Nashville Predators center Craig Smith tries to control a bouncing puck in the first period of an NHL hockey game against the Detroit Red Wings, Saturday, Feb. 28, 2015, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

Most hockey fans, I think it's fair to say, couldn't pick Craig Smith out of a lineup.

He was the fifth-leading scorer on the Predators this past season, so put him behind Pekka Rinne, and probably even a few other guys who finished behind him in scoring (Colin Wilson, James Neal, and Seth Jones), and he's one of the lesser-known interchangeable parts on a team that not a lot of people league-wide get to see very often.

Most people really only got exposure to them in that six-game series against Chicago to open these playoffs. If they were really, really paying attention, they might have noticed that Smith was one of four guys who tied for second on the team with five points in six games.

So then Elliotte Friedman says on Saturday that, with Smith's arbitration hearing coming up today, the Predators asked that he be paid $3 million for the coming season, and Smith himself put in for $4.75 million. That's a big gap — 58 percent, in fact — and even as a guy who watches a lot of Predators games, I thought $4.75 was a bit much. “Where,” I thought, “did he even come up with that valuation for himself?”

This is, of course, how arbitration works. Team goes lower than it thinks a guy is actually worth, player goes higher. An arbitrator probably drops them somewhere in the middle, and both sides grudgingly take whatever's offered. This is how compromise works.

But the more I thought about it, the more this whole thing nagged at me. I mean, $4.75 million for Craig Smith?

That sure sounds like a lot, and he's a restricted free agent. That doesn't make him rich by NHL standards, certainly, but hell, that's what Gustav Nyquist makes. Although, hmm, Nyquist is only four days older than Smith, and has played with better linemates, and has 100 games fewer on his NHL tally, and also has 29 fewer career points.

Nyquist couldn't possibly be a career comparable for Smith, could he? That doesn't seem right. And yet...

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It seems that with the exception of goal-scoring (which you'll note is a fairly valuable skill), Nyquist and Smith are more or less similar players. And those numbers are, in fact, driven by Nyquist having a much higher shooting percentage. I'm not willing to dismiss him being a higher-skill player — except that Smith attempts more shots per 60 minutes — but are we willing to say that Trotz's system in Nashville for the first three years of his career wasn't a restrictive issue there?



And what's interesting, actually, is that these numbers are so similar despite the fact that Smith had a horrible lockout season. We're talking “4-8-12 in 44 games” horrible. Now granted, that's almost a sixth of his career, so you can't just throw it out the window, but in the past two seasons, the results have been very favorable. You'll notice there aren't huge changes from the chart above, but every one more or less favors Smith.

At this point, the difference in overall value has to be seen as minimal, even with Nyquist continuing to score some 23 percent more goals per 60 minutes.

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