Whether you like Russel or not his still worth something. you won't need to give up a second round pick to trade him

Once upon a time Russell was a decent Dman, but he's been getting worse every year for half a decade now. He's definitely not worth his contract and Edmonton would be smart to dump him to a team that still thinks he is.

He's been playing out of his natural position, so of course his boxcars suffer. There's more to defending than boxcars though - something that smarter hockey minds than ours (Chairelli, McLellan) understand.

If you watch Russell a lot, he looks worse than his numbers. He is a burden defensively, deadweight carried by his teammates.

As someone not around the team daily, the NMC made absolutely no sense the moment it was revealed. It's a case of tunnel vision where Chiarelli wanted one thing and didn't pay attention to the whole picture. If I had to guess, Chiarelli was actually sold by his (offense) numbers.

Kris Russell cannot suppress shots...and as your job as a defensive defensemen, you kinda need to do that, not be in the 2nd percentile

Not signing Russell and Lucic would have solved the problem in the first place.

Kris Russell gives up the puck and then fails to ever retrieve it. Other than that, fine dman

By what measures? He lead the league in blocked shots and blocked shots per game.

More importantly, his 1.60 GA/60 (last I checked, goals win games not shots) was 4th in the league for defensemen that played over 1000 minutes, behind only Weber (1.30), Doughty (1.50) and Orpik (1.50). Russell's GF/60 (2.10) was better than Weber's (2.00) and Doughty's (1.90). For reference, Russell played 35% of the time against the league's elite players, which compares well to Doughty (35%) and Weber (38%), while Orpik (21%) played very sheltered minutes.

I'm not suggesting that Russell is an equal to Doughty and Weber (although his results weren't far off last year), but he isn't the terrible player some people seem to think.

In fact, lets dissect a play just from this most recent playoffs involving Dan Girardi and shot blocking.


From Game 5 of the second round. Kyle Turris takes the puck at the blueline from #14 Alex Burrows. Girardi is the defender in this scenario as you can see. At the five second mark of the video, Girardi goes down and blocks turris's shot. However, Turris easily picks up the rebound off Girardi, who is now out of the play and stranded. Turris skates right around Girardi and fires a shot five hole on Lundqvist who reacted to the initial shot attempt, but as a result of Girardi's shot block changing the angle of the shot, Lundqvist could not get back into position in time since the play happened very quickly.

Do you now see why shot blocking isn't a reliable way to suppress shots??

From the 2010 ECF, Matt Carl (#25) has a stick lift that leads to #28 Claude Giroux to send the puck into the middle of the ice. Flyers captain Mike Richards (#18) gets the puck and ends up scoring a goal.

Because of the shot suppression by Matt Carl (21 seconds in), the Flyers scored a goal

Not signing Russell and Lucic would have solved the problem in the first place.

I am arguing that shot suppression is vastly different than shot blocking, since blocking shots is far less valuable than suppressing shots.

You are quoting Corsi Against as "shot suppression", which is inherently flawed to begin with.

No I am not lol. I am using data derived from HERO charts to use as my shot suppression metric. I never once brought up Corsi, you did.