The Team USA Men’s and Women’s Olympic hockey rosters were announced yesterday during the NHL’s Winter Classic game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and Detroit Red Wings. In alphabetical order, the men’s players are as follows:
Forwards: David Backes, Dustin Brown, Ryan Callahan, Patrick Kane, Ryan Kesler, Phil Kessel, T.J. Oshie, Max Pacioretty, Zach Parise, Joe Pavelski, James van Riemsdyk, Paul Stastny, Derek Stepan, Blake Wheeler
Defense: John Carlson, Justin Faulk, Cam Fowler, Paul Martin, Ryan McDonagh, Brooks Orpik, Kevin Shattenkirk, Ryan Suter
Goaltenders: Ryan Miller, Jonathan Quick, Jimmy Howard
There has been much made about different roster selections, so let’s go through these by position.
Goaltenders
From the outset, it seemed pretty certain that Ryan Miller would be taken as USA’s starter, and that’s probably their best move.
What I have seen is an outpouring of support for Ben Bishop, the Tampa Bay goaltender who has had a marvelous start to the 2013-2014 campaign, posting a .935 save percentage overall and a .945 save percentage at even strength. That mark of .945 leads all goalies with at least 20 starts so far this year in the NHL.
Conversely, Jon Quick has been hurt for most of this year while Jimmy Howard is having arguably his worst full season of his career (and he’s also spent time on the shelf with injury). So why take them over Bishop? I’ll point you to these very interesting tweets from a couple of days ago:
https://twitter.com/camcharron/status/417908409954881536
https://twitter.com/camcharron/status/417908543509889025
https://twitter.com/camcharron/status/417908862042132482
Mr. Charron also showed a graph that showed that there is essentially no relation between how goaltenders have played going into the Olympics and how goalies play at the Olympics. If you remember, Martin Brodeur was removed as Canada’s starter at the Olympics and never got back the job after Roberto Luongo took over. Brodeur had a .919 save percentage at the end of January that Olympic year, and after a shootout against the Swiss and a round robin loss to the Americans, he was supplanted by Luongo and the rest, as they say, is history.
Even if Bishop were to be named to the team, he’d be the third goalie and sitting in the stands anyway.
Defense
There are two notable omissions from the US defense corps were Phoenix’s Keith Yandle and Winnipeg’s Dustin Byfuglien.
As pointed out by Yahoo’s Greg Wyshynski in his article today, and by many others along the way, the US team’s mantra has been about team speed. With the games being played on Olympic ice, it seems to make sense. So for that reason, I can understand why Byfuglien would be left off the team. He’s not very fleet of foot until he gets going at full speed so if that was their concern, I understand it. I don’t agree with it, but I understand it.
On the other hand, if you’re all about team speed, why take Brooks Orpik and not Keith Yandle? It should be noted that the expectation is that Team USA could struggle to score goals (relative to their top competition), so it would seem that taking Yandle and not Orpik would be the correct play here. Why?
- Keith Yandle is one of only three defensemen to tally at least 200 points since the start of the 2009 season (Erik Karlsson, Duncan Keith are the others). The offense starts with the defense and Yandle is one of the top puck-moving defensemen in the NHL, and has shown it for several years now.
- From 2009-2013 (not including this season), Yandle played about half of his 5-on-5 time with Derek Morris as his defensive partner (2492 minutes). In the time with Morris, Yandle had a 49.4 GoalsFor percentage. That means of all the goals scored at 5-on-5 with Yandle/Morris on the ice, 49.4 percent of them were for Phoenix. When Yandle wasn’t on the ice with Morris (2546 minutes), which was the other half of his ice time, that number jumps up to 63.1 percent and that’s elite. So I guess unless Morris is a dual citizen and had plans on being on this Olympic team, Yandle would be easily a top four defenseman. There is also about a 4-percent jump in Yandle’s possession rate over that same time frame with/without Morris.
- Conversely, Orpik’s underlying numbers go the other way when he’s not in the ice with Kris Letang, Chris Kunitz, Evgeni Malkin, or Sidney Crosby. It appears that Orpik needs to be surrounded with very good-to-great players to be successful, while Yandle just needs to avoid ankle weights to be a stud.
This is, in my opinion, a mistake by Team USA and they’ll find out soon enough when Orpik gets to Sochi.
Forwards
Of course, the biggest controversy about who was left off the list is that of Bobby Ryan.
Ryan was a former draft pick of Team USA braintrust Brian Burke with Anaheim, though as pointed out in that Wyshynski piece, he didn’t want to draft him but was overruled by scouts.
The concern is that Bobby Ryan needs to be a top six forward on the wing to be effective, that he’s not a checker or grinder. Patrick Kane, Phil Kessel, Max Pacioretty and Zach Parise would seem to slot into that top six, so Ryan would have to fit elsewhere. That seems a bit odd, too, considering Bobby Ryan has 160 goals since the start of the 2008 season, only one of 11 players in the NHL to do so. So for a team that will apparently struggle to score goals, you make room for a player like Bobby Ryan. You don’t leave him off the team. Here’s why:
- Remember that GoalsFor percentage I mentioned with Yandle? Well Ryan’s from 2008-2013 with Anaheim was 57-percent. When he wasn’t on the ice with Ryan Getzlaf, it only dropped to 55.5-percent and 55.8 percent without Corey Perry. And his possession numbers only dropped about half has much as Orpik without his superstars.
- This year with the Ottawa Senators, Ryan’s GoalsFor percentage is an even 60-percent. That drops considerably without Kyle Turris, though it’s still 50-percent without him and it’s a pretty small sample size.
Essentially, Yandle and Ryan are two players where your eyes tell you they’re good, their surface statistics tell you they’re really good and their underlying numbers cement them as elite hockey players. Anyway you look at it, these are pretty big omissions.
Let’s hope the sting of being left off the team doesn’t prevent Yandle or Ryan from accepting an invitation in the case of injuries. Or that USA’s selection committee stops submitting bad dreams as evidence to take or not take players to Sochi for future tournaments.
