Saying Farewell – Jarret Stoll
- Updated: July 21, 2015
Last week, we said farewell to Justin Williams with a heavy heart. Williams, as we saw, was a remarkable, clutch yet underrated player with great character who made enormous contributions to the Kings right up until his very last game with the team. Today, though he’s not officially gone, we’ll say farewell to Jarret Stoll, who almost certainly will be in another uniform next year. Now, savor all those nice things I just said about Williams, because it’s about to get negative real quick. Stoll and Williams may be the same age (33), but that’s pretty much where the similarities end.
This is going to be a rough review for Stoll, so I’ll start by saying 5 nice things about him:
1) Jarret Stoll was, once again, a pretty durable player, only missing a handful of games.
2) He does a decent job of suppressing shots against.
3) He is still a halfway decent option in the faceoff circle.
4) He is a handsome man.
5) He… is… well liked by his teammates?
I actually don’t really know if he’s liked by his teammates (he seemed to be), but I’m just grasping at straws at this point, because Jarret Stoll had a no good, terrible, awful, train wreck of a season (that carried into the off-season), and has been in steady decline since 2011.
Let’s start with looking at a high-level snapshot of his 2014-2015.
Stoll, your production. Woof.
Oof. Well, I’ll reiterate one of the nice things I said about him: he’s not bad at suppressing shots against. His UA CA60 (Corsi against) is consistent with that of an average second line player, and reinforces his perception as a defensive specialist. But the rest of the data is so cover-your-eyes, hide-the-kids type of bad that it doesn’t matter. He was basically of no help whatsoever in creating offense for the Kings, and as a whole, was a basically replacement-level, 4th line type player.
The scary part about this is that it wasn’t like this was one bad year that he could bounce back from. This has been a gradual decline since the 2010-2011 season.
That’d be fun to ski down!
Aging poorly, graphed
In this last graph, ideally, you would like to be in the upper left part of the graph with a giant, dark blue circle. This would mean you’re getting big minutes and are significantly out-shooting the opposition despite facing tough competition and unfavorable zone starts. The worst possible outcome is to be in the bottom right with a big dark-brown circle. This would mean you’re getting big minutes but are being significantly outshot (relative to your teammates) despite facing easy competition and getting easy zone starts. Oh, would you look at that? There’s Stoll with a big brown circle in the bottom right for 2014-2015. As you can see by the connecting lines, he has been trending in the wrong direction since 2010-2011.
It gets worse. Stoll, it turns out, was so bad that he basically dragged down any teammate that shared the ice with him.
Jarret Stoll: Human Anchor
This is called a WOWY (with or without you) graph. This tells us how Stoll affected the play of his teammates, and vice versa. The closer a player gets to the bottom right of the graph, the better he’s performing. As you can see from the key to the right of the graph, a red box represents a player’s performance when not on the ice with Stoll. I’ve circled a cluster of red boxes with numbers in them down in the bottom right corner. What this is telling us is that literally every single Kings’ player was better last year without Stoll! In some cases, like that of Dwight King (#74), they are astronomically better players when they are away from Stoll.
“But wait a minute,” you say, “he’s not supposed to be an offensive threat. He’s supposed to play defense, kill penalties, win faceoffs, do the dirty work.” True, but he didn’t even do these things well. He committed too many penalties, putting the Kings on the PK way too often, and he was only 8th on the team in shorthanded minutes. Oh yeah, and about that “win faceoffs” thing.
Even the one area where he was elite – in the faceoff circle – he is now merely average, after taking a precipitous nosedive in 2014-2015. If you can’t score, can’t generate offense for others, are pinned in your own zone all the time, don’t kill penalties, don’t produce on the powerplay and don’t win faceoffs, you’d be excused if you were channeling the Bobs from Office Space.
The last time Stoll was a free agent after the 2012 season, some thought Andrei Loktionov might reasonably replace Stoll’s production for a fraction of the price, but the Kings opted to re-up him for 3 years, $9m. The Kings are once again in a position to replace Stoll with a younger, cheaper talent, and this time it seems certain they will do it. Not only has Stoll’s decline become even more obvious 3 years later, but Nick Shore, the player slotted to replace him, is much more similar to Stoll in style than Loktionov was. The horribly timed arrest for possession of molly and cocaine was merely the final nail in the coffin.
So what can the Kings reasonably expect from Nick Shore? He’s a 23-year-old in his first full season, so probably not a whole lot. Lucky for him, Stoll set the bar about as low as it could be for a 3rd line center. Shore put up better scoring and assist rates in limited minutes, and was also excellent in the faceoff circle for a first year player, at 53.8%. Here are the two side by side (Stoll on top, Shore on bottom):
Stoll vs. Shore
Shore got very favorable zone starts and easier competition than Stoll did, but at least he did something with those minutes. He didn’t really get enough time for us to draw many conclusions, but we do know that, unlike Stoll, he at least had a positive effect on his two most frequent line mates: Jordan Nolan and Kyle Clifford. It’s not unreasonable to expect Shore to be better than Stoll right away, and he’s only bound to improve as the season progresses.
It feels wrong ripping Stoll so badly, as he made great contributions to the Kings a few years ago, and his goal to send the Kings past the Canucks in 2012 is a pivotal moment in their history. But many Kings fans have expressed desire to bring him back, and that is just madness. The Kings are much better off with him on another team.
We’ll end this one on a happier note, showing a clip of his aforementioned goal against the Canucks. Fare thee well, Stolly!
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