Nichols writes with understandable incredulity that Curtis Lazar has some apparent trade value despite any appearance of NHL-usefulness. There are GMs out there for whom “good in the corners” or “good in the room” is valuable. How much value? I’d guess not much–an underperforming prospect or a late 2nd/early 3rd round pick. The Sens historically either overvalue or undervalue their prospects however (we all remember when Mike Hoffman was put on waivers), so I can imagine them holding on to Lazar long enough that they get even less for him.
It’s sad to say but I was not surprised when I heard the Sens were shutting down Clarke MacArthur for the season. Nichols writes a piece largely focused on where the Sens go from here without him, but I wish he’d delved more into his salient Tweet from a few days earlier:
Feel terrible for MacArthur, but wish Dorion never guaranteed publicly that MacArthur would play this season.
This isn’t the only instance of the org making irresponsible promises, but certainly one of the most obvious.
The good vibes have continued in BSens land as they continue to thrive in a Stortini-free lineup. The team is 3-1-0 since my last update, despite an anemic powerplay and getting badly outshot (warning signs that things could change quite quickly). Scoring remains reasonably high (12 goals) and goaltending has been strong. Kleinendorst’s willingness to scratch players management is fond of has been a huge boon.
Hockey Graphs looked at data and determined that expected primary points are a better predictor of future scoring than shots or total points. The piece adds:
incorporating passing metrics into player evaluation continues to outperform existing public metrics that attempt to predict point production. This remains logical and a missing piece in player evaluation across the league. There is still significant value to be add [added] in the trade and free agent market by exploiting uninformed teams that fail to properly evaluate their players. At the player level, passing needs to be accounted for.
When researching for my article a couple of posts back I was looking at newspaper circulation numbers and thought I’d share the relevant ones for this area (you can read the data yourself here; I’m looking at weekly circulation and I’ve included who owned the paper):
The Globe and Mail
2008 1,996,582 Bell Globemedia
2015 2,149,124 Woodbridge (+7.64%)
National Post
2008 1,182,206 CanWest
2015 1,097,080 Postmedia (-7.2%)
Ottawa Citizen
2008 900,197 CanWest
2015 626,272 Postmedia (-30.42%)
Metro Ottawa
2008 300,000 Metro International
2015 238,651 Torstar (-20.44%)
Ottawa Sun
2008 274,628 Quebecor
2015 266,777 Postmedia (-2.85%)
Pembroke Daily Observer
2008 32,429 Quebecor
2015 16,655 Postmedia (-48.64%)
Everything Postmedia here shows a downward trend of some sort, with a precipitous drop for The Ottawa Citizen (yet still dominating the Sun for readership). Not surprisingly, the company has issues (although in the bizarre way the corporate world works the company was given an award for increasing it’s advertising despite attributing much of its losses to a loss in advertising).
Roster moves continue for Wichita (quite normal for an ECHL franchise); they picked up Zach O’Brien from the German second division (not the same team leading scorer Alexis Loiseau signed with); they traded another Sens org favourite (Nick Trecapelli) in return for Jake Bolton from Atlanta.
This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)
2 Comments
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
eyeonthesens 
[…] Senators News & Notes […]
[…] in the deal. This story resonated with me because of the research I did about a year ago over newspaper circulation and ownership (at the time talking about how Postmedia’s Paul Godfrey injected his […]