OOOOF, got a solid reminder as to why I'm not a regular listener to the morning show this morning.
The guys have Jack Han on who just wrote an article about Huberdeau. Great, I thought... Good time to talk about relevant flames hockey rather than some dumb texter driven trivia shtick. Also, I like Han and dislike how over the top negative he is on Huberdeau so it's either an opportunity for me to check myself or for these guys to challenge Han on some of his assumptions.
Nope!
Russic starts it off cryptically and awkwardly saying the first sentence of the article is a little aggressive, isn't it??? Wait, what is the first line? Does the listener know? Negative. Han starts off on the defensive but I'm not even sure what he's defending. Ok, bad start... They can get it back though right?
Nope!
Russic drives things off the rails by using this as an opportunity to jump on an anti stat soap box, but Han isn't really a stat honk like a JFresh. He focuses on player styles and skills. Han is now evidently annoyed at the line of questioning, thinking he was on to talk Flames or Huberdeau. He's still on though so we can salvage this right?
Nope!
They just end the interview 5 minutes in! It seems Russic was annoyed that Han didn't follow him off the deep end on expected goals for and just packed it in.
I can think of a hundred lines of questions based on his article:
https://jhanhky.substack.com/p/whats...with-huberdeau
1. You wrote an article similar to this in the offseason and this seems to confirm what you were saying. However, do you think the jump in Huberdeau's defensive analytics suggests he's going through a transition that could eventually yield fewer points but a better overall player?
2. You say that Calgary is coached to be defense first and cited your surprise that Gaudreau responded so well offensively to Sutter. If you look at the difference between last year's flames and this year's, do you think it could be a misconception that Sutter is strictly a defensive coach but the team may just lack consistency of execution this year?
3. In your article, you site linemates as a reason JH has had success in Florida, do you see a combination that exists on the flames that could yield a better result than what has happened so far? Obviously Lucic didn't help...
4. As an elite 3 on 3 player, what do you see going on this year? Is it possible that his ineptitude in this regard this year points to a player feeling the pressure of a new market and maybe that can be extrapolated to the rest of his game or is this another systems thing?
Instead we got an awkward ending followed by several minutes of Russic complaining about stats. Even that argument in a vaccuum is already annoyingly flawed because he wants things like expected goals for to be tracked by the league to remove bias, but it would just be tracked in buildings from 32 sources like shots and hits. Way more biased than from a single source like natural stat trick. I would say the NHL, at this point, has almost no credibility as an unbiased source of anything as the total revenue whores that they evidently are.