Moreover...if Harris
was trending to become a Spurgeon-like player, there's absolutely no way he'd even be remotely available. You find an effective young, developing, top-pair all around tough minutes defenceman like Spurgeon and you hang onto that like gold. You don't care if the guy is a little small and not that physical. That's a hugely valuable player.
Harris isn't really showing anything to indicate he's on track for that sort of sharp upward development explosion.
It's almost like you're going deliberately out of your way to flip around and misconstrue the meaning of these statistics.
Playing more minutes, performing better in them, and doing it on a better team is generally a positive thing. Romanov played Top-4 defensive D minutes against good players and came out with better results...on a team that had better results overall. He was part of that.
It's like there's some victim complex where we're supposed to just assume all Habs players are secretly extremely good, because they survived the team as a collective unit being terrible. It doesn't really make a lot of sense.
That's where i said, particularly in the advanced metrics...things can get severely distorted when it comes to teams at the extremes (cellar dwellers with a laundry list of injuries, or record-setting Presidents Trophy dominant alike). There are inflationary artifacts all around those types of teams. Player performance in either of those scenarios is suspect in it's translatability.
For example...is Kaiden Guhle a worse or less valuable player than Harris too? He's got some iffy metrics. Or is he a cornerstone of the Habs future defence, while Harris is being dangled by fans as "expendable"?
