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Barring a loss in Game 6 tonight, the Tampa Bay Lightning are in the Stanley Cup Finals.
That sounds good but the play of Steven Stamkos has fans concerned as he has scored one secondary assist through four games. With one year remaining on his contract, there are suggestions that his play in these playoffs could hurt his next contract. However, Stamkos has nothing to worry about with negotiations and here is why.
Stamkos is the Lightning’s best player and he will be paid accordingly. He has scored enough to merit a similar contract to Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews and P.K. Subban. If you don’t think that Stamkos deserves a contract like that than look at the first four years of his contract. He has been an elite hockey player.
Most of these complaints revolve around one mediocre (?) postseason anyways. If NHL General Managers weighted one playoff run like this, then Tyler Seguin would be playing for the Dallas Stars by now.
The Triplets
Another argument I hear often is that the play of Tyler Johnson, Nikita Kucherov and Ondrej Palat are overshadowing Stamkos and diminishing his play. First of all, the play of someone else doesn’t affect a particular player. Also, the Triplets line and the Stamkos line play at different times so they play against different levels of competition.
As the Lightning’s best player, Stamkos should be playing against the other team’s best players. This would leave the Triplets to beat up on lesser opponents. But after investigation, courtesy of Behind the Net, I found a different culprit.
PDO
PDO (which doesn’t stand for anything) is a statistic that combines a player’s shooting percentage and save percentage (with that player on the ice). PDO is the best metric for measuring a player’s puck luck over any sample size. Among the Lightning, Johnson, Kucherov and Palat have the highest PDO on the team. At over 104 percent, they are beneficiaries of friendly bounces that no one else on the team (other than Jason Garrison at 103 percent) is experiencing.
This is because the trio have a shooting percentage above 12 percent. Looking at the roster for the Lightning, the average shooting percentage is around eight or nine percent. This means the Triplets are scoring at an efficient but unsustainable rate. So maybe the hype surrounding the hottest line in the NHL is premature.
Conclusion
Stamkos hasn’t had a great outing in the playoffs, but he has played well at times. But every hockey player goes through similar stretches and these concerns have drawn too much attention. If the league and their fans learned anything from what happened to Seguin and even Sidney Crosby last year, they wouldn’t question the play of Steven Stamkos. Besides, Stamkos has a year to negotiate a new contract which gives the two parties plenty of time to assess how much he is worth.
Read this article for a different perspective.
