Bruins old and slow? Check the stats!

[MacMacandBarbie]

Your last sentence was Litterally the whole point lol.

That poster got strangely upset when people pointed out that Columbus doesn’t get the same draw of the bigger markets.

Despite it being an indisputable fact

Thats fair, and I know the poster double downed. I was just pushing back on some of the more over the top comments, like Bank Shot claiming Columbus is an undesirable market. Its still an east coast time zone city and is far from 'undesirable' and most of its drawbacks revolve around hockey not being very big there and the ownership group being very cheap.

 

[tarheelhockey]

Ridiculous goal post moving, and your claims of posting stats that support your argument are silly at best.

The numbers are what they are. Again, I posted one link but the numbers are easily available from multiple sources. You can re-run the numbers if you want, but they’ll look the same. It’s just a statistical fact that in the NHL, individual scoring peaks out around 24/25 and falls slightly till 28, then drops off steadily.

If you want to argue against math, be my guest.

You even bring up Jagr after all that? He had two of his best seasons at 29 and 34 years old where he won the Art Ross and the Pearson in respective years.

Jagr was 28 for most of that last Art Ross year. But the point is, even during those seasons he wasn’t at the level of his peak from 22-28, when he won 5 Rosses and a Hart (and very nearly 3 more Harts) in 7 years.

Nobody’s saying that a player can’t still be good as he ages. Obviously a Hart winner is probably going to still be pretty good past 30. But he will almost certainly not be what he used to be. Which is why there are very, very few cases of a winger playing at a Hart level or scoring at a Ross level after 30.

Pasta being 28 with plenty of his best years ahead of him makes your comment about the Bruins best players being old look ridiculous, but you just can't admit you are wrong so you have to say plenty more off the wall stuff and you can't even be bothered to fact check your comments.

We can settle this easily enough. Just watch him over the next few years and see if he maintains this level without a falloff. The odds heavily favor my side of that argument, no matter how many times you throw around words like “silly” and “ridiculous” to describe a near-ubiquitous reality in the NHL.

 

[Score08]

If pasta a was a ufa, what would be his market value?

 

[MacMacandBarbie]

Nobody’s saying that a player can’t still be good as he ages. Obviously a Hart winner is probably going to still be pretty good past 30. But he will almost certainly not be what he used to be. Which is why there are very, very few cases of a winger playing at a Hart level or scoring at a Ross level after 30.

Kucherov - Hart Finalist at 32
RNH - Best season at 30
Marchand - Best season and 5th in Hart voting at 32
Kane - Top 5 scoring finish at age 32 and won ESPY
Panarin - Career best season, outperformed his Hart finalist season at 32

That is only mentioning wingers and only mentioning the last 3-4 years. I just think you have taken an extreme position on this, and I wanted to push back. It is pretty clear that modern NHL players are still likely to be performing at their best in their early 30s. To make it seem like such a rarity just seems odd.

I will concede that is unlikely they will perform at their absolute peak in the regular season, but I think that has more to do with pacing themselves. I would like to see a proper analysis done, because it seems like its more common for players have better postseason performances in their late 20s versus their early 20s.

 

[MacMacandBarbie]

If pasta a was a ufa, what would be his market value?

Despite what others would have you believe, he is in his peak and just came off of one of his best years. I think it would easily be ~14M AAV.

 

[tarheelhockey]

Kucherov - Hart Finalist at 32
RNH - Best season at 30
Marchand - Best season and 5th in Hart voting at 32
Kane - Top 5 scoring finish at age 32 and won ESPY
Panarin - Career best season, outperformed his Hart finalist season at 32

That is only mentioning wingers and only mentioning the last 3-4 years. I just think you have taken an extreme position on this, and I wanted to push back. It is pretty clear that modern NHL players are still likely to be performing at their best in their early 30s. To make it seem like such a rarity just seems odd.

I will concede that is unlikely they will perform at their absolute peak in the regular season, but I think that has more to do with pacing themselves. I would like to see a proper analysis done, because it seems like its more common for players have better postseason performances in their late 20s versus their early 20s.

In the case of Panarin, note that this past season he actually placed lower in both the scoring race and the Hart race than he did in 2020. 2024 was a phenomenal season for him, but not his best.

One thing I would suggest, look at the full careers of the players on your list. Each of these post-30 seasons represents a one-year jump in their numbers, which then dropped back down again the following season. Kucherov and Panarin are TBD on this, of course, but both of them have been more like 95 point players in recent years. Odds are, they go back to that range this year, same as Kane and Marchand and RNH dropped back off. Same with Jagr after 06 for that matter. The only winger I can think of who legitimately peaked in his 30s and sustained it for years was MSL (well, there’s also Johnny Bucyk, but we know what happened there).

That’s why I’m acting like it’s such a rarity — it is a rarity, comeback seasons do happen, but the are brief and unpredictable compared to the overwhelming trend of post-30 decline. Hence them being called “comeback” seasons.

The playoff question is interesting. It does seem that players learn to pace themselves, especially if they’re on successful teams which tend to manage themselves and prepare for the playoffs better than bubble teams. There’s also the factor that if a young player is really good, he is probably part of a rebuild. Whereas by the time he’s in his late 20s, the team is going all-in and filling the roster with veteran talent to try and cap off a Cup run. So there are some different factors intersecting around the playoffs which would at least make it a reasonable hypothesis that playoff peaks happen a little later than regular season peaks.

 

[blankall]

Old and slow? The Bruins losing a perennial Selke winning center was more the issue.

Marchand is 36, not 34, btw. He is old.

Kucherov - Hart Finalist at 32
RNH - Best season at 30
Marchand - Best season and 5th in Hart voting at 32
Kane - Top 5 scoring finish at age 32 and won ESPY
Panarin - Career best season, outperformed his Hart finalist season at 32

That is only mentioning wingers and only mentioning the last 3-4 years. I just think you have taken an extreme position on this, and I wanted to push back. It is pretty clear that modern NHL players are still likely to be performing at their best in their early 30s. To make it seem like such a rarity just seems odd.

I will concede that is unlikely they will perform at their absolute peak in the regular season, but I think that has more to do with pacing themselves. I would like to see a proper analysis done, because it seems like its more common for players have better postseason performances in their late 20s versus their early 20s.

League scoring went to dramatically the last few years. That masked a lot of these guys losing abilities due to age.

You are also listing outliers. The list of guys who got worse post 30 is much longer. It's basically everyone except the guys you've listed.