Report: Senators Kicking Tires on Matt Dumba
According to TSN’s Darren Dreger, the Ottawa Senators have kicked tires on Minnesota Wild defenceman Matt Dumba.
During tonight’s ‘Insider Trading’ segment, Dreger reported:
“When I think of a team that may have a defenceman available, I think of Matt Dumba and the Minnesota Wild. There’s no question that both the Edmonton Oilers and Ottawa Senators have reached out and do have interest in Dumba. Why wouldn’t you? He’s 28 years old and he’s a pending unrestricted free agent. The problem from the Wild’s standpoint is that they need him. They’re playing pretty well right now. They are not sure just yet they are willing to move on from Matt Dumba — even though you look into the future and see the cap issues of the Minnesota Wild. But, as you alluded to, the price would be high and then the Wild would have to hit the market potentially to replace Matt Dumba.”
Dumba is in the last year of a five-year contract that pays him $5.4 million this season, but carries an average annual value of $6.0 million. When he hits unrestricted free agency for the first time this summer, it would be a fair assumption to believe that the defenceman would be looking to cash in at a comparable salary or one that is higher.
The Minnesota Wild currently occupy the third seed in the Western Conference’s Central Division with 48 points, so to hear that teams — especially a rival in Edmonton who could potentially be competing for a wild card playoff spot with the Wild — would be kicking tires on Dumba is puzzling on the surface.
A digger deep into the situation reveals some evidence to suggest that Minnesota could shrewdly use this opportunity to have a team overpay for Dumba, find a cheaper replacement who can offer similar or better results on the trade market, and then reallocate Dumba’s salary to address a weakness or add a significantly more talented player.
The problem with Dumba is that he carries a number of red flags. The right-shot defenceman turns 29 years old this July, which means that he is exiting his prime and is soon to be on the wrong side of 30 when players typically enter a decline. If Dumba was an elite offensive player, perhaps more consideration could be given to taking on the risk and believing that he could age gracefully. Historically, he has never been that player. His most productive campaign was the 2017-18 season in which he scored 14 goals and 50 points in 82 games. Ironically, it was that 2018 offseason in which Dumba signed his five-year extension.
Dumba has played parts of 10 NHL seasons in his career, but he has only eclipsed the 30-point mark twice. If his best offensive season occurred six seasons ago, it feels fair to assume that this high-water mark is not the norm.
A historical look at Dumba’s career portrays a player whose offensive impact may already be in decline.
I keep focusing on his offence because he is not renowned for his defensive play. And, if he is already in decline, teams should be wary about acquiring and overpaying while his true value will likely be significantly less than what teams will pay — in terms of the opportunity cost to acquire the player and then extend him on his next contract.
While Dumba’s offence has tailed off, NaturalStatTrick’s data shows that when Matt Dumba is on the ice, the Minnesota Wild fare worse at five-on-five.
As a team, the Wild generate more shots (50.58 CF%), more shots on goal (50.08 SF%), more goals (51.72 GF%), and more expected goals (50.92 xGF%) at five-on-five. When Dumba is on the ice, those numbers dip. The Wild generate a lower share of the shots (49.15 CF%), shots on goal (47.61 SF%), and expected goals (49.97 xGF%). The Wild have scored on a greater share of the total goals (52.08 GF%), but it is possible that over the remainder of the season, that share could normalize if the Wild continue to give up the shots and chances that they have when Dumba is on the ice.
Hockeyviz.com’s visuals help paint a better picture of what Dumba’s isolated impacts are relative to how the Wild have fared as a team.
Offensively, the Wild are a below average NHL team, but defensively, they are one of the stronger teams in the league at five-on-five.
Below is a look at what Dumba’s isolated impacts are.
Although the Wild improve a modest amount offensively when Dumba is on the ice, his impacts are still below average while his defensive impact is poor. Interestingly, it is intriguing to notice how the opposition tends to generate an above-average volume of shots on the right side of the ice that Dumba is responsible for in the defensive zone.
Making matters worse, it is this defensive ability that puts Dumba into trouble and has him taken a significant volume of minor penalties. By Hockeyviz’s data, Dumba takes 17 percent more penalties than the league average. For what it is worth, Evolving-Hockey’s ‘goals above replacement’ (-5.1 GAR) and ‘wins above replacement’ (-0.8 WAR) that look at a player’s total value relative to a league average player portray this 2022-23 season as being the worst of Dumba’s career.
If these are the defining characteristics of Matt Dumba, Pierre Dorion should not even be considering acquiring this player. The knock on Ottawa’s blue line is that they have quality puck-movers on the left side, but not enough talent on the right side — outside of Artyom Zub — who can be relied on to play significant minutes.
Adding Dumba to the mix would not address the Senators’ shortcomings on the blue line. And worse, at the salary and opportunity cost that the Senators would likely pay to acquire his services and keep him in the fold, he would exacerbate the situation. With so much money being locked up in the team’s top-six, and the likelihood that the team will be doing everything within its own interests to extend Alex DeBrincat, throwing bad money on a player of Matt Dumba’s quality would be foolish.
Rather than insulating its core group with good players on efficient contracts, acquiring Dumba would causelessly complicate the Senators’ future cap situation (or worse, helps create a sense that the Senators cannot budget appropriately to extend DeBrincat). As Travis Hamonic’s contract comes off the books at the end of this season and there is every expectation that this should also be Nikita Zaitsev’s last year with the organization, getting out from underneath bad contracts only to lock up a player of Dumba’s quality would be, pardon the pun, really dumb.
For a management team whose tenure has been characterized by a really poor understanding of the valuations of veteran NHL defencemen, this would simply be another uninspired acquisition by Pierre Dorion. And as I joked on Twitter, if Ken Holland is also kicking tires on Dumba, there is not a better indicator that Dumba is a player that you do not want to acquire.
In fairness to the Senators’ general manager, it has been reported that he’s kicked tires on seemingly every available NHL defenceman, so maybe that is all this is. Or maybe the rumour is already out of date and the Senators have moved on to more realistic or talented alternatives. At least we can hope that is the case.
An unfortunate consequence of the Senators’ dragged sale to new ownership is that the current regime can continue to operate as is. New ownership cannot influence or offer direction on how to proceed for the remainder of the year the longer this sale process drags out. Meaning, Dorion retains the ability to make shortsighted decisions that can negatively impact the future of this club.
If there was ever a time to overspend on a right defenceman, it was last summer shortly after the Senators acquired DeBrincat. Waiting until the halfway point of the season when the team is already nine points out of the second wild card, is not the time to be doing risky shit. But, maybe Dorion no longer cares. There is every reason to believe that with new ownership coming into the mix, his days as the general manager of the Ottawa Senators are numbered. If he is a lame duck, maybe he believes that his best opportunity to keep his role or put himself in a position to be hired elsewhere is to try and make this team more competitive down the stretch.
As the NHL’s March 3rd trade deadline approaches, it will be intriguing to see whether the ownership situation is resolved and how its state impacts Dorion’s efforts. The bar to be a better defenceman than a Zaitsev or a Hamonic is not high, but one thing is clear. After enduring the Zaitsev and Hamonic era, fans do not have the stomach to experience the expensive acquisition of another underperforming defenceman.
If management cannot creatively find better and more efficient solutions to their right defence problem, they need to go.