Ristolainen Re-signs with Flyers

[flyercanuck]

5 minutes ago, SCFlyguy said:

That photo of Risto makes him look like Jeff Carter's meth head/paedo uncle.

 

He's supposed to be the "intimidating" defenceman on the team.

 

If I lined up up across from him I'd break out laughing.

[SCFlyguy]

He's intimidating me from ever watching the Flyers again.

[ruxpin]

16 minutes ago, flyercanuck said:

If I lined up up across from him I'd ask him, "didn't I see you at the Ambassador Bridge?"

 

FIFY

Edited March 11, 2022 by ruxpin

[GrittyForever]

The Sabres fan reaction says it all

 

https://www.sabrespace.com/community/topic/30708-ristolainen-extension-for-philly/

 

[Pedo 228 ERQS]

16 hours ago, jammer2 said:

This is a really, really bad signing. It compounds the original horrid trade and turns it into a 5 year curse. This guy is simply not good at hockey. Zero hockey sense, out of position, HORRIBLE skater, especially backwards. He represents everything that is wrong with the current Flyer management team! 

  I would have been thrilled to trade him for a second round pick and be done with this MESS. Wake me up when Fletcher is fired. WE SUCK ANF IT WILL CONTINUE!!

Sanhiem is worse than him on everything you just stated and he's getting 4.65 m a year

[RonJeremy]

19 hours ago, Cheesesteak said:

Zero point Zero

[flyercanuck]

5 hours ago, Pedo 228 ERQS said:

Sanhiem is worse than him on everything you just stated and he's getting 4.65 m a year

 

 Let's try this again....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The only thing Ristolainen is better than Sanheim at is hitting. 

 

 Oh, and taking up wasted capspace.

[ruxpin]

12 hours ago, GrittyForever said:

The Sabres fan reaction says it all

 

https://www.sabrespace.com/community/topic/30708-ristolainen-extension-for-philly/

 

Did you read the responses on Twitter from some of the utterly brain dead Flyers fans?  I mean exactly how many Twitter handles does PEDO 228 ERQS have?

Edited March 12, 2022 by ruxpin

[ruxpin]

5 hours ago, Pedo 228 ERQS said:

Sanhiem is worse than him on everything you just stated and he's getting 4.65 m a year

Have you ever considered having the paint in your house tested for lead?

[flyercanuck]

43 minutes ago, ruxpin said:

Did you read the responses on Twitter from some of the utterly brain dead Flyers fans?  I mean exactly how many Twitter handles does PEDO 228 ERQS have?

 

 I liked this one from a Sabres fan...

 

"If I were Risto, I would have tried for a playoff team. Philly is gonna be bad. "

 

 Buddy, in case you don't remember, Risto is a BIG reason our teams aren't playoff teams.

[pilldoc]

One of the best articles read regarding the Risto trade.....

 

https://theathletic.com/3175546/2022/03/10/with-rasmus-ristolainen-extension-flyers-prioritize-style-of-play-over-results-and-it-will-cost-them/?source=dailyemail&campaign=60198300

 

With Rasmus Ristolainen extension, Flyers prioritize style of play over results — and it will cost them....

 

Evaluating Ristolainen’s season

The initial case for acquiring Ristolainen was simple.

No, his tangible results in Buffalo weren’t very good, beyond raw point totals. But he was being used as a heavy-minutes, top-pair defenseman on an awful club, the thinking went. Drop him down the depth chart a bit, inject stability into his game via a better team around him and a regular partner (Travis Sanheim) who complements his skill set and he’ll do a lot better. In addition, he’ll provide a physical element to the roster that had been missing in past seasons, making the team “tougher to play against.” That was, at its core, the argument in favor of the Ristolainen trade last summer.

 

So how has it played out?

 

Let’s start with the good. The Sanheim-Ristolainen pair has been, by the numbers, the Flyers’ best regular defensive pairing at five-on-five. That’s a fact, regardless of which stat one picks.

 

 

And relative to the rest of the Philadelphia blue line corps, Ristolainen’s standalone advanced metrics shape up OK — he’s second at the position in on-ice xG share, third by shot attempt share and fourth by goals share. In other words, by performance, he has been a “top-four” defenseman for this Flyers team. Also, he absolutely has met expectations as a physical presence. Hits may be a somewhat subjective stat tracked differently by each arena, but Ristolainen is tied for third in the NHL among blueliners with 177 hits, and he’s in the top 10 when adjusting for ice time. That matches the eye test as well — Ristolainen dishes out his fair share of punishment on the ice.

 

Now, onto the bad.

 

The Sanheim-Ristolainen pair might be the team’s “best” pair, but that doesn’t mean it’s been legitimately good. The duo has been outshot, outchanced and outscored on the season — they’ve just been less bad than the other pairs the coaching staff has thrown out on the regular. We’re not talking about a dominant duo here.

In addition, there’s a significant amount of evidence that Ristolainen isn’t the one driving the pair’s relative success. Basically, Sanheim has performed well with pretty much every Flyers defenseman this year — and generally better than he has alongside Ristolainen.

 

 

Now, this type of “with or without you” analysis isn’t perfect, but more advanced play-driving measurement models like RAPM — which account for teammate quality, quality of competition, zone starts, basically everything that critics charge that advanced stat analysis ignores — also love Sanheim (92nd percentile among NHL defensemen this season in terms of impact on his team’s even-strength expected goal differential) and are unimpressed by Ristolainen (19th percentile). Every public model that looks to isolate individual player impact on even-strength results has spit out the conclusion that it’s Sanheim dragging up Ristolainen, not the other way around, or even that it’s a symbiotic relationship that elevates both.

 

And what about all that physicality? It’s undeniable that Ristolainen hits — a lot. Yet it’s difficult to argue that a team with the NHL’s sixth-worst record has been “tough to play against” due to his presence. Sure, his hits and general style of play may irritate opponents; after all, no player enjoys getting bruised up by a 6-foot-5 beast of a blueliner. But when a club has lost 38 of 56 games, it’s an inherent fact that they have been easy to play, given the outcomes of their games. That doesn’t mean Ristolainen is the reason for the Flyers’ poor results, just that his acquisition hasn’t fixed that stated flaw.

 

Yet the Flyers’ front office still deemed him worthy of $5.1 million per year for the next five years. Why?

Why the Flyers re-signed Ristolainen

So why is Ristolainen here to stay in Philadelphia? There’s not just one single reason, but if it all had to be boiled down to one overarching force, it’s almost certainly this: the culture.

 

There’s a real belief in fan circles that the Flyers are no longer “The Flyers” anymore, and that’s a sentiment that not only hasn’t gone unnoticed within the organization, it’s also shared by quite a few people within.

 

Part of the issue is simply the team’s on-ice struggles — they’re clearly not a good team right now, and before this past decade’s run of mediocrity (and now outright poor play), they pretty much always were. Some of it boils down to the belief that the organization lost its soul when Ed Snider died. But there’s a stylistic hockey element to all of this, too.

 

The Flyers, in the minds of many, are supposed to be tough, physical, fearsome. Teams should dread coming to Philadelphia, and know that even if they exit with a victory, the Flyers are going to extract their pound of flesh in the process. There’s an organizational belief that the Flyers, in recent years, have strayed from that core identity. Even interim head coach Mike Yeo brings it up regularly in media sessions — the idea that the Flyers have to get back to being tough to play against. It was a big reason why Ristolainen was prioritized last offseason in the first place; it’s also a not-insignificant part of why many in the front office advocated strongly to keep him at this deadline rather than recoup some of the assets lost for him.

 

So no, this isn’t a case of the Flyers’ internal analytics liking Ristolainen a lot more than those in the public sphere, based on what I know about private models and the general data sources that the Flyers analytics team use in theirs. This was a “culture” signing.

Yes, it’s true that Fletcher and other key decision makers believe that a team and a defense in particular needs a mix of styles to fully click, and a physical element is a part of that. It’s also true that Fletcher — who coveted Ristolainen dating back to his time as Wild GM — legitimately believes that Ristolainen is a good NHL defenseman, that the numbers don’t fully quantify what he brings to the table and that on a good team, those numbers will improve anyway. It’s also true that the players in the dressing room truly respect Ristolainen, and believe he’s been a good fit.

 

But it goes beyond that.

 

The Flyers don’t merely want to win. They want to win a certain way. They want to win playing “Flyers Hockey,” in the traditional, Broad Street Bullies sense. And there just aren’t that many players in the modern NHL who bring that throwback kind of element. Tom Wilson, of course, is one, but Washington isn’t trading him. Which brought them to Ristolainen.

 

And in fairness, the oft-ridiculed “guys hate to play against Ristolainen” perception isn’t just a media creation or a sales job by misguided GMs. It’s very real — players all around the league state their dislike in matching up directly with the blueliner, due to his brute strength and constant willingness to mix it up. They’re not all lying and laughing their way to the bank. They truly believe it.

So do the Flyers. Which is a big part of why they so desperately wanted to keep him. They see Ristolainen as an essential part not just of a winning club, but a winning Flyers club — the way they should win.

 

The problem with it all

Stylistically, yes, Ristolainen does fit the traditional definition of the way that the Flyers have historically liked to play. That’s undeniable.

 

My problem in spite of that is simple: I struggle to see how this extension tangibly helps the Flyers achieve their long-term goals, particularly given their current state.

 

Ristolainen clearly isn’t a top-pair defenseman. He proved that in Buffalo, and it’s borne out in Philadelphia as well. Notably, the Flyers themselves don’t even believe he is one — despite Ryan Ellis missing all but four games, Ristolainen has received all of two games on the first pair with Ivan Provorov. The coaches on some level know what he is and what he isn’t.

 

Is he a second-pair quality defenseman? Well, with Sanheim, he kind of has been. But it’s not like his results with Sanheim have been great in the grand scheme of winning, and given Sanheim’s results away from Ristolainen, it’s unlikely that Ristolainen is the one pushing that duo into borderline-passable second-pair territory anyway.

 

By the same token, it’s almost certainly an overstatement to call Ristolainen a non-NHL caliber defenseman, as some particularly snarky stat-oriented individuals on social media do. I don’t even believe Dom Luszczyszyn’s Game Score-driven evaluation of Ristolainen as basically a just-above-league-minimum-salary value player to be accurate as well. There almost certainly is a benefit, if just mentally, of having a big hitter on a club to make the rest of the lineup feel more comfortable, to wear down opponents over the course of a game or playoff series, to fire up the crowd and infuse the team with extra energy. There’s just too much anecdotal evidence and testimonials to disregard those impacts entirely.

[pilldoc]

I split out all the threads with Risto resigning into a new topic...

[flyercanuck]

19 minutes ago, pilldoc said:

One of the best articles read regarding the Risto trade.....

 

https://theathletic.com/3175546/2022/03/10/with-rasmus-ristolainen-extension-flyers-prioritize-style-of-play-over-results-and-it-will-cost-them/?source=dailyemail&campaign=60198300

 

With Rasmus Ristolainen extension, Flyers prioritize style of play over results — and it will cost them....

 

Evaluating Ristolainen’s season

The initial case for acquiring Ristolainen was simple.

No, his tangible results in Buffalo weren’t very good, beyond raw point totals. But he was being used as a heavy-minutes, top-pair defenseman on an awful club, the thinking went. Drop him down the depth chart a bit, inject stability into his game via a better team around him and a regular partner (Travis Sanheim) who complements his skill set and he’ll do a lot better. In addition, he’ll provide a physical element to the roster that had been missing in past seasons, making the team “tougher to play against.” That was, at its core, the argument in favor of the Ristolainen trade last summer.

 

So how has it played out?

 

Let’s start with the good. The Sanheim-Ristolainen pair has been, by the numbers, the Flyers’ best regular defensive pairing at five-on-five. That’s a fact, regardless of which stat one picks.

 

 

And relative to the rest of the Philadelphia blue line corps, Ristolainen’s standalone advanced metrics shape up OK — he’s second at the position in on-ice xG share, third by shot attempt share and fourth by goals share. In other words, by performance, he has been a “top-four” defenseman for this Flyers team. Also, he absolutely has met expectations as a physical presence. Hits may be a somewhat subjective stat tracked differently by each arena, but Ristolainen is tied for third in the NHL among blueliners with 177 hits, and he’s in the top 10 when adjusting for ice time. That matches the eye test as well — Ristolainen dishes out his fair share of punishment on the ice.

 

Now, onto the bad.

 

The Sanheim-Ristolainen pair might be the team’s “best” pair, but that doesn’t mean it’s been legitimately good. The duo has been outshot, outchanced and outscored on the season — they’ve just been less bad than the other pairs the coaching staff has thrown out on the regular. We’re not talking about a dominant duo here.

In addition, there’s a significant amount of evidence that Ristolainen isn’t the one driving the pair’s relative success. Basically, Sanheim has performed well with pretty much every Flyers defenseman this year — and generally better than he has alongside Ristolainen.

 

 

Now, this type of “with or without you” analysis isn’t perfect, but more advanced play-driving measurement models like RAPM — which account for teammate quality, quality of competition, zone starts, basically everything that critics charge that advanced stat analysis ignores — also love Sanheim (92nd percentile among NHL defensemen this season in terms of impact on his team’s even-strength expected goal differential) and are unimpressed by Ristolainen (19th percentile). Every public model that looks to isolate individual player impact on even-strength results has spit out the conclusion that it’s Sanheim dragging up Ristolainen, not the other way around, or even that it’s a symbiotic relationship that elevates both.

 

And what about all that physicality? It’s undeniable that Ristolainen hits — a lot. Yet it’s difficult to argue that a team with the NHL’s sixth-worst record has been “tough to play against” due to his presence. Sure, his hits and general style of play may irritate opponents; after all, no player enjoys getting bruised up by a 6-foot-5 beast of a blueliner. But when a club has lost 38 of 56 games, it’s an inherent fact that they have been easy to play, given the outcomes of their games. That doesn’t mean Ristolainen is the reason for the Flyers’ poor results, just that his acquisition hasn’t fixed that stated flaw.

 

Yet the Flyers’ front office still deemed him worthy of $5.1 million per year for the next five years. Why?

Why the Flyers re-signed Ristolainen

So why is Ristolainen here to stay in Philadelphia? There’s not just one single reason, but if it all had to be boiled down to one overarching force, it’s almost certainly this: the culture.

 

There’s a real belief in fan circles that the Flyers are no longer “The Flyers” anymore, and that’s a sentiment that not only hasn’t gone unnoticed within the organization, it’s also shared by quite a few people within.

 

Part of the issue is simply the team’s on-ice struggles — they’re clearly not a good team right now, and before this past decade’s run of mediocrity (and now outright poor play), they pretty much always were. Some of it boils down to the belief that the organization lost its soul when Ed Snider died. But there’s a stylistic hockey element to all of this, too.

 

The Flyers, in the minds of many, are supposed to be tough, physical, fearsome. Teams should dread coming to Philadelphia, and know that even if they exit with a victory, the Flyers are going to extract their pound of flesh in the process. There’s an organizational belief that the Flyers, in recent years, have strayed from that core identity. Even interim head coach Mike Yeo brings it up regularly in media sessions — the idea that the Flyers have to get back to being tough to play against. It was a big reason why Ristolainen was prioritized last offseason in the first place; it’s also a not-insignificant part of why many in the front office advocated strongly to keep him at this deadline rather than recoup some of the assets lost for him.

 

So no, this isn’t a case of the Flyers’ internal analytics liking Ristolainen a lot more than those in the public sphere, based on what I know about private models and the general data sources that the Flyers analytics team use in theirs. This was a “culture” signing.

Yes, it’s true that Fletcher and other key decision makers believe that a team and a defense in particular needs a mix of styles to fully click, and a physical element is a part of that. It’s also true that Fletcher — who coveted Ristolainen dating back to his time as Wild GM — legitimately believes that Ristolainen is a good NHL defenseman, that the numbers don’t fully quantify what he brings to the table and that on a good team, those numbers will improve anyway. It’s also true that the players in the dressing room truly respect Ristolainen, and believe he’s been a good fit.

 

But it goes beyond that.

 

The Flyers don’t merely want to win. They want to win a certain way. They want to win playing “Flyers Hockey,” in the traditional, Broad Street Bullies sense. And there just aren’t that many players in the modern NHL who bring that throwback kind of element. Tom Wilson, of course, is one, but Washington isn’t trading him. Which brought them to Ristolainen.

 

And in fairness, the oft-ridiculed “guys hate to play against Ristolainen” perception isn’t just a media creation or a sales job by misguided GMs. It’s very real — players all around the league state their dislike in matching up directly with the blueliner, due to his brute strength and constant willingness to mix it up. They’re not all lying and laughing their way to the bank. They truly believe it.

So do the Flyers. Which is a big part of why they so desperately wanted to keep him. They see Ristolainen as an essential part not just of a winning club, but a winning Flyers club — the way they should win.

 

The problem with it all

Stylistically, yes, Ristolainen does fit the traditional definition of the way that the Flyers have historically liked to play. That’s undeniable.

 

My problem in spite of that is simple: I struggle to see how this extension tangibly helps the Flyers achieve their long-term goals, particularly given their current state.

 

Ristolainen clearly isn’t a top-pair defenseman. He proved that in Buffalo, and it’s borne out in Philadelphia as well. Notably, the Flyers themselves don’t even believe he is one — despite Ryan Ellis missing all but four games, Ristolainen has received all of two games on the first pair with Ivan Provorov. The coaches on some level know what he is and what he isn’t.

 

Is he a second-pair quality defenseman? Well, with Sanheim, he kind of has been. But it’s not like his results with Sanheim have been great in the grand scheme of winning, and given Sanheim’s results away from Ristolainen, it’s unlikely that Ristolainen is the one pushing that duo into borderline-passable second-pair territory anyway.

 

By the same token, it’s almost certainly an overstatement to call Ristolainen a non-NHL caliber defenseman, as some particularly snarky stat-oriented individuals on social media do. I don’t even believe Dom Luszczyszyn’s Game Score-driven evaluation of Ristolainen as basically a just-above-league-minimum-salary value player to be accurate as well. There almost certainly is a benefit, if just mentally, of having a big hitter on a club to make the rest of the lineup feel more comfortable, to wear down opponents over the course of a game or playoff series, to fire up the crowd and infuse the team with extra energy. There’s just too much anecdotal evidence and testimonials to disregard those impacts entirely.

 

 So to compound the stupidity of trading for, and then re-signing Ristolainen, who do you think Fletcher trades...Sanheim or Provorov? 

[flyer4ever]

7 minutes ago, flyercanuck said:

 

 So to compound the stupidity of trading for, and then re-signing Ristolainen, who do you think Fletcher trades...Sanheim or Provorov? 

Risto and Yandle will be the shut down pair next season. Chuck's quick turnaround.

[BobbyClarkeFan16]

8 hours ago, Pedo 228 ERQS said:

Sanhiem is worse than him on everything you just stated and he's getting 4.65 m a year

Jesus Christ, homer. Sanheim is infinitely better than Shitstaintolainen. Ass-to-Mouth should be thanking Sanheim for him getting that huge contract.

[pilldoc]

30 minutes ago, flyercanuck said:

 

 So to compound the stupidity of trading for, and then re-signing Ristolainen, who do you think Fletcher trades...Sanheim or Provorov? 

 

If I had to pick ....I think it is a 50/50 probability that he Fletch does stupid and moves Provy ....

[BobbyClarkeFan16]

31 minutes ago, flyercanuck said:

 

 So to compound the stupidity of trading for, and then re-signing Ristolainen, who do you think Fletcher trades...Sanheim or Provorov? 

Schmuck Felcher will trade both.

[ruxpin]

41 minutes ago, flyercanuck said:

 

 So to compound the stupidity of trading for, and then re-signing Ristolainen, who do you think Fletcher trades...Sanheim or Provorov? 

Provorov.  I'll personally hate it, but it gets bigger bang and clears out suddenly-needed cap space.

[ruxpin]

12 minutes ago, BobbyClarkeFan16 said:

Jesus Christ, homer. Sanheim is infinitely better than Shitstaintolainen. Ass-to-Mouth should be thanking Sanheim for him getting that huge contract.

This, as they say 

 

1000x this.  Forget the lead paint. I'd go directly to portable oxygen.

[ruxpin]

13 minutes ago, BobbyClarkeFan16 said:

Schmuck Felcher will trade both.

For Chara.  Because he plays 19th century Flyers hockey (and played in the 19th century).

[flyercanuck]

8 minutes ago, ruxpin said:

Provorov.  I'll personally hate it, but it gets bigger bang and clears out suddenly-needed cap space.

 

 Either will likely make me stop watching til Fletcher leaves. I haven't seen a Flyer game in 4 months now. I watched more Flyer games back when the only time I could was when they played Toronto or Buffalo.

[Pedo 228 ERQS]

4 hours ago, ruxpin said:

Have you ever considered having the paint in your house tested for lead?

Ok lets talk numbers not just this year 

Ristolainen  games-592  goals-48 assits- 211  points- 259

 

Sanhiem  games-310  goals-26 assits- 79  points-105

[OccamsRazor]

53 minutes ago, flyercanuck said:

 

 Either will likely make me stop watching til Fletcher leaves. I haven't seen a Flyer game in 4 months now. I watched more Flyer games back when the only time I could was when they played Toronto or Buffalo.

 

 

They signed Risto to protect their players and deter the cheap shots from happening...

 

 

...see it works.

[Pedo 228 ERQS]

1 hour ago, BobbyClarkeFan16 said:

Jesus Christ, homer. Sanheim is infinitely better than Shitstaintolainen. Ass-to-Mouth should be thanking Sanheim for him getting that huge contract.

Yes if we're talking about figure skating then he us better

[OccamsRazor]

Risto please watch and take notes is it possible to ever expect some sort of defense in your end???

 

 

In fact all the Flyers defensemen should take not but especially RR....Yandle you're hopeless.