Quoting: hockeyfanatic05
Yet you've not given one reason how he's not overrated. The guy is an offensive dman with 9 points. Thats his job. Score points. He's currently getting outproduced by John Marino. John Marino moves up and replaces Schults. Dumo, Letang, Pettersson, Marino, JJ. Last spot can be battled in the offseason between JOP, Rikkola, and Addison. If neither of them work out, find a cheap 3rd pairing dman, like they just did this year. Zero reason to trade for a guy with a 5.4 cap hit when there are cheaper options that are getting better every year. Everything you said is wrong. Look at Petterson last year. Look at Marino this year.
Sure, why not, let's have the points are a useless stat argument too. It's Saturday, I don't have to get up tomorrow!
Here are some arguments using Patrik Laine as an example:
1. Points say precisely nothing about defense. This one's pretty self-explanatory: points only occur on goals scored by your team and are unmodified by goals, shots or chances against your team. In Laine's case, points miss that before this year he had yet to have had a year above replacement-level defensively, per EvolvingWild's GAR metric.
2. Points are EXTREMELY usage dependent. 6 of Laine's points came on the powerplay, which means a different coaching decision could nix 1/4 of his points production, without him doing anything different. And that's without factoring in how playing with elite teammates and seeing large amounts of icetime can bias the results as well. Laine's scoring rate at 5v5 (he has 13 5v5 points) could this year have produced: 15 (Schiefele's TOI), 11 (Roslovic's TOI), or 5 points (in 16 games, Bourque's TOI). All that changed between these scenarios is TOI, which player's can't directly control. NHL coaches are USUALLY smart about TOI allocation, but I doubt you could find someone who says they're perfect. No reason to punish a player for their role. And that's before accounting for teammate impacts (spoiler alert, they're pretty big).
3. Points are VERY luck-dependent. Shooting percentage is one of the most volatile stats in the NHL and forms a huge part of goal numbers, (and goals aren't even the least
predictive part of points, secondary assists have even more variance, to the point where they are essentially useless in skater evaluation). In Laine's case, the 20-point drop he experienced from 17-18 to 18-19 is entirely explained by his shooting percentage dropping by 6 percentage points (from 18% to 12%) and by his secondary assists falling from 14 to 3 (11 points right there). He wasn't really playing differently, but his points were way worse. Not really what you want from a stat.
Points work better when restricted to primary points (goals+primary assists) and used as a rate (e.g. P1/60). Even then, there's an argument to be made that advancements in regression models like EvolvingWild's RAPMs and Micah McCurdy's Magnus 2 more firmly measure individual offence by accounting for things like teammates, competition, score effects, etc. While using them in concert makes sense, it can lead to a tendency to double count offence, especially when using something like GAR, which is based off of the RAPMs.
Stop using unmodified points. Please. Use better stats.