[Plaedo]

Originally Posted by Cali Panthers Fan

Here's my take on this debate, that seems to endlessly come up on this board. Part of it is that they were both drafted in the same year, so comparisons will always come up right away based on draft class.

I'm going to start by saying IN MY OPINION,

Spoiler!

so people don't get all cranky with me. Remember, I watched every Flames game since Monahan was drafted, and I've watched Barkov regularly since he was drafted (probably about 80-90% of the games). My opinion comes from regular viewings of both players.

Monahan is one of the better pure shooters in the game. He puts up a fair amount of goals, usually by being in the right place at the right time due to his high hockey IQ, but also just purely from his ability to shoot the puck. He's a better than average passer as well, and his hands are OK, but nothing spectacular. Acceleration is an issue, but he skates fast enough to get to his spots on the ice. He's Ok on the cycle, but is better suited to playing along the walls or in the slot.



Now Barkov has just about everything you want from a top line center. He's big, but not any more physical than Monahan. However, he's very, very good on the cycle and along the boards, deftly moving the puck for his linemates to do something off the wall. He's got elite vision and hockey sense, always in the right place and always knows where his line mates are. Here's a clip of a comeback against the Rangers where he is the biggest difference maker on the ice in back to back goals. It doesn't even start great because he happens to lose the face-off, but just follow him in this sequence and see what I see almost every time he plays. This isn't abnormal either, this is how he always plays. It's just the results aren't always there. He scores on a simple PP set up where the rebound comes to him at the side of the net and he simply buries it with little effort. He battles to win the next face-off in the zone, goes to the net to screen the point shot, works hard to gain control of the puck on the boards getting it to point man for a shot, goes right to the front of the net in a quiet zone when Jagr shoots and hits the pots (if there's any rebound there, he's going to score again), gets the puck again in the high slot and passes through 2 defender sticks to Jagr at the side of the net for the tying goal.



But those are 5 on 5 sequences during the game where he scales back on the fancy stuff quite a bit. In this clip you can see his incredible skills on display in the shootout.



But yet, you see his power and skill combination at times on plays like this (skip ahead of 0:50 mark to see his play, even though he does set up Huberdeau nicely on the first goal).



Unfortunately, nobody collects clips of defensive play, so I can't show you how well he does down low in his own zone, transitioning up ice to his line mates, but he's always good and sometimes he's dominant defensively. His Corsi and other advanced stats support this with a CF% of 55%.

I'm betting that it's just the lack of opportunity to watch Florida play that leads to the narrative that Monahan is better, but outside of having some injury problems, Barkov is better in almost every way.

That's coming from a guy who owns a Monahan jersey and loves the way he plays.

I just want to preface this post by saying I almost always enjoy your posts and typically agree with your perspectives.

However, I would find your opinion here more compelling if you had a greater degree of balanced discussion - it just seems biased to meticulously pull out the assets/abilities of Barkov, while dismissing Monahan as a goal scorer and nothing more. If you wanted to have more of a balanced discussion, you could also post clips of Monahan's good positional play, winning face-offs, his shoot-out moves, etc.

Yes, yes he would be. There's nobody on the Flames who can do as many things as Barkov. The closest would be Giordano.

I would submit that being a multi-tool doesn't make a player the best on the ice. Taking over a game and willing it to victory could be an attribute of such a player. While it is hard to answer the question of whether he would be the best player on the ice, since it is hypothetical, it is rare in the NHL to have one player always/almost always be the best player on the ice that they skate on. Even Crosby isn't always. When you get a player that "takes over" a game it usually doesn't matter how well his teammates are playing, nor the opposing team's play, they become the best player and stand out in a good way every time they are on the ice. I'm thinking along the lines of Karlsson, Price, Crosby... Iginla in his heyday.

Bringing this back on topic, it's hard to say that Barkov would be the best player on the ice, when he is ranked in the second tier of the THN article. If you use their methodology from the article to account for the many statistical categories involved in two-way play, then there is a whole tier of players that could be the best player on the ice, even on a Barkov team.
To "gut-check" this... I could easily see Subban, Crosby, McDavid, Karlsson, Giordano, Holtby, etc. taking over a game to the extent that it didn't much matter how well Barkov played, or how the other teammates are playing. For these listed players it is somewhat easy to think of examples of when it has happened before.

The next question is how consistently they drive the play of the game to such an extent when they are on the ice, because a player could take over sporadically or do it consistently. One could make an argument, based on the past year, that Hamilton, Giordano, and even Backlund would be the best players on the ice, or that it is at least inconclusive, in comparison to Barkov.

So my point is, no matter how much we watch each game of hockey, and despite our attempts at being objective, everyone still has a bias. Statistical analysis attempts to remove this, but it is also imperfect still.

On a side note, and I realize this is conjecture, but I think some positions have a greater capacity to take over a game than others, but these positions also come with a higher degree of exposure. (Maybe the heirarchy is goalies, defencemen, centres, then wingers?) When Price is playing other-worldly, it doesn't much matter how well the defensemen are or are not playing, nor the centres or wingers, because Price is controlling the game. It's almost a neutralizing effect. Likewise, when Karlsson is on-point both defensively and offensively, the effects of the forwards are lessened (on both teams). Or when Crosby is backchecking but also creating chance after chance, his effect on the game is greater than the snipe-show that Ovechkin attempts to perform, since he's being stick lifted every second chance.