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Hainsey to Leafs [2 years, $3.0mil AAV]

Well, if we can trade JVR for Demers and sign Marleau then we may have an incrementally better defensive team next year. An upward tick in performance from the rookies could push us a level higher. 

Tampa, Carolina, Columbus and the Rangers (with Shats) will be teams to watch out for.
 
looks like a good pick up, Polak is probably done and Hunwick was and is a Penguin. Gives the Leafs a two year development frame for one of the youngsters. And as mentioned could be flipped at the deadline.
 
Aside from his age, Hainsey appears to have been a worthy signing.  He provides experience and defensive depth.  His cap hit at $3M may seem high but it's not something the Leafs can't live with.  Barring any (long term) injury a la Polak, he can be seen as an upgrade to Polak and a good replacement for Hunwick.

...it?s only a two year deal, so worst case scenario is that he doesn?t work out and you eat the cap hit. Also, this falls into the Leafs two year window before they have to re-sign Matthews and Marner, so the cap hit won?t cause any problems in that regard, although it might cause some issues with Nylander?s extension.

At the very least, Hainsey is a solid, third pair defenseman who has experience. He can play on both sides, so he has a bit of versatility to him, and he?s a better option than Polak. The cap hit is a bit high, but not high enough to cause any massive problems, and it?s a short enough term that the Leafs might be able to afford to bite the bullet if it goes wrong. It?s not ideal, especially if this is the only defenseman they sign...
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https://theleafsnation.com/2017/07/01/leafs-officially-sign-ron-hainsey-to-2-year-3-million-contract/
 
Mirtle: Why the Leafs got an upgrade in choosing Ron Hainsey over Matt Hunwick
https://theathletic.com/72302/2017/07/01/mirtle-why-the-leafs-got-an-upgrade-in-choosing-ron-hainsey-over-matt-hunwick/

Key difference is the QoC Hainsey faced in his career.

I've upgraded from ugh to mmmeh.
 
I try to keep The Athletic links down to no more than the first paragraph and maybe an enticing graphic, if even that. I also try to excerpt similarly for posts from other Leaf blogs, who put in the hard work and don't deserve to have their traffic/revenue diverted.
 
herman said:
I try to keep The Athletic links down to no more than the first paragraph and maybe an enticing graphic, if even that. I also try to excerpt similarly for posts from other Leaf blogs, who put in the hard work and don't deserve to have their traffic/revenue diverted.
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I also think it's important that, if you're using someone else's words or conclusions, that you begin with accrediting to them, not waiting until the end.

But we can have a fair discussion about proper citation on free stuff elsewhere, posting stuff that's behind a paywall is just flat wrong. 
 
Nik the Trik said:
herman said:
I try to keep The Athletic links down to no more than the first paragraph and maybe an enticing graphic, if even that. I also try to excerpt similarly for posts from other Leaf blogs, who put in the hard work and don't deserve to have their traffic/revenue diverted.
Click to expand...

I also think it's important that, if you're using someone else's words or conclusions, that you begin with accrediting to them, not waiting until the end.

But we can have a fair discussion about proper citation on free stuff elsewhere, posting stuff that's behind a paywall is just flat wrong.
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The tweet should be fair game though, agreed?
 
Frank E said:
The tweet should be fair game though, agreed?
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Link to a tweet all day long. There's no way to link to someone else's tweet while giving the impression it's yours and it's a public forum. 
 
Yeah I mean hf we just went over this. I get this one isn't the same as posting multiple paragraphs from the article verbatim but by paraphrasing it it's not any different. The content/analysis from those articles are behind a paywall, we can't really be giving it away for free here. I get that that doesn't really make it easy to discuss articles from the Athletic here where most people probably aren't subscribed (although they should be) but that's something that we need to deal with.

It's still cool to share Athletic articles just to point them out to those who aren't following their feed, but all that should be posted is the link to the article and a short description of what it's about. That can come through either a) a tweet from the author or @TheAthleticTO b) the opening paragraph from the article or c) a brief statement in your own words. Any further discussion about the content should be original thoughts from our members here, not just re-posting of the author's thoughts.
 
If you want an easy guide for what should be posted for an Athletic article click on one while logged out and see what their free preview shows. For instance, this is what they post for the Hainsey article for non-subscribers:

https://theathletic.com/75315/2017/07/13/by-the-numbers-can-new-leafs-defenceman-ron-hainsey-handle-tough-minutes/

Going into the off-season, the Maple Leafs needed to address defence. Toronto?s big addition was Ron Hainsey. Not the sexiest name out there, but he wasn?t too expensive and was coming off a Stanley Cup victory with the Pittsburgh Penguins where he was second in ice-time on the blue line.

He played tough minutes too.

That?s key because the Leafs need someone who can handle tough minutes after running the Morgan Rielly and Nikita Zaitsev pair into the ground last season.

What are tough minutes? Usually, it?s a synonym for tough competition, but there?s people who are skeptical of its importance given the small spread between the toughest and softest competition. Everyone plays everyone. That creates a sticking point in the analytics community because others believe its importance is being understated.
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For anything else you need to sign up.

I suppose that should be fair game here too.
 
I think the overriding principle, paywall or not, is that if someone writes something interesting and someone here wants to discuss it that poster should be encouraging people to read the original article(not a summation or a paraphrasing of it) where the original article was published.

 
On the topic of Hainsey and the player he's replacing...

https://twitter.com/ChartingHockey/status/887724924437245962
www.twitter.com/ChartingHockey/status/887724924437245962

Hunwick did a lot of good work limiting carry-ins and breaking up plays at the blue line. I'm curious about the co-relation to our left wing forwards (Hyman, Komarov, Martin) being defensively stronger overall compared to our right (Nylander, Brown, Marner, Soshnikov).

How Hainsey bolsters the right side will be interesting to watch unfold as it's way harder to close off the boards off your backhand (easier to break up plays through the middle though), and a little different on the pivots to maintain gap/body position. He's got wheels though, and size, and rather deft hands for a defenseman.

Good!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4Ga3oDXK4U
So very bad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFbmHYgaBt0
 
herman said:
On the topic of Hainsey and the player he's replacing...

https://twitter.com/ChartingHockey/status/887724924437245962
www.twitter.com/ChartingHockey/status/887724924437245962
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I was looking at this chart for like 30 seconds before I spotted Marchenko down there. Jesus. I mean sure some of that is because of a smaller sample size probably but still.
 
What we have here is a conflict between two goods.  It's good and fine for The Athletic to demand payment to see their material.  (Incidentally, from a strictly legal standpoint it's bad and not fine to violate their copyright by reposting -- which is, in fact, republishing -- anything more than a very small amount of material that might be considered "fair use," as we say here; I presume there's a similar doctrine in Canada.) 

It's also good and fine that we have community discussions here that are open to anybody (since this site is not behind a paywall thanks to Rick & Co.'s endless generosity). 

The conflict comes when people who are subscribers to TA want to discuss articles in-depth that us non-subscribers aren't privy to.  Although nobody intends it, that sets up a not-so-good dynamic: non-subscribers like me can't really participate fully in the conversation.

I'm not saying that subscribers to TA shouldn't post about what they read on there.  I'm just stating a fact that any subsequent conversations are qualitatively different than ones using information everyone has free access to.

And no, CTB, I don't agree that we all "should" subscribe to TA.  Why should I if I don't want to?  I've got plenty of other more important things to spend my limited money on, especially since I can get free high-qual hockey analysis all over the place (not the least of which is here).  God bless TA and their paymodel if they can make it fly, but I don't particularly care if they succeed or not.
 
CarltonTheBear said:
I was looking at this chart for like 30 seconds before I spotted Marchenko down there. Jesus. I mean sure some of that is because of a smaller sample size probably but still.
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Babcock used his spares last season as drop-in plug-and-play options, and if you couldn't just be in mid-season form 3/4 of the way into the season, you were basically dead to him. The leash was only ever as long as the duration of the injury being replaced.

I found that remarkably unfair and tactically rather stupid, especially during the first quarter of the season (when things were more in flux, results-wise) when we could have gotten away with training up some of the younger subs (Corrado, Leivo, Griffith) instead of always leaning on Polak/Martin when it was quickly clear they didn't have much on-ice value early on.
 
Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate said:
And no, CTB, I don't agree that we all "should" subscribe to TA.  Why should I if I don't want to?
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I'm going to go out on a crazy limb here and say that CtB wasn't being literal but was just saying that he thinks the Athletic is good.

Also, as to the larger point, I'd say that as someone who doesn't subscribe to the Athletic I've never really felt like I miss out because as a general rule we don't tend to discuss actual articles here that often regardless of the source. We may discuss the general hypothesis of an article but we don't tend to dissect any one piece of writing with depth.

I mean take the basic concept here, which is how well does Ron Hainsey do against "top competition". As we can see from the graphic they tweeted, as well as the intro paragraphs CtB quoted, the basic idea is kind of a sketchy one. Personally, I don't think it's all that important. Every defenseman will play some minutes against every kind of competition and I think a general rule of thumb is that every defenseman will play worse against a top line than they do against a third line. "Tough minutes" as a concept, then, to me seems much less important than just how good a defenseman generally is.

That, how good Hainsey generally is, is the sort of thing that drives discussion here and that can be had without the writing on the Athletic or any particular conclusions they come to.
 
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