Patrick Kaleta, Penalty-Drawing Ninja, re-signs with Buffalo
by Hawerchuk on Jul 23, 2010 9:00 AM EDT
18 comments
It took a little while for the details of Kaleta's contract to come out, but it's $1.82M over two years. If we assume a 40% RFA discount, then Kaleta signed for the UFA equivalent of $1.5M a year. That's pretty amazing when you think about it - Kaleta played 9.5 minutes per game at 5v5 last season, and missed more than 25 games. Here's how he compared to the other 70 players who had between 8.42 and 10.42 minutes per game last season and played more than 20 games:
| GP | TOI | Corsi QoC | Ozone% | Corsi | Adj Corsi | |
| Average | 56 | 9.56 | -0.167 | 49.8 | -3.11 | -3.37 |
| Kaleta | 55 | 9.42 | -0.298 | 48.2 | -5.33 | -5.05 |
Overall, though his low-minute compatriots rarely drew tough matchups, he faced even slightly weaker competition, though he did take more defensive-zone draws. His Corsi, whether we adjust for competition and faceoffs, or not, is not very good.
Of course, Kaleta famously drew 28 more penalties than he took. Let's look at his overall value, first in goals above replacement, then in wins and finally in dollars:
| Goals | Wins | $Value | $Salary | |
| Average | 0.73 | 0.12 | 0.78 | 0.83 |
| Kaleta | 5.35 | 0.89 | 2.55 | 0.52 |
Figuring out win values is hand-wavy at best, but Kaleta's salary is still vastly less than his value to his team. Of the 70 low-minute players in our sample, only Rod Brind'Amour made more than $2.55M last season, and that's just the bad tail end of a contract running its course. There's no doubt about it - while Patrick Kaleta is not an All-Star, he's the most-efficient fourth-liner in the NHL.
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He’s definitely one of those guys you’d hate if he wasn’t on your team.
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by Bettman's Nightmare on Jul 23, 2010 10:49 AM EDT reply actions
i wonder when the league finally figures out that kaleta turns himself intentionally into the boards when he feels a check coming, every time.
I don’t watch the east, but is that really Kaleta’s game? People accuse Dustin Brown of diving, but it sure doesn’t seem that way.
No, he’s more of a “getting punched in the face” kind of embellisher, he doesn’t embellish much on the boards (i think he may have been ordered not to because of his head injuries)
He also loves to throw blatently dirty checks, but intentionally miss (so obviously no penalty is given but the other team still convicts him on intent). I must say this second strategy is brilliant.
On the Mike Weber bandwagon.
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i’ll defer to the sabres poster below, but that certainly was his game when he first came into the league. he gets the other team upset at him, knows someone’s going to take a run at him, and (rather crazily) turns to face the boards when retribution arrives.
he also goads people into fights and then won’t drop his gloves.
kaleta’s managed to keep a low enough profile. iirc, sean avery was at least close to this level of penalty-drawing until he got a horrible reputation among referees as a diver and complainer, now they go out of their way to NOT call obvious penalties committed against him.
When do you think the refs changed their view of Avery? He was 9th in pens drawn (07-08), 5th (08-09) and tied for 20th (09-10). His problem is that he has started taking a lot of penalties.
That would be consistant with the refs doing the usual “send them both” in diving cases. Also reputation counts when calling penalties.
can’t say exactly, although i am surprised that he’s 5th in 08-09 given all the time he missed (is this a rate stat or total you’re giving me?). when i watch ranger games, avery will dive or draw what looks to be a penalty and the refs will look the other way quite often. this might be no higher than any other player like this, but avery is always yelling to the referees and throwing tantrums, so it might just seem like more. (selection bias of course).
It’s not so much dive as fall down. He falls down a lot, even when not trying to draw a penalty.
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by George E. Ays on Jul 23, 2010 9:03 PM EDT up reply actions
Kind of like 2B/SS only have to be in the vicinity of 2nd base, Avery tends to only need to be in the vicinity to get called for penalties at times. He also seemed to struggle at times in where the line is between agitating and doing something stupid.
At least superficially.
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by George E. Ays on Jul 23, 2010 9:01 PM EDT up reply actions
The same thing has happened to Alex Burrows. It seems like refs are more inclined to call more penalties on agitator types than they are to let them draw fewer.
by Scott Reynolds on Jul 23, 2010 9:33 PM EDT up reply actions
Hey, we all know that Burrows is the victim of a league wide conspiracy.
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I think this is a bit overstated because he legitimately takes what is coming to him in order to get a penalty call. He’s one of the best in the business at this and he’s coming along as a player as well. Guys do go after him hard. He doesn’t just go around turning clean plays into dirty ones by turning into the boards as you say. By the way, lots of skill guys do that and it is a form of exploiting the rules as far as I’m concerned. If a guy consciously turns his back to an incoming checker he should be free game and then players will stop doing it. If Kaleta does that, well, the same applies to him (and I’m a Sabres fan).
He does turtle, but that’s the name of the game for agitators like him. It takes a lot of guts to turtle, to be honest.
Seriously?
It takes a lot of guts to turtle, to be honest.
Last I checked, getting your teeth knocked in – rather than turtling – was the gutsy option. If you’re arguing that the non-gutsy choice is to avoid the conflict altogether, then I see where your argument is coming from, but I don’t think this is a “turn the other cheek” situation. Kaleta is valuable as long as his act doesn’t wear thin through over-exposure to the refs, and the rest of the NHL. Eventually he’ll build up enough of a reputation that he won’t get as many easy calls, and his value will drop. Not sure how far, but for the moment, he looks like a good signing.
"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."
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I'm pretty sure he's talking about the Leafs.
by Steve Burtch on Jul 26, 2010 11:27 AM EDT up reply actions
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