Vancouver-Florida Trade: On Michael Grabner
by Hawerchuk on Jun 26, 2010 3:51 AM EDT
13 comments
Vancouver and Florida made a draft-day swap: the Panthers sent D Keith Ballard and F Victor Oreskovich to Vancouver for F Steve Bernier, the #25 draft pick and F Michael Grabner. Forget the picks and Bernier's contract - this deal basically boils down to Ballard for Grabner, which then boils down to Grabner's value. Which is?
Grabner had a nice tryout with the big club this year, posting 11 points in 20 games while getting significant time on the power play and lining up alongside Ryan Kesler in the offensive zone more often than not. But is that an accurate reflection of his talent? Grabner actually spent a huge amount of time in the AHL, so we can use that to judge his abilities. Let's compare him to other players who had big AHL careers from age 19 to 21:
| GP | G | A | Pts | G/82 | A/82 | Pts/82 | |
| Grabner | 180 | 68 | 52 | 120 | 31 | 24 | 55 |
| Comps | 159 | 37 | 61 | 98 | 19 | 32 | 50 |
| NHL 22-25 | 95 | 12 | 21 | 33 | 10 | 18 | 28 |
| AHL 22-25 | 127 | 36 | 58 | 94 | 23 | 38 | 61 |
Grabner's comps are the 113 players born 1950-1985 who played 150-210 games in the AHL, IHL or old CHL between age 19 and 21. As you can see, the comp group didn't exactly light up the NHL over the next four seasons - they produced just 28 points per 82 games and spent 57% of their time in the minors.
Now that might not be the best comp group - they were more typical hockey players than Grabner, who is a scorer first and a playmaker second, and they also included some higher-scoring defensemen. Let's look at how the top 57 goal-scorers in our dataset did:
| GP | G | A | Pts | G/82 | A/82 | Pts/82 | |
| Grabner | 180 | 68 | 52 | 120 | 31 | 24 | 55 |
| Comps | 159 | 55 | 75 | 130 | 29 | 38 | 67 |
| NHL 22-25 | 90 | 18 | 25 | 42 | 16 | 23 | 39 |
| AHL 22-25 | 140 | 54 | 76 | 131 | 32 | 45 | 76 |
That's a group that's more similar to Grabner, likely better - they have virtually the same number of goals per season and quite a few more assists. And their performance in the NHL was even worse than the first group. Fully 51% of them played fewer than 40 games in the NHL over the next four seasons. There are a few good players in this group - Pavol Demitra, Guy Carbonneau, Keith Acton, Tomas Plekanec - but the odds are stacked against Grabner.
Grabner is a bit of a unique player - it's very rare that a big scorer spends so much time in the minors without making the jump to the bigs. But players who fit his general profile as a 3-year AHL repeater before age 22 don't tend to produce much in the NHL. The average four-year value of his comps is about $2M over the minimum salary, but the median value is zero, which will most likely make this trade a win for Vancouver.
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Why, for Florida?
The average four-year value of his comps is about $2M over the minimum salary, but the median value is zero, which will most likely make this trade a win for Vancouver.
How would you value Ballard? I looked up the microstats on behindthenet, and he was Florida’s top tough minutes dman, with tough zone starts, still had positive corsi relative to competition, top penalty killer, did well on the PP. Granted, that’s only one season, but sounds like all around decent no. 1 or 2 dman, all at 4.2 million, only 27, and no history of head or other important injuries…
So I’m wondering if there’s something about paying him 4.2 that would lead to a break even in terms of wins? Or the number of future wins that a no. 25 pick could bring? Otherwise I don’t get this for Florida, beyond what the Kitty Litter writer says, ie, Ballard was Jacques Martin’s man, rather than Dale Tallon.
I’m assuming that Florida gave a cheap fourth liner for an expensive one was one way of making the deal happen. That makes it even more puzzling.
Ballard’s a tough one to figure out. His role is as you described, but his numbers are awful. So were Jay Bouwmeester’s, though. Florida’s home scorer pads shots against to make Vokoun look better than he is. The scoring chances guys had Ballard for 10 games this season and he was great though. My feeling is that he’s worth $5M a year and can be a #2 or 1A in Vancouver, and the Canucks were well-justified in making this move.
Well, the other angle is that could be is that Florida is simply ridding themselves of all their long term contracts. I assume a lot of these moves are about clearing out the team within two years.
They have only 3 players now signed beyond 2012, and they’re all forwards (Booth, Olesz, Weiss). They’re at $47m for 19 players right now, so it’s possible they want to drop even another one of those contracts and get to the floor.
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by Bruce Peter on Jun 26, 2010 12:45 PM EDT up reply actions
Silly question, I know, but…
Why would they want to do that, dropping to the floor? Are they that into the red?
I think it’s safe to assume that the Panthers are a financial disaster. Maybe they’re going to fold the team :)
Either that, or Tallon has convinced management that they need to sign Nabokov to a 4 year, nearly $25m contract.
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i tried to put together a primer for Ballard last night. Like Gabe said, he’s an interesting case. He’s been used in just about every situation over the past couple seasons, and has had wildly different results. He did very well in 08/09 as a second-pairing guy behind JBouw+Skrastins, then was trusted with top minutes last year and got beaten up a bit. He’s also been sorta all over the place in terms of PP and PK work, although that might just be sample size stuff (any idea on that, Mr Desjardins?). He does get credited for physical play. I’m hoping we go into the season with him as our 2.5th dman I think.
by Passive Voice on Jun 26, 2010 2:45 PM EDT up reply actions
Panthers fan on Ballard....
He had a terrible season last year, I would contribute that mostly to the fact that the team around him was horrendous. He is very prone to trying to do to much or trying to do 2 jobs at once and failing at both. He also got lit up by Ovechkin, Kovalchuck etc often, his 1-on-1 skills arent good enough to be a shut-down defencemen, aside from all of this, he is pretty good, you’ll love him.
Why did Tallon make this trade? I think the reason is that there isn’t a reason, this trade was pointless for us. But to humour you guys, Tallon was probably just having a Burke moment and wanted to make a trade for the sake of making a trade.
i’m not as down on Grabner as Gabe (he was legitimately awesome for us last year), but not as high on him as most other Canucks fans (it was a 20 game sample size). You guys also got a late first-rounder, and cleared a fairly big salary. i can definitely see why a rebuilding tallon would like this deal.
by Passive Voice on Jun 26, 2010 7:08 PM EDT up reply actions
Yeah, clearing salary seems to be the issue.
I realize that the narrative is that he had a “terrible” season (even he says so), but by his numbers, he was the best dman on Panthers, and part of the “terrible” season seems to be that he was playing a lot against the very best, trying to fill Bouwmeester’s shoes (see Passive Voice’s primer and comments). Maybe that was what made him look so bad, or seem to look so bad, but he still had the best corsi relative to competition on the regular d corps (although someone mentioend that Seidenberg and another dman’s numbers aren’t included in Florida’s numbers, so there’s a caveat). I think OV and Kovalchuk are going to make most NHL dmen look bad once in a while, and slashing your star goalie’s head is probably not a smart thing to do.
I thought maybe they’d have to trade Ballard after that ugly slash to Vokun last season
by ThrashersRecaps on Jun 26, 2010 8:59 PM EDT reply actions
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