Leafs would likely just keep Kerfoot

uhhh debrusk for nurse doesn't go through

add the rags 2nd?

with Ottawa's stock piling of prospects, and the #3 and #5 OA's this year, I really don't think they need to trade up to fill anything they don't already have.

i'd see them wanting a roster player if anything to help support the young guys development, and round out their rosters.

With this much draft capital, it depends on who is available

Might need to massage the picks a bit, three 2020 picks is a lot from one draft.

what?

The OP proposed that Ottawa trade up from 28 to 15, by giving up their 2nd and 3rd rd.

so it would still be 3 picks, which I agree, given their current prospect depth, Ottawa would be better off with a roster player.

the 28th OA, the 2nd rd (33 OA) and the 3rd round for Nugent-Hopkins might be fair.

Any roster players that OTT is selling picks for need to be the right age for the rebuild.

RNH will be be in his age 28 season, not someone that I want to shell draft capital for. He will be on the wrong side of 30 when its times to compete

Trading picks for 14OA might be worthwhile, depending on who is available at that point.

eh.... i don't know, RNH realistically has another 6 good solid years left, and it removes pressure of a 1C for the development.

But yeah, i definitely agree, they would only give up draft capital in exchange for a piece that makes sense with their philosophy.

I agree, that he has 6 years. 2-3 of which OTT wouldnt be competitive, and the last 3 would be on the lower production side.

If I am looking trading picks for roster players, I am not targeting a player over 24

and we would tell ottawa to pound sand if they want nuge and will only give up that much

Correct. Holland would laugh in Sweeney's face.

fr tho, debrusk > nurse and im an oilers fan

Just because you're an Oilers fan doesn't make you an expert. AA has scored about equal to DeBrusk over the past 2-3 years, while Nurse's numbers look a lot like Hedman's. The real Ken Holland would laugh at that offer.

Past 2 years at 5v5:

DeBrusk: 133, 29-20-49, 72.06 IPP
Athanasiou: 131, 28-21-49, 84.48 IPP

Both play LW, both score well at 5v5, both are RFA's, both in their mid twenties. Athanasiou is faster and seems to be better at driving play - his IPP ranks 4th in the entire league - while DeBrusk is a bit younger.

Some people decry Holland trading a couple of 2nds for AA but they turn around and advocate trading a top-pairing defender PLUS for a statistically equivalent player.

a top pairing dman? Dude can't play defense if his life depended on it. 3rd percentile in xEVD and you compared him to freaking Hedman lmao.
And the problem with AA was that he couldn't produce this season and was awful defensively. And AA's outlier 2018-19 season won't be repeated

DeBrusk is much better than Nurse if you look at analytics. Points are not a good way of evaluating players

I posted this a few weeks ago:

Just thought I'd compare Nurse's past 3 years with some of the generally accepted "#1D" at the same age. It's not a perfect comp due to play-style differences of course, but I'm hoping it'll give some idea of where Nurse is in his development.

Nurse: 2017-18 to 2019-20
Jones: 2017-18 to 2019-20
Hedman: 2013-14 to 2015-16
Pietrangelo: 2012-13 to 2014-15
Josi: 2012-13 to 2014-15
Doughty: 2012-13 to 2014-15
Burns: 2007-08 to 2009-10

5v5 TOI/GP
Doughty: 19:39
Jones: 19:14
Josi: 19:12
Nurse: 19:02
Pietrangelo: 18:04
Hedman: 16:40
Burns: 16:03

Doughty has played crazy minutes since entering the league - still does - but Jones, Josi and Nurse are all in the range at the same age. Pietrangelo is nearly a full minute less while Hedman and Burns are way down.

5v5 Boxcars
Hedman: 212, 22-60-82
Nurse: 235, 17-60-77
Pietrangelo: 209, 12-57-69
Jones: 209, 17-48-65
Josi: 201, 22-42-64
Doughty: 208, 12-37-49
Burns: 188, 8-29-37

Nurse is second overall in part due to playing more games than the others. That's a feature, not a bug, although for 3 of these players we're including the lockout shortened season, so Pietrangelo, Josi and Doughty have an excuse for having played less. Nurse didn't miss a single game in the timeframe in question.

5v5 P/60
Hedman: 1.39
Pietrangelo: 1.10
Nurse: 1.03
Josi: 0.99
Jones: 0.97
Burns: 0.74
Doughty: 0.72

Nurse is right in the range with Pietrangelo, Josi and Jones, and 3rd overall. Burns was nowhere near his prime and Hedman is ahead of the others at the same age. Of course, Hedman's TOI and puckiq.com numbers indicate that he wasn't playing 1st pair until the last of the 3 years, so that could have something to do with his offensive numbers. When you look at each year individually, you'll see that the year he played 1st pairing his scoring rates were the lowest.

Hits/60
Nurse: 5.92
Doughty: 5.69
Burns: 3.86
Jones: 3.40
Hedman: 3.06
Josi: 1.55
Peitrangelo: 1.54

Shots Blocked/60
Josi: 5.14
Pietrangelo: 4.46
Nurse: 4.44
Jones: 4.33
Hedman: 4.26
Doughty: 2.79
Burns: 2.76

I wouldn't normally bother with things like Hits and Blocked Shots, but I wanted to throw them in there to show the differences between these players' styles. Josi and Pietrangelo aren't very physical, but both block shots well. Burns and Doughty are physical but don't block a lot of shots, while Nurse plays more like Jones and Hedman, but more physical than both. It's worth giving this a second mention: Nurse is more physical than Doughty in his hey-day. That's incredible. So let's look at some more defensive metrics, corrected for team strength ("relative" metrics).

Shot Against/60 Rel (and SF% Rel)
Hedman: -1.85 (+3.70)
Jones: -0.93 (+3.05)
Doughty: 0.09 (+1.26)
Burns: 0.44 (+1.02)
Nurse: 1.1 (+0.30)
Pietrangelo: 2.24 (-0.65)
Josi: 3.21 (-0.45)

Man, it really isn't easy to play 1st pairing at 23-25 years old. Almost everyone here puts up worse SA/60 numbers than their teammates whom they sheltered, although to be fair Burns wan't playing 1st pairing and Hedman was only 1 of the 3 years. For reference, a positive SA/60 Rel number is bad, while a positive SF% Rel number is good. So while Nurse allowed marginally more shots against than his teammates, he created enough Shots For that his overall % was positive, although only slightly. Nurse is clearly behind Jones and Doughty but well ahead of Pietrangelo and Josi.

Goals Against/60 Rel (and GF% Rel)
Josi: -0.05 (+2.55)
Burns: -0.02 (+4.32)
Nurse: 0.05 (+4.54)
Jones: 0.09 (+0.60)
Hedman: 0.13 (5.81)
Doughty: 0.20 (-0.54)
Pietrangelo: 0.35 (-0.43)

In this metric Nurse shines, allowing basically team average goals against but while playing much harder comp than everyone else. Notice how practically everyone in this group allows more goals than their teammates? First pairing is hard. The players here are tightly grouped, but you can see from the GF% Rel that 3 players - Hedman, Nurse and Burns - produced enough GF Rel to make a significant difference for their team while on the ice. We can see that shots allowed is not a great predictor for goals allowed due in part to shot quality and distance, so they came up with an "Expected Goals" metric to try and correct for this:

Expected Goals Against/60 Rel (and xGF% Rel)
Hedman: -0.02 (+2.18)
Doughty: -0.01 (+1.11)
Jones: 0.05 (+0.39)
Burns: 0.06 (+1.10)
Josi: 0.08 (+0.03)
Nurse: 0.12 (+0.04)
Pietrangelo: 0.25 (-1.46)

Only Pietrangelo is behind the pack here, all 6 of the others are all within the same range. Nurse is at the bottom of the range, but this is a very good group of players to be hanging around with. Okay, just one more stat to give colour to all the above stats...

Defensive Zone Faceoffs/60 (Off. Zone Faceoff %)
Josi: 24.57 (44.89)
Pietrangelo: 19.91 (50.55)
Nurse: 18.67 (48.84)
Burns: 18.19 (46.14)
Doughty: 17.93 (54.18)
Jones: 17.26 (56.54)
Hedman: 17.00 (56.98)

If you look back at the Shots Against list, you'll see that Nurse, Pietrangelo and Josi ranked 5,6 and 7 respectively. Now you can see why - they were sent out for the most defensive zone faceoffs. The defenseman has nothing to do with losing the faceoff and very little control over the resulting shot / shot attempt. This list also explains why those three rank at the bottom for xGA/60 and at the top of the Shots Blocked list too - and makes the fact that Nurse and Josi are strong in the actual Goals Against metric even more impressive.

So what do you think? Do these numbers stand up to the fact that you "seen him bad", or do they show Nurse on a track to remain one of the leagues best over the coming decade?

The problem here is that most of those "elite" guys (Burns, Doughty, and Jones) are not elite according to analytics. Way overrated. And the statistics that you use (like TOI, blocks, defensive faceoffs and hits) are not the best.

xGA/60: 15th percentile
CA/60: 21st percentile
xEVD: 3rd percentile
xSPAR: 19th percentile
Played 600 minutes of his TOI with McDavid, which boosted his GF/60 and xGF/60. Had a GF% of just 42.82 without McDavid this season
Goals Above Replacement: 0.1 (adds less value than Benning, Klefbom, Bear, and Jones)

Is this the guy you said is comparable to Hedman? Jesus.

DeBrusk>Nurse

Nope. DeBrusk = Athanasiou

Nurse at 22-25 in comparable to Hedman at 22-25, yes. Nurse at 22-25 has comparable 5v5 offense to Hedman at 27-29, which is pretty incredible. No sane GM would trade that player for a guy who can't outscore Andreas Athanasiou AND THEN ADD ANOTHER SIGNIFICANT ASSET. That's just absurd.

Can you tell me what the correlation between your "expected" metrics are with "actual" metrics? Ppl here love to use "x" numbers, but they tell you much less than real numbers. For instance, "xGF" is a poor indicator of future "GF". You know what metric has the highest correlation with future scoring? P/GP.

GAR has no context, and its only useful in context. Matt Benning has one of the highest GAR ratings in the league yet no NHL coach will play him above 3rd pairing. He isn't one of the best defensemen in the league, although he is very good at what he does.

You need to do a lot more learning about how to use these stats before you can draw any meaningful conclusions from them, IMO.

xGF is GF when taking the luck out of it, or you would have weird results

And I don't remember Hedman racking up secondary assists with mcdavid and draisaitl

I honestly cannot tell if you're trolling rn. DeBrusk is better by every measure.

It depends on who's xGF you're looking at, but mostly you'll find that xGF is simply CF within a certain distance of the net. It has very little correlation with GF and certainly doesn't take any basis from or have its starting point in GF.


Do you remember him racking up secondary assist with Kucherov, Point and Stamkos? Weird that you give him a free pass for playing with the leagues best offensive producers. Over the past 3 years TBL's top forwards have combined for 454 points at 5v5, which is greater than EDM's top-3 (with Nuge) which has scored 439 points.

Also, take a look at their IPP, which measures how involved each player is in the offense created while on the ice:

Nurse: 39.29 IPP, 480 shots, 21.25 ixG (since you love expected goals so much)
Hedman: 38.69 IPP, 389 shots, 20.59 ixG

Nurse is slightly more involved in creating offense than Hedman is.

Since when have I said Nurse isn't great at offense? He's terrific in that regard. But provides negative defensive value which cancels out most of his positive offensive value

5v5 Primary Assists/60
Hedman - 0.69
Nurse - 0.35

5v5 Secondary Assists/60
Hedman - 0.32
Nurse - 0.57

Hedman never racked up secondary assists like nurse did.

Nope, offensively they're similar players. Both score well at 5v5, both are in their mid-twenties, both play LW, neither are very good playmakers. Over the past 3 years:

DeBrusk: 133, 29-20-49, 72.06 IPP, 248 shots, 11.69 SH%, 20.82 ixG
Athanasiou: 131, 28-21-49, 84.48 IPP, 256 shots, 10.94 SH%, 21.53 ixG

Their production is virtually identical, the IPP number shows the only major difference: AA did it by himself and DeBrusk had some help.