Quoting: BeastModeUnknown
As I said Bortuzzo is more consistent, and the reason our penalty kill is bad right now is because he is missing on it. He didn't even get through what 5 minutes of the first period in the second game? First game we held them 1/4 on the PK with Bortuzzo, so you can really see the difference, and ultimately if you don't like Barbashev. Samuel Blais is a way better PK player than Barbashev is in my honest opinion. Make it Blais, and Barbashev then mix the Defenceman pairings up. Honestly Holl doesn't do as good as much as Freddy is making tremendous saves. I understand your point of view, and I agree Mikheyev is a better player than Barbashev objectively, but Bortuzzo is more consistent, and puts up more consistent defensive numbers than Holl. Only reason Holl looks good is because he's the only one on the ice on the defense than looks competent enough to actually do something on defense.
Couple of things here. First, Holl has only been in the league one year (not counting the three games or whatever this year) and that was widely considered Freddie Andersen's worst year in the league, so I would say Holl put up those results in spite of Andersen, not because of him.
Second, the charts that you are putting here are for even strength. I'll come back to the PK, but in my opinion this actually shows that Holl is the more consistent player due to how much his expected goals for/expected goals against line up with his actual goals for and goals against. The xGF is a decent predictor of the "mean" that these players will regress to, whether that be a good or bad regression, while the GF is descriptive of what they actually did in 19-20. What I see is that Holl performed a little worse offensively than he should have, while Bortuzzo way overperformed offensively last year.
But, RAPM charts really only tell us so much about defense, and they're not optimized for 4-on-5. So for the PK, I think their player cards are a little more indicative of how they performed short handed. I've never been able to figure out how to get an image into capfriendly, but
here's a public link to them. As we can see in the SH Defense column, Bortuzzo's value is mainly in his ability to drive offense, rather than his stingy defense. In fact, he's been below replacement short handed for the past three years (and I would say this is mostly because of his much-beloved willingness to block shots, which analytics would tell us can oftentimes do more harm than good). We only have a one year sample on Holl, so maybe I'm jumping the gun a bit, but he's had better results on a worse defensive team that had worse goaltending last year.
As for our PK being bad without Bortuzzo- maybe. We did let a power play goal in when he was in the lineup the first game too. But even if you don't believe in Holl's ability to step up there, we have guys that should be able to handle those minutes. Faulk has posted some very impressive PK numbers, we've got Mikkola- who has been a PK specialist basically his entire career- waiting for opportunity as well. In fact, the only regular defenseman who has posted worse numbers than Bortuzzo over the last three years is Scandella. In my opinion, Bortuzzo very much shouldn't be an everyday player, trade or no trade.
I do think Blais should be a more regular PK'er and I do like the sort of "intangibles" that Barbashev and Bortuzzo bring to the table which would make me unwilling to trade them, but these are two players that give us very clear upgrades. It's very similar to the Reaves trade in my opinion, where you don't get the "sexy" players necessarily but you get the better players.