I Got A Little Mad About Sean Couturier Again

I have a confession - I got a little triggered this afternoon. It was this tweet from my boy Mikey (great follow for Flyers and non-Flyers content):

Dunno why it popped in my head but I remember reading sum1's tweet not so long ago that said theyd rather have Couturier over Mark Scheifele

— Mikey D, O&BP 🤙🏼 (@MikeyD_OandBP) September 25, 2017

I'm a Couturier guy. I feel like I go to bat for him all the time against people who think he stinks. I certainly don't think Mikey believes that Couturier is "bad", just that Scheifele is better than him.

And from a scoring standpoint, it's hard to argue. They were drafted back-to-back in 2011 (which is why this fucking comparison comes up so frequently). Couturier started in the NHL immediately, and his two-year headstart over Scheifele means he's totaled 110 more games played. But despite that difference, Scheifele has still outscored Couturier by 20 goals, 16 assists, and 36 points.

When you boil it down to raw scoring, yes, you would obviously rather have 0.96 goals per 60 minutes than 0.58. You don't need to be an Ivy League economics grad to grasp that general logic (shoutout Charlie O'Connor).

....Stephen A. Smith voice....

HOWEVER.

Couturier's value is always extremely underappreciated by raw scoring metrics for three reasons.

1. Teammates
2. Competition
3. Power play

I'm going to try to be brief and bang out summaries for all three. First, let's look at the guys with whom he shares the ice. I'll resort back to those raw scoring numbers so we can look at how much ice time Scheifele and Couturier get with their teams top ten scorers (please note that Scheifele led the Jets in scoring next year and Couturier was sixth on the Flyers):

(Please do not utilize the bit in parentheses there in an argument against me, thank you.)

Scheifele plays with Wheeler, Laine, Ehlers, and Byfuglien each about half the time he's on the ice. I'd have to get a more mathematically-talented person to tell me how much of his ice time is spent with one of those top-four guys.

What I can tell you with absolutely certainty is it's a shit-ton more time than Couturier plays with the Flyers' top four. I mean he didn't even play enough minutes with Claude Giroux and Wayne Simmonds last season to qualify for HockeyViz's WOWY chart.

I think perhaps the best illustration of the Teammate disparity is this stylish Excel 2003 plot:

Sure, Couturier spent quite a bit of time with Philly's number one scorer (Voracek) last year. But Scheifele spent even more than that amount of time with each of Winnipeg's four top scorers. I'm going to disappoint my high school calculus teacher and try to reference area under the curve here - Couturier's would be about half the size of Scheifele's.

As for competition, that has been well-documented on this website. Couturier consistently takes his band of whoever-the-fuck-his-coach-tells-him-to-play-with into battle against opposing teams' top lines, and he routinely shuts his opponents down completely.

And as for the power play, I would recommend Charlie's latest piece from Flyers training camp. He references the second power play unit with Couturier, Konecny, Provorov, Jordan Weal, and Nolan Patrick. I certainly think the additions of Weal and Patrick (with the new coach behind the scenes) should make this second unit more dangerous.

I also would like to state for the record that I think Couturier should be the net-front guy and Patrick should take the "Giroux" spot on the wall. That seems like a simple fix.