These are all fair points but I want to defend Pasta with him having an excellent penalty differential and an even better PP-impact. Kase is great, and definitely in an Anderson-mould of a player that will always get underrated. I'd probably lean on him being better than Laine, but shooting talent is one of the hardest concepts to pin-point from a statistical perspective. Kase's impact is insane, but he's also playing easier minutes. I still think he's a 5on5 beast, but it'd probably regress a bit vs tougher competition, something that is also hard get down to an exact science. His contract is also such a ridiculous aspect of his value. If you had to rank all wingers by expected impact, where would you put Kase?



Now for you, this is almost entirely dependant on zone usage. I was unsure when the Bruins traded away Spooner cause I thought his numbers looked great until I realized he played some of the easier minutes in the entire league. Players can still have usage in that aspect, much like the Gagner example you provided in some post, but Kase doesn't play those kind of minutes. David Krejci has tendencies of the same thing, because the Bergeron line was previously leaned so heavily on defensively. You see the shift now with Cassidy and how they share d-zone starts more. Krejci's numbers are still great, and he should be in the conversation with a lot of the people you mentioned, cause he isn't infact that poor defensively.

Notice also how almost all the guys you draw conclusions about have very limited sample sizes. What I think when I see Austin Wagner high on those charts is that "he's probably talented, let's see how this plays out over time, if he regresses with usage" etc. It's helpful, but you can't overinterpret it beyond recognition and say "look, this is bad". Kase has good numbers, over time, without playing soft minutes. Can one know for sure he's a top winger in this league? Well, no, but every tool we have to evaluate him by points in that direction. Before this or last season or whenever you could've looked at MacKinnon's numbers and said "lol this guy doesn't produce with the best", but by all parameters of statistical analysis he was always going to do that. Scoring happens around a normal distribution - Nylander isn't a 40-point guy cause he had an outlier of a season this year, he's great and all the numbers back that up, which shows when he outscores the best of them on the world stage.

yeah FOH with that Kase top 15 RW nonsense, Hes great but just no.....and over krug????.....again.....no...