Vlasic does many things that are quantified statistically. Unfortunately, the NHL is by in large still stuck in the dark ages when it comes to advanced performance metrics. And that is primarily because the mainstream media that covers the NHL, whether it be writers or television analysts (especially on NHL Network), are almost exclusively "old-school", traditionalist hockey men who much prefer to conform to what every other traditionalist, old-school hockey man says rather than try to provide readers or viewers with something new and innovative. The funny thing is that ESPN provides fantastic NHL coverage on it's website from Pierre Lebrun and Craig Custance, and has made a commitment to making advanced stats a very large part of their online coverage (it is all Insider though). Yet next to a great (and very in-depth) article by Custance on a potential Sharks' roster "reset", there is a video of Barry Melrose probably saying something typically accurate like "Marleau doesn't want to pay the price to score goals in the playoffs."
Honestly, NHL fans are actually far more knowledgeable and innovative about the sport than the people paid to talk about it. Mention Corsi or PDO or Fenwick or CorsiQualComp to Craig Button, who shows up on NHL Network and TSN quite often, and he might respond with "Douglas Murray is good at moving the puck." Which, BTW, he actually said on TSN last week. I was in a bar in Mexico, which happened to have TSN on, and I literally laughed out loud when I heard him say that. Maybe he meant to say, "the player with the puck is good at moving around Douglas Murray." Hell, the HockeyNews ranked Joe Thornton as the 40th best player in the NHL prior to this season. Even if you use points (12th in the NHL/4th in the West) or assists (3rd in the NHL), that doesn't make sense. But if you go to behindthenet, you will find that no player since they began tracking those stats (5 years) has posted a higher Corsi with a higher CorsiQualComp than Thornton did last year. He was outplaying elite competition at a rate only approached by two other players (who happened to be his linemates). Shows you how dominant that line was last year.
Anyways, my point is that Vlasic is all over the advanced stat sheets. Only two defensemen in the NHL last year posted a higher Corsi (on-ice shot diff) while facing a higher level of competition than Vlasic did. Both were 10-15 years older than him. One was a stud veteran (Kimmo Timonen) and the other was quite possibly the 2nd best defenseman of all-time. I know that the Sharks (along with Detroit and most of the other long-time puck possession teams) value Corsi and other advanced stats. That's why they locked him down long-term. Now, Vlasic and Boyle did play almost exclusively with the Thornton line, so they all did have something to do with the Corsi rate being so high. But the fact that they dominated such high competition as a 5 man unit is extremely impressive. Boyle, Thornton, Marleau, and Pavelski simply played keep away from the opposition like no other four-man unit could. But when Boyle happens to be behind the other teams net and Thornton blindly drops a pass to no one (both are common occurrences), someone had to clean up the mess.
I honestly dont care for Bailey or Okposo.
