The New Jersey Devils should trade Pavel Zacha

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Today’s post was written by C.J. TURTORO. You can find him on Twitter @CJTDevil.

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Before we get too bogged down into statistical minutia and philosophies of rebuilding, let’s just make state the thesis of this piece in concise and salient terms.

The pillars of the titular claim for this piece are twofold.

1) Pavel Zacha’s value is the highest it’s ever been, and that’s largely not due to increased skill.

2) Pavel Zacha is more valuable on the market than on the ice. 

These two facts are enough to do all of the legwork in arriving at the “trade Zacha” conclusion. So let’s review them.

1. Peaking Value Due, in Part, to Luck 

If you or your friends are big Pavel Zacha fans, and are triggered by this piece, the likely culprit for that reaction is Zacha’s point production. So let’s take a bit of a closer look at Zacha’s point totals.

Coming into the season, Zacha was producing 0.83 assists per hour at even-strength and 2.54 on the powerplay. This year, he’s improved to 0.92 at even-strengh, but fallen off to 2.35 on the powerplay. 

So, as it turns out, his assist rate is largely unchanged. How can this be, though? He’s played fewer minutes so far than any season in his career and is already at his 2nd highest assist total. If his powerplay is down by 0.2 per hour and his even-strength is up by 0.1 per hour, how does that produce an increase in total assist rate?

The difference is utilization. Despite playing a career-low in total minutes due to the shortened season, Pavel has already topped his career-high in powerplay minutes. A whopping 16% of his minutes have been on the man advantage. So, even though his PP production declined, his total numbers look increased because even terrible PP production will always be better than even-strength. When we view his breakout season, we need to adjust for the change in his utilization.

I’m sure the particularly ornery readers will note that I’ve left out goals until this point. Why? Am I trying to ignore that Pavel Zacha has become a goal scoring machine, putting up a career-high 15 goals in a career low 47 games?

Well, first, let’s recall that Zacha is playing more minutes per game, and a higher percent of the minutes are on the powerplay. But true enough, even after accounting for that, he’s still producing at career high rates!

The reason I’ve separated goal scoring is because when it comes to that metric, we need to ask ourselves, is “is this likely to continue”?

Based on the quantity and quality of his scoring chances, Pavel Zacha should have 9.71 goals, but he’s scored 15. That’s a 50% overachievement. Now, that’s not an impossible rate of conversion, but it would put Zacha in the company of guys like Steven Stamkos, David Pastrnak, and Patrik Laine.

If we have a shooter of that skill on our team, that’s excellent news! But is Zacha that skilled? History suggests no. Let’s break down Zacha’s goals per xG by strength as well.

Zacha’s powerplay shooting has always been quite good and that seems likely to continue. His even-strength shooting has never exceeded expectation at any point in his career until his 150% overachievement this season. Shooting talent is a thing.

On the powerplay, Zacha has historically shown it; at even-strength, he has not. In the aggregate, Moneypuck has Zacha’s shooting talent estimated at 2.3% below average, Hockeyviz has him at 2% above average.

Coming into this season, Zacha had never topped a half a point per game. This year he’s a 0.72. But what happens to those numbers if we assume career average distribution of playing time (PP vs EV vs SH) and career-average shooting in each situation. 

So when adjusting for these types of anomalous features of his production, Pavel Zacha’s massive 2021 breakout campaign has produced a mammoth point-per-game improvement since last year of … 0 points.

It’s not that Zacha hasn’t improved as a scorer at all. His scoring his first three seasons was definitely below that of his past two. It’s just that the improvement into this season is massively overstated due to his luck and usage.

So, whatever you thought of Zacha as a scorer last season, you should think roughly the same about him this season.

2. Market value vs Actual value

There are a few attributes that GMs in the NHL will somewhat reliably overspend for. It’s not hard to figure out what those things might be. We have plenty of evidence for what GMs value in hockey players -- they’re called contracts. 

When Luke and Josh Younggren developed their contract projection model, they confirmed what their research predecessors and the general consensus had hypothesized:

“Basically, players get paid based on their playing time and offense (game score / A1 / G). We’ve tried out various metrics over the years to account for defense or all-around player (like WAR), and the fact remains that GMs/teams do not pay players, overall, for their defense. A player who never gets injured, plays a lot of minutes, and “points” is one that teams love historically.”

Now, the model to predict a contract involves a lot more moving parts because of age, term, etc. most of which we’re not interested in here, so let’s do our own naive model.

We’ll take the ATOI and Game Score (via HockeyStatCards) and compare them to the GAR via Evolving-Hockey. We’ll standardize the units (z-scores) and find the difference between them to determine the value over market for each player.

I did this for the entire NHL but comparing across teams, positions, and usage was a little complicated. I just chose the top 12 Devils forwards in terms of GP to make the comparison apples-to-apples. Here are the results.

One way to interpret this is that Zacha’s actual value (according to GAR) is about a half a standard deviation lower than his market value (using this naive metric). The market considers Zacha around the 55th percentile, and he’s actually closer to the 33rd.

And if you think about this for any longer than a few seconds … of course Zacha is the most overvalued player on the team. 

He was selected 6th overall, he has finally pulled his faceoff percentage (another overvalued thing) above 50, he plays in all three situations, and he’s the team point-leader on a roster that includes Jack Hughes. That is a hell of a pitch to make to potential suitors!

Those are all good things, though, right? Why would you want to give up someone that’s good at all that? The short answer is ... the Devils simply suck when Pavel Zacha is on the ice. And to answer your next question -- yes, they suck more than they normally do.

Over the past three seasons, the Devils have been outscored by 39 goals when Pavel Zacha is on the ice. That is the 4th largest number among all NHL skaters behind only Riley Sheahan, Chris Tierney, and Andreas Athanasiou. If Zacha is so great, how come the Devils seem to lose the battle in so many of his shifts? Scoring points is great, but my goal isn’t for Zacha to score, it’s for the Devils to score. And, ideally, for the Devils to score more than their opponents. When Pav is on the ice, that seems to happen very rarely.

I wrote about the trouble beneath the surface of Pavel Zacha’s performance earlier this season and most of it still holds true. Almost every winger gets worse results when centered by Zacha this season.

It was suggested to me that the fact that this doesn’t hold true for centers may be an indication that he is a good player, but just one that belongs on the wing.

Many make specific note of the success of the Bratt-Hischier-Zacha line. This is a popular caveat so let me just say a little about that argument before wrapping up here:

1. Centers are worth more than wingers on the market, so if we think he’s a winger, but can market him as a center, he’s still worth trading even if he’s not as overvalued as described in this piece.

2. The “Centers improve with Zacha” phenomenon is a recent one with a very small sample. Nico Hischier’s goal ratio and expected goal ratio are better with Zacha this year, but are both better without Zacha if we extend the sample size to include the past two seasons.

3. Literally anyone would play well alongside Nico Hischier and Jesper Bratt. That trio first got substantial minutes last season. In those two years, Nico and Jesper have performed better both in terms of goals and expected goals WITHOUT Zacha on their wing-- they’re a minus-2 with him and a plus-5 without him.

Concluding Thoughts

The Devils have had a couple years of talent exodus. That has thrust players into increased roles that they hadn’t been in previously. Whenever that happens, a few players will be box core beneficiaries without actually needing to improve their play much. This has happened to Zacha in his deployment.

In addition to that, he’s either suddenly become Alex Ovechkin, or he’s been an extremely fortunate shooter this season (particularly at even-strength) and his goal totals have been inflated as a result.

What’s more, Zacha’s point totals were always deceptive of his actual on-ice impact. He’s always given back more on the defensive end than he’s produced on the offensive end. So these lucky quirks of the season inflated what was already a market overvaluation of a player like Zacha.

To close here, I’m sure you’re all wondering “If we should trade Zacha, what we should get back for him?” My short answer to that question is this: it pretty much doesn’t matter.

When your market value is as inflated as Zacha’s it’s pretty hard to lose the trade. If you own tulips at the absolute peak of the mania, do you ask what you’re gonna buy with your earnings? No, you cash them in while you have the chance. 

Maybe Edmonton wants scoring help when McDavid and Draisaitl aren’t on the ice and they’ve grown disillusioned with Ethan Bear (Todd here…I love this idea!).

Maybe the Rangers are overflowing with blueliners so they’d be willing to dish out middle-pairing Ryan Lindgren for center help that they desperately need.

Maybe a cap-strapped team like the Lighting likes his small price tag and is willing to give up a player-pick package in exchange for the relief.

Maybe Zacha can be the one who is part of a package to acquire a bigger asset from someone else. Or maybe something I haven’t even thought of.

But that’s exactly my point. Anything that’s close to market value for Zacha will result in more on-ice value walking in the door than out of it.

Zacha is an ripe asset, and the Devils should trade it before it rots.