Second off, I've stipulated previously on this topic that of
course Cronin had a better defense. Again, look at the Injury Viz charts you've cited. Notice how Eakins' injuries were much more spread out between positions while Cronin's were nearly all to the forwards. Accordingly, Cronin's improved defense absorbed its few injuries and put up a greatly improved GA, while his gutted forward corps put up a worse GF. There's really nothing surprising there.
You asked: "Are you admitting that Cronin didn't have more talent and talent depth at his disposal? That's what you are asking me to believe, which is completely facetious."
I'm saying Cronin had inferior
forward depth. He couldn't consistently deploy his top of the lineup talent due to injury, and his bottom six sucked. So he had a top-heavy roster that kept taking injuries to its top players.
And they
did keep taking injuries. Eakins' top talent (your cited top six) averaged 76 games per player. Cronin's top talent (your cited top eight) averaged 63.75 games per player. This is without even getting into the stretches where McTavish and Killorn played injured to a degree that visibly detracted from their game.
I'll go through it more thoroughly. You've cited several times that Cronin's top eight played 54 more games and scored 30 more points than Eakins' top six, thus proving Cronin's superior depth. Here's the problem with that:
—30 more points from two extra players is 15 points per "top talent". This immediately indicates something went wrong somewhere.
—To produce a valid comparison, you have to compare like to like. Top six against top six, or top eight against top eight.
—If you go by 5v5 TOI/GP, Eakins' top eight would add Comtois and Jones, who provided 38 points in 133 games. Alternately, Cronin's top six would lose Henrique and Strome, removing 83 points and 139 games. Both these comfortably clear the 30/54 differential, leaving Eakins' unit with more points in many more GP.
—If you'd rather go by total TOI/GP (not how I'd do it but, for the sake of argument) Eakins' top eight would instead add Silfverberg and Grant, who provided 44 points in 127 games. Cronin's top six would lose Strome and McTavish, removing 83 points and 143 games. Once again, well over the bar.
—If you want to really compare like with like, removing Killorn and Carlsson removes 65 points and 118 games.
—Interestingly, Cronin's top eight had a ppg of 0.62. Eakins' top six had a ppg of 0.63. If you pull Killorn and Carlsson, Eakins' top six had a ppg of 0.64 under Cronin. Practically the same, despite your assertions that Eakins could obviously do more with equivalent talent.
—In either of the Eakins top eight units cited (or any mix of the four players involved), the Cronin top eight has a far superior scoring rate (better offensive talent), but the total production was inferior because they were injured so much (not at his disposal).
—I should mention here that Cronin
did have two bottom six players who scored more than 15 points. His problem was he also had multiple roster regulars who scored less than 5. Eakins had somewhere between zero and two (depending how you classify Regenda, who was obviously not a regular but did play as many games as Meyers, and whether you count McGinn's points as a Penguin.) Counting both, Eakins' sub-5-point regulars played 29 games combined. Cronin's sub-5-point regulars played 151.
Cronin had better forward talent. He did not have the forward talent
depth to mitigate the injuries to that better forward talent.
One last thing on this subject: "Cronin's PK unit produced 12 shorties, which was 11 more than Eakins' PK unit - again, identifying more talent available for Cronin."
Once again, you've got to look more deeply at the statistics.
Every forward with so much as a single PK point under Cronin was also on Eakins' roster. Of them, only Carrick and Leason played appreciably more games under Cronin (and Leason was
available to Eakins the entire season, he just got lots of press box time. Vatrano played 81 games under Eakins and 82 under Cronin, he's not who anyone is talking about here.) Six defensemen had a single PK point each, half of which were secondary assists, indicating the bulk of those twelve shorthanded goals were forward-driven. By the same forwards Eakins had.
This discrepancy is about the PK system much more than it's about the available talent. That's an issue with a different coach.
Third, I have legitimately no idea what you're trying to prove with the Zegras and Grant charts? There's no correlation between either player's ppg and the team's point share, then you say Grant made a similar on-ice impact to Zegras based on...? The similar pts% in their last segment?
Okay, sure. If you're going to talk about points percentage you're missing a pretty key detail: the games they didn't play. Those numbers paint a much different picture of their impacts:
| 2022-23 | GP | W | L | OTL | Pts | Pts% |
| With Grant | 46 | 10 | 23 | 9 | 29 | 0.315 |
| Without Grant | 36 | 13 | 24 | 3 | 29 | 0.403 |
| 2023-24 | GP | W | L | OTL | Pts | Pts% |
| With Zegras | 31 | 12 | 17 | 2 | 26 | 0.419 |
| Without Zegras | 51 | 15 | 33 | 3 | 33 | 0.323 |
Yes, points percentage definitely supports your argument here.
Thing is, I don't believe for a second that either of these players was personally responsible for that kind of points percentage swing. I'm not posting them to argue you're wrong about Grant, I'm posting them to argue you're wrong about points percentage being useful in this context.
What it is, is a category error. Team record, in any form, is not a relevant individual stat. Not even for goalies (though that's another topic),
especially not for skaters.
A single win or loss is the confluence of relevant statistics for all 38 guys on the ice. Plus coaching. Plus intangibles. External factors. Every game introduces many new variables to replace many of the old ones. You can't simply reduce wins or losses to any one person, whether player or coach, unless all other variables are the same. They're rarely going to even be close.
This is also why you pretty much can't fully isolate an individual player's impact. I like to cite the fancy stats at times, not because I think they're the be-all end-all (they're definitely not), but because there are so many factors to individual performance I prefer having more information to less. Which brings me back to the point that Grant's fancy stats were all comparatively strong upon his return from the second injury... but the team still sucked and couldn't win. It's the same as how your PPG chart showed no correlation between the individual and team stat. Hockey is complex, individual stats frequently don't correlate with team record, so it's really not as simple as "having this one player means we would
definitely win more games!"
That doesn't mean an individual player can never make the difference, and I'm not saying that a healthy Grant couldn't have maybe swung Eakins an extra game or two. He very well could have (and I wouldn't bet against it, again, I'm a big Grant fan). The point is that there's no guarantee there. He demonstrably could not carry the team to a greater record all by himself, so you have to start factoring in other variables. How many games do you expect the 4C to win singlehandedly? Perhaps he'd be in the position to make the difference a time or two. Perhaps not. It'd be up to more than him.
Whereas Zegras scored 48 even strength points last year, 19 of them goals. The year before that, 44 even strength points, 14 of which were goals. Imagine the dent his healthy production could've made in Cronin's ES differential? The ES differential that you identify as the main culprit? It's not necessarily a guarantee of more wins either, that depends on the distribution, but the chances sure seem higher. But you want us to believe it's a fact that Zegras' ES offensive talent would have been no more impactful than the guy Eakins was back to misdeploying on that godforsaken shutdown line until he got hurt.
There's a pretty well-known Twitter meme about how if you say "I like pancakes" there, someone else will respond "so you hate waffles?" That's basically what you do on this topic. Someone says "Cronin had a lot of injuries" and you come rolling in with "so Eakins didn't have injuries?" No. Nobody said that. Nobody was talking about Eakins until you brought him up.
The weirdest thing is that you ended by pointing out just a couple of the perfectly solid criticisms of Cronin. He couldn't seem to adapt. His postgame comments and throwing the team under the bus were an embarrassment. If you tell me all the signs point to him being a bad coach, I will agree 100% and have said the same thing! But then you undermine your own argument by dragging your Eakins agenda into it.
As for your wonderful exercise... I for one wouldn't bet on either of them, but I am curious about something. You say "If you're relying on players available, then that speaks volumes of a coach's inability to adapt." And yet, you've argued many times that Eakins was a good coach because he had the team in a playoff position in 2021-22, until... he was deprived of several talented players.
Every coach is going to rely on their talent to some degree, and every team has a line where they've lost too much talent to be competitive. A good coach can move that line further, and I don't think Cronin moved it particularly far. But the idea that Eakins was clearly better at it just isn't supported by facts.
