Jimbo57
Registered User
- Jan 28, 2018
- 475
- 569
How so? You haven't provided any explanation yourself. Show how "intelligent" you are then.
Here's the bottom-line: Many defensively oriented players put up vastly better results than Beagle. Therefore, using his deployment as an excuse for why he gets poor results is a bad argument, as having tough deployment does not preclude the ability to still put up strong results.
I'm always fascinated by the "fancy stats are dumb" crowd who provide no logical explanation or counter-argument of their own.
This is a decently written article that puts things in perspective. Basically the author states Beagle is over utilised in a defensive role(arguably more than any other player in the league at the time) and that the coach should ease up on him. Written in January of this year, but still relevant.
Jay Beagle’s workload is not okay
Excerpts:
"Those are among the lowest percentages for any forward in the league, but that broad kind of context isn’t useful when considering Beagle, who might have the toughest job in the NHL this season. He’s got unproven linemates, lots of penalty killing work, and tons and tons and tons of shifts starting in the defensive zone. Literally no one takes a bigger share of his team’s defensive zone starts than Jay Beagle. More than half of Beagle’s shifts (excluding on-the-fly changes) begin near his own net. Nearly 40 percent (39.2) of the Capitals’ total defensive faceoffs during 5-on-5 see Beagle on the ice. He’s far and away the league’s number-one defensive specialist forward.
The implication there is trust. Barry Trotz trusts Jay Beagle to win faceoffs and make smart, reliable plays to get the team back on attack. And while Beagle is certainly winning faceoffs this year, the team is rarely on attack. There’s a cost to all that trust, and it’s high."
"Here’s a scatter plot of the league’s 144 most defensively utilized forwards with at least 400 minutes played. The y-axis means how many of their shifts start in the defensive zone (higher means more defensive usage). The x-axis means how many shot attempts belong to the team while that player is on the ice (right means more offense).
Beagle is the extreme top-left corner. He’s used defensively more than any other forward in the league, and his shot share is worse than any other forward in the league aside from Minnesota’s 41-year-old Matt Cullen, whose 38.2 percent of shot attempts with just 33.0 percent defensive-zone starts is literally off the chart – to the bottom left."
"But that linemate analysis leaves us no convenient scapegoats for Beagle’s deterioration. There’s no apparent bad chemistry driving his drop-off, which leaves us with two options:
- Beagle’s duties are so defensive that it is hurting him and the team.
- Beagle’s skill has diminished such that his play in any context would be worse.
I doubt number two – or, at least I doubt it’s the primary factor. When Karl Alzner‘s play dropped off last season, it was readily apparent to casual observers (right after bright analysts like Pat Holden noticed it). Alzner had lost a step and could not enforce the gap control that had served him so well. I have not seen the same with Jay Beagle. He seems, anecdotally, to be the same quality player he always has been. A quantitative look at Beagle’s on-the-fly shifts (independent of his defensive-zone deployments) might help us validate that idea – but I don’t have the resources for that kind of study these days.
But instead, there’s a simple way the team could find out if Beagle’s drop-off is being caused by the overwhelmingly defensive deployments his coach gives him: Stop it.
This doesn’t have to be an experiment. This isn’t, I wonder, what if…?
It could just be a reasonable course correction: It’s abundantly and painfully obvious that Jay Beagle and the fourth line are not succeeding in their current workload, which is the most overwhelmingly defensive workload in the entire league, so I, as head coach of the Capitals, will share that burden more evenly with the top nine.
It might not work, but it would be a modest and rational reaction to a glaring problem. Plus, it would give Beags the opportunity to do more stuff like this.
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