Wednesday News and Notes: Pro Scouting Staff Layoffs, Korpisalo & Small Sample Sizes, Kastelic's Improvement and Other Stuff
As much as the Senators started this season allowing the incumbents to continue in their roles, it always felt inevitable that we would arrive at a time when the organization would clear house.
It began with general manager Pierre Dorion’s proper resignation before hitting the coaching staff as D.J. Smith and Davis Payne were let go. Goaltending coach Zac Bierk was reassigned within the organization. One area that had previously been unaffected was the scouting staff, but it was only a matter of time before the axe fell there.
The news arrived Saturday that the organization had relieved Jim Clark and Rob Murphy of their duties.
After an offseason in which the Senators added Dominik Kubalik, Vladimir Tarasenko, and Joonas Korpisalo while extending Travis Hamonic on a multi-year deal… yeah, I kind of get it.
Clark had been with the Senators since the 2008-09 season. He started his career in Ottawa as a professional scout before being promoted to director of professional scouting for the 2014-15 season. He served in that role for eight seasons before he was downgraded to a head pro scout position for the 2022-23 season. His role was further reduced to a pro scout position this past offseason.
His head pro scout successor was Murphy. The inaugural Ottawa Senator spent two terms with the Senators working in a scouting capacity. The first occurred between the 2010-11 and 2013-14 seasons before he left the organization to join Tim Murray’s staff in Buffalo. He would eventually return for the 2018-19 season as a pro scout where he fulfilled that role until the conclusion of the 2022-23 season when he was promoted to the head pro scout position.
Whenever there is change at the management and ownership levels, there is often an accompanying trickledown to the supporting positions — irrespective of the quality of work done. In the case of Clark and Murphy, however, Ottawa’s track record speaks for itself.
A predominant reason for this organization’s stagnant development and inability to climb the league’s hierarchy has been its failure to identify and acquire quality and cost-effective talent to support this team’s young core. Its repeated attempts to bolster the blue line and goaltending positions have failed miserably.
The amount of money, prospects and draft capital was spent targeting the wrong players and short-term fits have been problematic. It has essentially put the Senators in a spot where they do not have the cap space to improve the team. Under a normal rebuild, that would be less problematic if the team had many high-upside prospects whom the team could either promote to the parent level or use as trade chips to acquire better talent. Sadly, this organization’s best prospects have already graduated.
It puts general manager Steve Staios and his staff in a difficult position - with a ton of inherent pressure on this group to identify and make cost-efficient acquisitions to improve the team’s true talent level.
Staios has often portrayed his predecessor’s era as one in which Dorion operated without relying on his staff’s input to make more informed decisions. It is impossible to know how much that extended to his pro scouts without firsthand knowledge. The Senators’ trade and free agent record is so horrendous that it probably does not matter — which seems crazy because the modern era allows so many live and recorded viewing opportunities. Coupled with the integration of analytics and publicly available data, it is inexcusable how bad this team’s track record of transactions is.
Fresh voices that Staios can trust are needed and he will need them soon. The Senators officially list three North American pro scouts (Steve Stirling, Mark Flood and Dale McTavish) and one European (Mikko Ruutu) on staff. The Senators will need to announce some new hires, but beyond the personnel moves they make this offseason, I will also be intrigued by how much the organization invests in its front office. That process began last summer, but Michael Andlauer did not officially take ownership of the team until late September.
The next few weeks will be critical to beefing up the staff and formulating a strategy for the offseason. It is shaping up to be a busy one for the Senators.
Sample Sizes and Korpisalo
Signed to a five-year, $20 million contract last summer, the 2023-24 campaign has not gone how anyone hoped for Joonas Korpisalo.
Through the Senators’ first 73 games, the organization has the league’s second-worst five-on-five save percentage (89.87) and the second-worst all-strengths save percentage (88.32). Coming off a year in which he played in a then career-high 39 games and posted an 18-14-4 record, Korpisalo was supposed to bolster a position beset by ineffectiveness, inconsistency and injury.
Korpisalo has avoided a long-term injury but has failed to stabilize the position.
Using Evolving-Hockey’s ‘goals above replacement’ (GAR) and ‘wins above replacement’ (WAR) metrics that use a statistical model to consolidate a player’s value into one number, the Senators have three of the five least valuable goaltenders in the league this season. Only Arvid Soderblom has accumulated less value than Korpisalo.
Through 48 games, Evolving-Hockey has Korpisalo recording a league-worst -12.70 goals above expected (GSAx). In 53 games, he has compiled a 20-25-4 record, a .891 save percentage and a 3.25 goals against average.
Korpisalo’s struggles throughout the season have opened the door to conversations about whether the Senators would be positioned to buy him out during the summer.
Some of those conversations were temporarily shelved by Korpisalo’s recent play. From February 27th through the end of March, NaturalStatTrick’s data showed Korpisalo allowing 17 five-on-five goals while facing an expected goals threshold of 23. His .932 save percentage represents a marked improvement from his season average. It has helped that the Senators had a 6-3-1 record during these games. It gave many fans reason to pause and think, “Shit, maybe we are seeing the guy the front office believed in last summer.”
Recency bias is a bit of a thing with sports fandom, but that has waned as the wheels have fallen off Korpisalo again. In his last five appearances, he is rocking an .855 save percentage at five-on-five. (If you think that is terrible, and it is, Forsberg’s only stopped .810 percent of the shots at five-on-five in his two appearances this month.)
With only four games left on the schedule, neither goaltender is going to change the narrative on their performance this season. As volatile as the position is, it is hard to imagine the Senators being comfortable returning this goaltending tandem in 2024-25.
Forsberg only has a year left on a deal that carries an average annual value of $2.75 million. Buying him out would cost the Senators $1,833,333 spread out across the next two seasons making his cap hit $916,667.
That immediate savings may seem enticing, until you realize some of those savings will be eaten up by the addition of a goaltender to replace him.
If it is one goaltender who needs to be bought out, it will be Korpisalo.
CapFriendly’s buyout calculator puts a prospective Korpisalo as follows:
An eight-year buyout is not appetizing, but at least an escalating cap will mitigate the cap hit costs in the latter years. Reallocating savings over the next four seasons of the deal may be too enticing to pass up.
It is just another infuriating reminder that the board of directors authorized a lame duck general manager to make multi-year commitments to external additions while the sale was being finalized.
Kastelic’s Last 20 Games
Speaking of sample sizes, I noted on Twitter following the Capitals game that Mark Kastelic has played well in his last 20 games.
According to NaturalStatTrick’s five-on-five data ahead of Tuesday’s game against Florida, Kastelic has averaged a team-leading 2.55 points per 60 during this stretch. The 25-year-old centre does not log a ton of minutes. He has only averaged 8:31 of ice time per game in these 20 games. That number is up from the 7:43 he has averaged this season, but he still does not play many minutes.
He has capitalized in the ones he is playing, however. His shooting percentage is up slightly from his career norms, but his rate of 8.01 shots per 60 at five-on-five trails only the shot-volume monster known as Brady Tkachuk (12.41).
The production spike is welcomed because Kastelic has always had a positive impact at the defensive end of the ice. On a team that has historically struggled defensively, Kastelic’s impact has been positive per HockeyViz.
As a bigger player, Kastelic has taken some knocks from fans for not being physical enough as one of the larger forwards on the roster. Fans tend to be hyperfocused on having those archetypal depth guys at the bottom of a roster.
Kastelic thrives when he shields the puck with his body and can work the puck down low in the cycle game.
What is interesting is the contrast in how Kastelic’s two most frequent lines this season have fared.
From Evolving-Hockey:
Katchouk-Kastelic-Kelly: 45.33 GF%, 56.80 SF%, 54.95 CF%, 70.67 xGF%
Kubalik-Kastelic-Kelly: 0.0 GF%, 47.91 SF%, 40.72 CF%, 25.26 xGF%
Dominik Kubalik has been an absolute passenger this season, but the stark contrast when Boris Katchouk has played with Kastelic is very real. He has helped complement his game.
As an impending restricted free agent, I would not be surprised to see Katchouk be given a qualifying offer and play an inexpensive depth role next season.
I do not want to overstate the performance of Katchouk in what has been a small sample size of games, but if we are looking for any optimistic indicators of this front office’s capabilities, Katchouk may be one. Even if he is just a modest improvement to this team’s bottom-six depth, as this front office’s only external addition to the roster this season, he represents an example of this team finding efficient and inexpensive value. They will need to do more of that this summer.
Other News and Notes:
The Athletic did a deep-dive on identifying the NHL’s best shutdown defencemen. Harnan Dayal used “Evolving-Hockey’s Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM) tool to measure defensive impact and rank a pool of defenders.” It is just one metric to examine, but the Senators’ Jake Sanderson clocked in at the fourth-best spot.
According to a sourced report out of ESPN, the owner of the Arizona Coyotes may be sold to the NHL for $1 billion. The league would then sell the franchise to the NBA’s Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith for $1.3 billion. The $300 million windfall would then be split amongst the league’s owners. As much as Michael Andlauer would appreciate that revenue, is it too much to ask for that conditional first-round pick back that the franchise lost because of Pierre Dorion’s negligence in the Evgenii Dadonov trade.
Bruce Garrioch confirmed on Twitter that Shane Pinto has agreed to play for the United States at this year’s World Championships. After losing half the season to suspension, it is a great opportunity for Pinto to play more games and build more confidence heading into the offseason. The Postmedia journalist also confirmed that Pinto’s camp continues to have discussions with the Senators regarding an extension.
The Senators posted an awesome behind the scenes video of the team celebrating assistant equipment manager Ian Cox’s 1000th pro game.
I don't have the time, but would love to see a deeper dive analysis into the goals-above-expected metric (& similar goalie analytics) relative to overall team defence. Intuitively, I don't think the latter is accounted for enough.