Spotlight on Radim Vrbata

The free agent sweepstakes kick off in less than two weeks, and already pundits are guessing which players will find new homes and which will re-up with their existing teams.

Among available forwards, there are some big names: Thomas Vanek, Marian Gaborik, Paul Stastny and Jarome Iginla, to name a few.

Each comes with some questions. Was Vanek hurt in the playoffs, or did he stiff out against the Rangers? Is Gaborik the iron man who scored 14 playoff goals and drank from Lord Stanley’s mug this year, or once he has a new contract will he return to being the tin man he was in Minnesota, Columbus and New York?

How much juice does Iginla have left and will he ever win that elusive cup?

While we find these kinds of conversations as much fun as the next guy does, they miss the point. In the salary cap era, paying top dollar for obvious choices is far less critical than finding value for money.

Say, for example, you’re one of 7 Canadian teams and you’ve tied up $5.25 million in cap space in a player who shall not be named (he’s taken enough abuse…but his initials are D.C.), and another $7 million in Dion Phaneuf.

Or you’re the Pittsburgh Penguins and have paid handsomely for Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin and are carrying around an albatross in Marc-Andre Fleury’s $5 million cap hit, leaving you with a new coach and GM but the same tough offseason choices and the prospect of Lee Stempniak and Brian Gibbons as first liner wingers.

Or you’re the New Jersey Devils, a great possession team that managed to turn hockey into soccer (no goals and every game’s a shootout) while missing the playoffs for a second consecutive year.

Each of these teams – and there are others for sure – would love some scoring depth.

Enter Radim Vrbata.

Vrbata has been quietly toiling away in Phoenix, a market that doesn’t get a lot of attention from the hockey cognoscenti.

And yet, during the past 3 seasons, he’s scored 39 goals during 5 on 5 even strength (5 v 5) play. That amounted to 0.904 goals per 60 minutes of ice time, which was not far behind Vanek (0.921) and ahead of Stastny (0.767) and Jaromir Jagr (0.646).

Now 21 of those 39 goals came in the 2011-12 season, in which Vrbata scored 35 goals in total. But unless your motto is “buy high / sell low”, this is a good thing.

You see while Vrbata’s 5 v 5 production dropped from 1.23 goals per 60 minutes in 2011-12, to 0.494 in 2013-14, he continued to generate a ton of shots.

In 2013-14 his shots per 60 minutes of ice time (9.660) was almost identical to his 3 year average of 9.667 and much higher than that of better known snipers such as Vanek (8.664), Stastny (7.042) and Jagr (8.166).

So why did his production tank?

Well, in 2011-12, his 5 v 5 Shooting % (Sh%) was 12.88%, and his True Sh% (the number of goals taken as a percentage of total shots at the net) was 7.29%. In 2013-14, these numbers were 5.11% and 2.69% respectively.

In other words, in 2011-12, Vrbata was lucky and managed to score 35 total goals due to a high Sh%. Last year he was unlucky and still managed to score 20 goals in total while leading all Coyotes forwards in power play goals (10) and power play points (21). Next year, the best bet is that he will be somewhere in between.

Now let’s talk defense for a second.

Nobody would accuse Vrbata of being a defensive stalwart, but he’s not a liability either. In each of the past 3 seasons, he posted a 5 v 5 Goals For % above 51%.  During the same period, he also posted a Fenwick For % above 51%.

These numbers tell us that when Vrbata is on the ice in 5 v 5 situations, his team is generating more shots at the net and scoring more goals than their opponents.

In each year, he was better than the Coyotes’ average in both of these measures.

The last time Vrbata tested free agency in 2008, he signed with Tampa and the results were disastrous. He only managed to get into 18 games and then asked to go home to the Czech Republic midseason before going back to Phoenix the next year.

So there may be some connection to Phoenix that makes it difficult for him to move and that’s worth thinking about.

But if I were a GM looking to add scoring depth, a guy who potted 20 and made “only” $3 million in an off year is exactly the sort of player I would target.