be up there in Snow’s bad moves. I mean Hillen might not be anyone’s long term solution, but we still could have gotten more out of him.

About the defense:
I’m not sure which group of defensemen is stronger. I’ve wondered for quite some time, but haven’t quite figured out how to compare them best or what really might give the edge to one of the groups.

First of all, as bad as Mottau’s looked I’m still convinced Witt was a worse player that year. So, Mottau’s awful play in my opinion can’t really be taken into account to make the point the current group’s worse.
Then, yeah, I liked Freddy Meyer, I liked Hillen and I liked A-Mac. But well, it was Hillen’s and A-Mac’s rookie seasons and they also struggled in certain areas. In a different way of course, but overall those two combined maybe didn’t really offer much more than Jurcina and Staios. Meyer and Gervais probably were better than Eaton. On the other hand, Hamonic’s the best defender out of these two groups. And Streit I think has really been back close to his 09-10 level now.
Overall, as said, it’s tough to compare. At least for a stretch there in the middle of 09-10 the third pairing was probably mostly stronger than what they’ve used so far this season. Then again, they had Kohn and Reese playing 20 games each towards the end and as said a struggling Witt the first 20-30 in an important role. So, I don’t know, I certainly think individual players, Hillen or Meyer, would upgrade the current D – and I do share a good part of the criticism towards the D this season – but I’m not sure the current group is worse. I think sometimes too much has been made of the D struggles this season. Then again, I’m always much more focused on what the forwards do out there anyway, so, maybe too often search for performance issues just among the forwards.

About the luck:
Yeah, in parts. PDO on the right side there is “luck” in 5-on-5 situations and it’s not really been improved. Clearly, they’re a better EV team than the +/- suggest and should improve their EV goal ratio quite clearly towards the end of the season. The thing is just that they’ve had good fortune on special teams. We don’t know a lot about how much the percentages regress on the PP for example, but as you can see here, 5-on-4 they’ve converted more than 15 % of their shots and that’s very high in this league. Also, look at the individual shooting on the PP, pretty much everyone is converting at a very high rate. Again, not sure if these numbers will necessarily regress, I would think with good PP strategy and execution you can create better looks than the league average and watching the games we get the impression they’ve done a very good job there indeed, but still, I’d maybe not expect that shooting to be sustainable. Particularly not the shooting over the last 15 games or so, where their numbers would look even more extreme than the season averages. And on the PK, they’ve got the 4th best goaltending in the league. Again, could be because of them controlling the quality of chances to some extent, and they truly are a good PK team in my opinion, but maybe they’ll not quite keep up the recent pace there, either. So, overall, luck’s been about balanced for them I’d say and maybe on their side recently.

I can’t tell you the exact WOWY numbers of JT with Okposo, but I can go back to see what JT’s numbers have looked like since the Calgary game. That’s when they were back together for the first time. JT’s been at 60.11% in Corsi with the score tied over the last 11 games (57.3% with the score close). By the way, Nielsen’s been at 63.8% even over this period.

I mean, 11 games is a bit of a small sample to make conclusions, especially if you look at score-tied situations only, and when the schedule might have been a bit easy overall, although there was the occassional tough game in there. However, it does seem like JT’s improved additionally, but PA seems to have given the bottom-9 (Nielsen mainly) a lift, so, I wouldn’t think about KO being a better player than PA or stuff, just maybe KO being a better fit even on the top line and PA on the other hand being a better fit on the 2nd (or eventually 3rd line). It’s win-win and probably the best setup they’ve had and if PA keeps up his play on the 2nd or as said maybe 3rd line one day those bottom-9 numbers should certainly improve quite clearly.

Yeah, I mostly agree about the limits of the current roster and what they’re doing with it.

What I don’t particularly like is how they’ve used their lines. If you’re a top team and have a really good scoring line (or power line) and good scorers, checkers, all-around guys in the middle-6, then I’m fine with sheltering the bottom-6 or the 4th line particularly and relying heavily on 7, 8 players. But I think if you’re a bottom-half team in this league you need to do something else and I’m just a big fan of the setup they had in 09-10. And I don’t even mean the setup they had early that season with Park logging extremely tough minutes and JT being sheltered very much, but rather the one they had in the 2nd half, from game 40 to 70 or something, when Schremp got the very easy minutes. I think a Schremp-type player (and line) can really make a difference in this league if you find a way to use them effectively. That’s what we saw back then with Nielsen playing very tough competition, Park still taking a good share and JT being keyed on by the opposition. And all lines were reasonably effective.

Now, JT could play even tougher minutes and would be much, much more effective of course. A Nielsen line could still do about the same work, a Park line could get slightly easier minutes maybe and do quite ok and a Schremp line could maybe take advantage even more.
But what have they done? They’ve got rid of pretty much all Schremp-type players (Schremp, Comeau maybe, Tambellini maybe) or haven’t added any such players. And even if they still had those type of players they couldn’t use them accordingly (that’s basically what happened to Schremp and Comeau last year and maybe in parts to Nino this year, though he’s of course a different case). because they’ve also got rid of those players feeling comfortable in all types of situations and roles and with all kinds of line mates (Bergenheim, Park, Thompson) – players you need to make that setup happen.

It also strikes me as a setup that helps to keep everyone happy. Park’s line’s playing decisive minutes towards the end of the games and feeling important, Schremp’s line’s producing and happy anyway, Bergenheim types are getting to play with/against gems like Nielsen/Ovechkin, etc.

It definitely is an extremely multi-layered puzzle and certain decisions were not bad in isolation or what they’re doing now might indeed be the best you can do with this roster. But overall, I just felt they had a really good plan how to compose the roster and use the guys in 09-10 and I’d certainly have built on that. Instead, I don’t know what they’ve tried to build on, just the progress of the young stars, including for example Bailey?! I do guess they somehow recognized the value of Bergenheim and there was just another issue there with maybe his relation to Gordon or Snow just feeling he didn’t fit in terms of personality or something, but I don’t know, then at least go get a similar guy. (Or if you’re the NY Islanders and maybe can’t land such a guy, just condone certain issues and hang on to the guy anyway.)

…..I think that one of the reasons we’re having a good deal more success of late is, with the exception of Rolston, Reasoner and Pandolfo, all the forwards are SO much more consistently mobile than Bergy, Hunter (injuries contributed to that mightily) and even Comeau, who could really turn on the jets – when he DEIGNED…..PAP’s biggest value is his ability to draw defenders off his linemates (on any given night ranging from Frans, Grabs, Bails and Martin, all viable offensive threats to varying degrees – figure to throw Ullstrom and Nino in the 2nd line mix next season) which may be why he’s among the league leaders in assists – freeing K-O up for the top line with 2 goalscorers as dangerous as JT and Moulson…..

It really depends on the return for Nabby. Anything less than a 3rd round pick isn’t worth it. Nabby is a very good goalie and can make a questionable team with terrible goaltending into a very strong playoff performer. I’d be fine with sticking with Nabby until the end of the season and hopefully he’ll get a big fat contract somewhere else.

That way, hopefully someone panics and gives Garth a great haul. He’s been a very good solider and I wish him well. But if the Islanders can pilfer a strong prospect from a nervous playoff GM, I’m happy to wait them out.