How is AZ an NHL organization at this point?
Arizona starts their preseason playing 3 games on the same day (the Sat at 12:05am is technically a Friday game, as the game is being played in Australia). They need all the players they can get.
How is AZ an NHL organization at this point?
I agree that average age is a misleading stat. With the Avs you have guys like JJ, Cogs, Tatar, Manson bringing the average age up when none of them play a significant role on this team. Our oldest core guys are Landeskog and Toews who are 29 and 30. Hardly an old team.
Manson and JJ will be 5th and 6th in ice time amongst our Dmen, I’m pretty confident in saying that.Manson is expected to be the #2RD, that's a pretty important position. Johansen is expected to be the 2C, another extremely important position.
There's a good chance Tatar is a Top 6 winger as well. The only ones that aren't playing big roles quite frankly are JJ and Cogliano.
I agree that average age is a misleading stat. With the Avs you have guys like JJ, Cogs, Tatar, Manson bringing the average age up when none of them play a significant role on this team. Our oldest core guys are Landeskog and Toews who are 29 and 30. Hardly an old team.
Just isn't an accurate statement at all. At 29/30 the age regression is already happening for most players, quite aggressively for some. And we have a lot of player approaching that age group.RyJo just turned 31. Age regression is a non issue for this team this season. The much more concerning thing is our ability to stay healthy.
Each team has guys that pull up or down the stats. LA has Lewis pulling up theirs too and he matters less than all of those guys.
Also... this idea that 29/30 isn't old is misguided. 27/28 is where things normally start falling off for most players (I'd argue a year or two earlier). By 29/30 they are well on their way down. By 32/33/34 many guys are not capable of sticking in the league. This is very well established.
A New Look at Aging Curves for NHL Skaters (part 1)
How do NHL players age? When do they peak? How quickly do they decline? Questions about player aging in the NHL have been debated for years, and an incredible amount of research has already been do…hockey-graphs.com
Really even 27/28 is into regression statistically where most say the peak is 26. Even for defensemen. There will always be outliers and better players tends to simply stay better... but it is simply a numbers game. If you look at the Avs forwards, the only forward that won't be 27+ this year is Meyers and he's gonna be 25 soon. On defense, the picture is better for sure but still not perfect 3/6 of the every day guys are 29+, 2 are 25 and one is 22. 25 is right in that typical area of a peak, but could be half step better. 22 isn't as concrete for a peak, but odds are high Byram will get a step better over the next 2-3 seasons. Entering that 90-95% peak zone though.Exactly. At 29/30 you are already well into the regression years. Avs have a number of guys Turing 29/30 this year and a number of guys already beyond that.
That 28 or less group is mostly 27/28. The team has a high concentration of players at the typical age of regression. The team is heavily concentrated there without enough younger players still moving to their peak to compensate for any regression (Byram is the only guy on the team in that sort of age). That represents a large risk IMO.29+ :
Landeskog
Toews
RyJo
Tatar
Cogs
Manson
JJ
Hunt
Dermy
Francouz
28 or less :
Mack
Mikko
Nuke
Lehky
Drouin
Wood
Colton
LOC
Meyers
Makar
Byram
Girard
Georgiev
One group seems a lot more vital to the teams success or failure than the other. Sure in a couple years things will look different. For this season, age regression is a non issue for the team, not individual players themselves.
Really even 27/28 is into regression statistically where most say the peak is 26. Even for defensemen. There will always be outliers and better players tends to simply stay better... but it is simply a numbers game. If you look at the Avs forwards, the only forward that won't be 27+ this year is Meyers and he's gonna be 25 soon. On defense, the picture is better for sure but still not perfect 3/6 of the every day guys are 29+, 2 are 25 and one is 22. 25 is right in that typical area of a peak, but could be half step better. 22 isn't as concrete for a peak, but odds are high Byram will get a step better over the next 2-3 seasons. Entering that 90-95% peak zone though.
Overall... of the 18 skaters, 78% of them are in the range where step backs should be expected. Even if you get half that don't, that still leaves 9 guys who were not as good. This just compounds over time. Maybe the Avs avoid it another year or two... but odds of 3/4/5 get small quickly.
Goalies are weird in all of this, though the data also suggests they are best 23-29... they are just all over the map though. Harder to say with the noise in the data.
Also a few funny things in this. 34+ players get better (because the riff raff retire and best players stick bringing up averages). PP QBs stay elite with their PP production. Their 5v5 play suffers greatly in their late 20s/30s, but their overall scoring stays up mostly due to PP. Forwards who are elite on the PK, stay elite their entire career. PK defensemen fall off a cliff faster in all situations, but it is most exaggerated on the PK where after 28/29 they become liabilities. PP forwards who are big goal scorers in that area, stay elite, arguably get better in that area in their 30s. Passing types have a very hard time sustaining on the PP. Goal scoring defensemen, almost never lose that ability. Even 5v5.
If players aren’t at their peak, they’re either ascending to it, or regressing from it. In both scenarios, you can make a case those players are at similar levels of play, but travelling in opposite directions. In both scenarios, you can make a case that a team isn’t good enough to win yet, or too old to win (in our case win again). Yet teams have won the cup in both scenarios when the majority of their teams players, including their stars, aren’t at their absolute peak.
In case it wasn’t clear, I’m not worried.
Yeah the data is pretty overwhelmingly accurate as well. It's why I always get a kick out of the folks who argue against it... The database this information is based off of is huge.
Of course you can always find outliers in both directions. The other thing that's frustrating when talking about the regressing stats is people completely fail to recognize the level of scoring across the league.
A player who was a 70 point player 5 years ago when they were ~25 years old, who is still a 70 point player today at 30 years old... That is a player that has regressed. But people just look at the same 70 point production and suggest otherwise without realizing that 5 years ago, maybe 30 players in the league scored 70 points, compared to the 60 who hit that mark this year.
I see were at that stage again of the offseason.
Hopefully this is the last time I need to hear the same thing regurgitated for the 1000th time before the season starts.
No doubt regression is a very real thing as players age and the Avs will be hitting the wall someday. Where I've disagreed is the lack of consistency when comparing it to other teams and acting like it's a fact. Is it cores? overall rosters? it's certainly changed now because in the past when discussions like this happened it was purely the core players that mattered. You can't just move the goals posts so teams like Dallas/L.A aren't "old" but the Avs are. Context is important. If Josh Manson's role is considered important than Koptiar is a certainly a top guy for L.A. Last offseason we were supposed to worry about Mack/Rants .. yet Roope Hintz is considered part of the "young" core for Dallas.
Avs 1D turns 25 years old. Kings 1D turns 34. That's more important than Dermy turning 30 this season.
Great post, and exactly mate. Also don't forget that competition for spots is also a very healthy place and space to be, because it lifts everyone's effort (even in training).
There's so much to look forward to. I'm betting everyone is absolutely pumped for the season to begin.
A big question though; who's jersey to buy
I always get a laugh out of people who make evaluations like this...
Ignoring the incredible flaws of this kind of evaluation, Yes congrats, they traded 3 players who combined for 90 points, an average of 30 points each, for one Top 6 Center who scored almost 65 points by himself.
Seems like an awfully great trade for LA.
so Kopitar, Doughty, and Danault are on their way down and may not be able to stick in the league any day now....Each team has guys that pull up or down the stats. LA has Lewis pulling up theirs too and he matters less than all of those guys.
Also... this idea that 29/30 isn't old is misguided. 27/28 is where things normally start falling off for most players (I'd argue a year or two earlier). By 29/30 they are well on their way down. By 32/33/34 many guys are not capable of sticking in the league. This is very well established.
A New Look at Aging Curves for NHL Skaters (part 1)
How do NHL players age? When do they peak? How quickly do they decline? Questions about player aging in the NHL have been debated for years, and an incredible amount of research has already been do…hockey-graphs.com
If Landeskog returns it may still be feasible to keep the team intact next summer simply by moving Manson.
The cap is projected to rise to $87.5m in 2024, so there's an additional $4m which basically covers Toews' raise. It might be on the low side but in the AGM below I used $7.5m X 8 years (the 8th year being what keeps the AAV down a bit), and that allows just enough capspace to fill out a 22 man roster by simply moving Manson off the roster (his NTC becomes a limited NTC so it is possible and may even actually be the plan by CMac).
The 4th liners, 5/6D, and backup G would all need to be $1m but that shouldn't be an issue if the Avs can continue to be an attractive destination for players (as we've already seen with ERod, Tatar, Drouin, Cogliano, Jack Johnson, and college free agents Meyers, Pavel, Malinski, etc).
so Kopitar, Doughty, and Danault are on their way down and may not be able to stick in the league any day now....
Kopi and Doughty fit that elite category that hold on longer and tick up that later curve. They could fall of the cliff at any point though, could easily be this year (and outside of last season Doughty has been a shell of his former self... IE last season could be the blip that sometimes happens). Danault is likely on his last big deal and won't be a positive value very soon. Probably gets 3 more years after his deal to be a PK 4th line C (which if you read though my stuff you'd see that is a trait for forwards that doesn't die).
Cores certainly matter more than total. Without a single doubt. The data is actually more extreme on cores than totals. Vegas is the only team to win with more than 1 30+ year old core player since the lockout. In the expansion era, I think it is only 4 teams total (one of those was the Avs BTW) that have pulled it off with 2+ core guys over 30. You can find many individual teams that have 4-5 guys over 30 that win the cup.
The point is absolutely not that Dallas, Colorado, and/or LA are not old. That is twisting what is being stated here. They are ALL old teams. They are varied in how they are old, but all are old. Dallas is a mix of old and young. A few old guys, a few young guys, and a couple in the middle. Avs are a highly concentrated team at 27/28 with a couple core slightly above, a couple slightly below. Really keyed into that late 20s age. LA is a team that has a core that is mostly 25/28 with a couple outliers high... then a group of ~4 players 22 or younger that are expected to be a part of their core, but not there yet. They are all different in their makeups, but all of them are old. If that young group succeeds, LA would move to middle age team rather quickly. If they fail, they'll be aged out as soon ad Fiala and PLD do.
The young teams in the league are the ones like New Jersey. The middle age teams are like Florida. Your olds are Colorado/Dallas/LA. Your nursing homes are Pitt and Washington.
Shut up.Also... this idea that 29/30 isn't old is misguided.