CA Monday Mailbag: December 28th

It’s the last mailbag of 2015! We have a few great questions for you, but more than anything else, I’d like to thank you for putting up with me to the point of encouraging me with talking points over the last few months. Here’s to 52 more weeks of these in 2016!

As people who have been reading my work pertaining to a certain “other team” before CanucksArmy would know, there’s definitely a worst case scenario for a team in transition, and it’s that tick below mediocrity. It’s when you’re awful all year, teams start using your games as their rest day, and your remaining players treat the final 20 games as if they’re Game 7 of the Cup Finals, and claw you up the standings while blowing it whenever the games matter, resulting in you missing the playoffs by a hair.

Could that be the Canucks? Who knows. They’ve been atrocious of late, but nobody makes a push like a player who has been injured and got a few weeks or months rest via injury recovery. Of course, the Pacific division might be bad enough to let them have one more year of playoff fun when all is said and done, but if they barely miss out and end up picking 13th or 14th thanks to a few extra happy game nights, it slows down the timeline needed to get back to the top.

Did the Canucks ruin Linden Vey, or was Linden Vey just not what people hoped he would be? The Manchester teams he racked up his points on were very good and very comfortable with playing in an offensive matter, and when he got his quarter of a season sniff with the Kings, he was less productive than he was with the Canucks.

It’s hard to say why he’s having his worst AHL season since his rookie year this year, but you figure that Utica’s defence-first system (which as stifled everybody other than Powerplay Vulture Hunter Shinkaruk) has lead to him using his two-way skillset more so than the one that lead to him being one of the AHL’s better playmakers.

JD Burke wrote a post about Rundblad today, but personally, I don’t see why not. The Canucks don’t have a lot of depth right now, as proven by their most recent defensive call-up being Ashton Sautner. Sure, Rundblad isn’t what he was panned out to be, but I can’t imagine that he’d be much of a downgrade on Sautner, or even Andrey Pedan or Alex Biega. Worst case scenario, you waive him again.

Ultimately, it’s up to the person who presents their research to do so in the friendliest way for the reader, whether it’s a fellow fan or somebody with the power to use their services.

I’m not an “analytics guy”. I don’t create new statistical models, nor do I ever really bring new things to the table. I do use the community’s research in my own work, however, and encourage the writers on CA (and elsewhere) to do the same. There are two things that I feel are crucially important when presenting analytics-based work.

“Here’s a bunch of data” will create dissemination, sure. But harnessing the data as an element in bigger-picture search, as crazy as it sounds, will lead to an easier to digest and more thought provoking product, and in its pursuit of “why” rather than the showing of “what”, will ultimately lead to better results if those words are practically applied.

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