It's summertime during the longest off-season in sports. As such, we at hockeyfreeforall.com (@hockeyfree4all) wanted to share our recent writings involving the Vancouver Canucks with those of you for whom hockey never sleeps (like us). We have viewed the most notable development, the trade of Kevin Bieksa to Anaheim for a 2nd rounder next year, as a starting point on rebuilding the defense lines by subtraction and eventually by addition.

Why are we picking this forum to make our first SB fan post just to bash good old BX? Well we aren't maligning him so much as we are trying to introduce our proprietary metric, the Advanced Bracton score (AB) to the hockey community as a manner by which we rate individual teams and players and gauge the probability of future success. The AB is an amalgamation of several hockey statistics we believe strongly correlate with winning games and therefore making the playoffs. What gives us that idea? We found in our work (post priori) that teams who scored a positive number on the AB made the playoffs in 2014-15 in 15 of 16 cases (VAN and WPG were negative, LA was positive). Amazingly, the team with the higher AB score won their first round matchup in 8 of 8 cases and 3 of 4 times in the second round. That got our attention.

In this case, the BX trade, no matter how much you loved him in VAN, is on paper infinitely positive for the Canucks in our opinion.

So when looking at off-season moves, such as the Bieksa trade within the division, it occurred to us that these types of trades among teams with differing philosophies on what makes and saves goals could have significant ramifications for season outcomes. In this case, the BX trade, no matter how much you loved him in VAN, is on paper infinitely positive for the Canucks in our opinion. While they still have more work to do on the back end, the situation has improved from last year already. The problem as we see it however remains whether or not VAN can continue to kill penalties at the same efficiency as it did last year. If not, we would expect any impact management can have in improving AB in the near term to be muted.

Luckily for VAN they play in the western conference. We know this sounds contrary to widely held opinion, but teams at the top and middle of the east are far more balanced with respect to our metric. In fact, until Dallas made the excellent moves it did recently, we rated VAN at a -6 AB, good for 7th in the conference. We still have them about 7th, but without the benefit of knowing what the opening day depth charts will be, we reserve final rankings until that time. The point is that although still negative AB, VAN is still likely a playoff team.

Why does any of this matter to us? Since we have a management bias in our real lives, we are captivated by teams that can convert ticket sales into hockey related revenues. Teams that make the playoffs obviously can do this on at least two more occasions than can their peers who miss the post season. We believed that if we could develop a metric relating to team construction that was highly associated with making the playoffs, great. If this metric, if in fact such data are available at lower levels of hockey could predict longevity of a player in the NHL, even better. This therefore is our humble seat at the burgeoning "moneypuck" table. Over a reasonable period of time, we think the AB approach, if not purely predictive of outcomes, could at least provide an anchor by which fans can look at trades such as the one involving VAN and understand what management was thinking when they traded, at least in BX' case, a favorite of many.

If you have indulged us so far, we appreciate it. If you have enjoyed the preamble, please read on and check in with us for reasonably frequent updates and our preseason rankings in September. Please also comment below. we welcome your thoughts on our fledgling endeavor!

The repost from hockeyfreeforall.com........

EDITORS NOTE – we wrote the following in a piece dated June 19th –

"……According to thecanuckway.com, VAN has only about $3mm under the salary cap for next year. Therefore they are somewhat hamstrung in their upgrading options. However, if they could move a player like Kevin Bieksa (-4.15 AB, $4.0mm) for a cheaper defensive alternative with better AB (assumedly to a team that doesn’t value metrics like AB), it would be a coup. The good news is that the Canucks are not necessarily compelled to resign or negotiate with players who are anything but middling or worse in terms of AB this summer….."

The on July 1, the trade transpired - on that date we wrote: