There have been a lot of players over the past few years that fallen in and out of favor of the fickle Rangers fans. You saw Marek Malik rise to near God-like heights of fame after his between the leg shot in the marathon shootout against the caps a few years back, and now the guy would be scared for his life if he had to pull a Sean Avery like act of sitting with the die hards in the 400’s. There has never, in my hockey life, been one who has risen to such highs, and dropped to such lows in a relatively short period of time, without a single explainable reason as Petr Prucha (those are Pruuuu’s not boooooos). This isn’t Marek Malik with bonehead turnover after bonehead turnover. This isn’t Theo Fleury getting wasted or Eric Lindros with a scrambled brain. He’s not an incompetent player (or an alcoholic) like Sandis Bozolinsch, and he’s not ultra soft like Tom “You F’ing Nerd” Poti. So what is it exactly about Petr Prucha that seems to draw so much ire from the Rangers fans I have come across on the net (since I don’t live in NY, that’s what I have to go with)?
It’s an interesting question, because with Petr it’s really easy to just point to 2 things, his lack of production this past year, and his constant imitation of of this pickup…
Let’s break down Petr to get a more accurate picture though, so we can formulate a theory of what is going on here. In year 1 of Petrs’ career he had a ridiculous season. He scored 30 goals and 17 assists in only 68 games for 47 points. But if you recall he suffered a pretty bad knee injury just before the olympic break, forcing him to miss a little over a month, and devastating the kid by keeping him out of the Olympics in what might have been his only shot to represent his country on the biggest international stage. The interesting thing about his numbers was that he scored only 5 goals and 8 assists in his final 19 games of the season after coming back from his injury, which means he scored 25 goals and 9 assists in the previous 49 games. To break down the numbers further, after coming back from his injury, his numbers extrapolated to 82 games were 22 goals and 35 assists for 47 points, but in the first part of the season his numbers extrapolate to 42 goals and 15 assists for 57 points. Huge goal differential there dontcha think? This lends a lot of credence to the second theory that Petr getting constantly destroyed night in and night out must result in deleterious play by him. Still though, if you think about it, coming back from the first major injury in his entire career, Prucha still produced at a relatively high level, and if you recall a lot of his primary minutes when he came back were being taken by one Petr Sykora.
Regardless Petr has a superb rookie season, finishing second on the team in goals behind Jaromir Jagrs’ record setting 54, and also setting the Rangers rookie record for Power Play goals with 16. In short, he produced, and earned a bigger role the next year. At least that is what one would assume wouldn’t you think? Instead Glen Sather went out and brought in one of my all time favorite players, Brendan Shanahan. A slap in the face of Petr for sure, since it was clear to all of us that Brendan would be eating up the majority of Petrs primary power play minutes since you knew that Straka, Jagr, Nylander, and Rozsival were going nowhere off the main units. Sure enough Brendan Shanahan did just that, leading the Rangers with 14 Power Play goals in 2006-2007, and playing the majority of Petrs minutes. Still despite a lesser role in his second season, Petr put up 22 goals and 18 assists in 79 games. Playing primarily on the 3rd and 4th lines, with less power play minutes these numbers are actually quite staggering if you think about it. How many 3rd and 4th liners put up 20+ goals in the NHL? Not too many.
Petrs’ third year in the NHL was a disaster. There really is no other way to put it. His confidence shot, he was unable to buy a goal. His shooting percentage went to a ridiculous 7.87% after being at 23.08% his first year. His shots on goal dropped, his games played dropped, his goals sunk to a disgusting 7, and he only managed to score 2 power play goals, his bread and butter. So what the hell happened? Going from 30 goals, to 22, to 7 is not the way you want to go in the NHL. You want to get better, not worse. So did he in fact get worse? Or is there a little more to this story than just that? Well, let’s look at a few stats shall we?
First let’s look at some pretty straight forward stats, easy to read, no explanation needed:
|
Year
|
GP
|
Goals
|
Assists
|
Points
|
TOI
|
PP TOI/G
|
|
2005-2006
|
68
|
30
|
17
|
47
|
13:41
|
3:49
|
|
2006-2007
|
79
|
22
|
18
|
40
|
12:59
|
2:53
|
|
2007-2008
|
62
|
7
|
10
|
17
|
11:38
|
1:38
|
The problem here though, is that nothing is normalized. I don’t like to compare numbers when everything is all askew by the number of games played. So let’s normalize everything to projected based on 82 games played and assuming the same amount of average TOI/G and PP TOI/G since those are averages anyway…
|
Year
|
Normalized GP
|
Normalized Goals
|
Normalized Assists
|
Normalized Points
|
TOI
|
PP TOI/G
|
|
2005-2006
|
82
|
36
|
21
|
57
|
13:41
|
3:49
|
|
2006-2007
|
82
|
23
|
19
|
42
|
12:59
|
2:53
|
|
2007-2008
|
62
|
9
|
13
|
22
|
11:38
|
1:38
|
So, there we have everything normalized, in fact it looks even worse for Petr here than it does before, because the numbers drop off by a bigger margin. But if you look at the way Petr plays his game, and if you look at the video I made and posted above, you’ll note that he gets a lot of garbage goals, garbage goals are conducive to power play players, hence why he sees so much of his offensive production on the Power Play, and really, can you blame him, I mean playing regular minutes with Blair Betts isn’t going to help ones offensive totals I can assure you. So, next let’s examine difference. How does his goal total relate to the minutes played? Assists and points are more or less meaningless since we can all agree, Petr is a goal scorer, any assists he gets aren’t because of great passes, but because he misses a goal, and someone bangs home his rebound (generally). Now, these are some more geeky stat calculations, but I think they are interesting enough to do the math for you.
|
Year
|
Normalized GP
|
Normalized Goals
|
% Drop In Goals
|
TOI
|
% Drop in TOI
|
PP TOI/G
|
% Drop In PP TOI/G
|
Normalized PP Goals
|
% Drop In PP Goals
|
|
2005-2006
|
82
|
36
|
-
|
13:41
|
-
|
3:49
|
-
|
19
|
-
|
|
2006-2007
|
82
|
23
|
36%
|
12:59
|
5.2%
|
2:53
|
24%
|
8
|
50%
|
|
2007-2008
|
82
|
9
|
61%
|
11:38
|
10.4%
|
1:38
|
43%
|
3
|
63%
|
So, the interesting thing here is that Petrs overall year to year drop in time on the ice isn’t that large. We’re only talking 5% from year 1 to year 2, and 10% from year 2 to year 3, which makes sense considering the Rangers brought in Brendan Shanahan between the first 2 years, and then brought in Chris Drury and Scotty Gomez the next year. However the drop in power play time is extreme, 24% from year 1 to year 2, and 43% from year 2 to year 3. A total drop off of 57% from year 1 to year 3. Imagine that, the guy’s power play time on the ice has been more than sliced in half. Clearly his 3rd year production has a lot to do with his shooting percentage going into the toilet, but regardless the drop in ice time has been gigantic. His drop in production, it seems, can be at least partially blamed on the lack of quality ice time because of the Rangers going out and bringing in 3 guys who demand big time minutes.
So, all this discussion has led has back to the same place. What exactly is up with Prucha? Well, the way I look at it is this, the guy isn’t going to give you much in the way of offense at even strength. I figure at his very best the guy will give you 15-20 goals at even strength. And that is if everything goes right. More likely you should expect, with adequate minutes and competent linemates, somewhere between 10 and 15 (closer to 12 I would wager). The key to the kids success though is the Power Play. He needs to be on the left side, and he needs to get pucks directed at the net to get those rebound goals home. The Rangers last year were disgusting at directing pucks at the net on the power play. They always tried for the perfect pass, the tic tac toe goal, and that killed them. Petrs game is not suited for that kind of hockey since he really doesn’t have great vision. What he does have is a nose for the net, and he is willing to pay the price to get those goals.
However this year with the subtraction of Jagr, Straka, and probably Shanahan, one would hope that Petr would get adequate power play time, but if you really think about it, on the left side you definitely have Naslund and Dawes blocking him, since both are better offensive players than him, but on the right side there may only be Zherdev blocking him (as of now). Can Petr adjust to getting power play minutes on the right side? I honestly don’t know. I think the kid has the nose for the net regardless of where he plays, even if the left side is his strongest.
My final thoughts on Petr? Now is not the time to trade him. His value is at an all time low, and you likely won’t get much more than a 3rd rounder, or an equivalent player. In my personal opinion, Petr is worth more, probably even a low first rounder. He is fearless, he gets to those danger zones that so many of our guys are scared to go, and he plays balls to the wall every second of every shift. Personally, I say we give him regular minutes on the power play, regular minutes at even strength, and see what happens. There are really only 1 of 2 things that can happen, either he fails, and does nothing, like last year, in which case you are no worse off than you were last year, or he succeeds and builds back his value.
Regardless I think THAT is the time to trade him. Keep him till he either proves himself again, and then trade him when his value is high, or keep him till he proves his first 2 years were just flukes, and he can’t do it anymore, and then just dump him off for about what you would get for him now anyway. I simply do not see a future for Petr Prucha with this team. Not because of anything Petr has done, only because I think the depth behind him in the form of Lauri Korpikoski, Alexei Cherepanov, Artem Anisimov, Ryan Callahan, etc are worth more in his roster spot than he is.
Buy low (7th round) sell high. Don’t buy low and sell low, that is exactly what we would be doing right now if we gave up on this former 30 goal scorer at this juncture.
So I’ve been sitting back, reading Weinman, Zipay, and Dellapinas blogs & articles concerning one Brendan Shanahan. I’ve kinda sat back, and not said much, both on the message boards, and their respective blogs. But I figure time has come to at least touch on this subject.
Sadly Shanny’s second tour with the Rangers wasn’t on par with his first year. It was clear from game 1 that Shanny was a little bit slower than the year before, and after being paired with Scotty Gomez after the Gomez-Jagr connection failed miserably it really became painfully aware to everyone that Shanny could not keep up with the future Rangers #1 center. Shanny was constantly slowing down Gomez, and whoever the left winger was on their line (sometimes Avery, sometimes Dawes). Shanny still managed to put up a respectable 23 goals, 23 assists for 46 points in 73 games. But it was down the stretch where it started to get painful to watch. In the playoffs Shanahan scored 1 goal and 4 assists for 5 points in 10 games. But that number is extremely misleading, none of his assists stand out as primary assists, and his 1 goal was a fluke shot that Uncle Daddy should have stopped…heck it was a shot that guys in my hockey league would be kicking themselves for letting in. But that doesn’t even begin to tell the story, counting the playoffs in his final 29 games played Brendan Shanahan scored a grand total of 4 goals, one of them being the aforementioned fluke shot. Even counting the fluke shot, those final 29 games extrapolate to 11 goals, and folks thats with playing 3:59 per game, on average, on the Power Play, which was the 3rd most on the Rangers. People love to scream how Jaromir Jagr killed the Rangers Power Play, but keep in mind Shanny only played 10 seconds fewer per game than Jaromir on the PP, and was just as much to blame for the PP’s failure.
So, we have an offseason where I could theoretically imagine Brendan Shanahan coming back on a 3rd or 4th line role with the entire crew from last year being reunited for one last try. But Glen Sather threw me a huge curveball by going out and COMPLETELY changing the face of this team. Sather went out and picked up guys who made sense for the rest of the team. He picked up guys who are square pegs to fit into the square holes we have. He went out and got guys who are built for Tom Renney hockey. Guys who can skate…FAST, guys who can press the puck out of the zone, guys who can play with Gomez and Drury, guys who compliment our core. In short, guys who play VERY different than Brendan Shanahan played down the stretch. Where Shanahan was slow, Naslund is fast. Where Shanahan is methodical, Zherdev is creative. They went out and gave Tom Renney exactly what hes asked for, including significant depth on the lower lines. But the question remains, what to do with Brendan Shanahan? Well, he has already stated that he’d be willing to take a reduced role, so lets say that leaves him open for ANY of the 12 forward positions. I think the best thing to do then, is to break up the team into 4 different categories, which are as follows: