Hall of Not Bad, Volume 2: Shawn Glade (and Ryan Kastelic!)

[Gustav 6,322]

 

If you can't tell, I'm particularly drawn to players I remember back in the days when I joined the league in S65. At that time, @ShawnGlade was GM of Davos and still on his first player, the creatively-named...Shawn Glade. As a side note, I can say that as a former GM in both leagues (yes, I said both; fight me), it's rare to see players with the same name as their agents' usernames stick around and be productive, so some congratulations is in order here for exceeding expectations before we even get into the article.

 

I mostly remember Glade playing for Davos, which is somewhat curious considering the fact that he never finished a season with the team (I did a double take upon realizing that Davos doesn't make a single appearance on his player page for that reason). When I first learned about the player, at least, he played for Davos, and the sig Shawn used at the time was a Davos one (which I made a meme out of at one point). Anyway, we're going off on a bit of a tangent here. I also remember Glade as one of the league's good, established defenders who, in the eyes of a pure noob, was someone whose build I should pay attention to and try to emulate. In recent seasons, he's popped up in a couple places around the site, and his agent firmly believes that he should be inducted into the VHL Hall of Fame.

 

A note about my own bias: when I popped open Glade's player page for the first time, I more or less concluded that I didn't think he was HoF-worthy. That said, though, I wouldn't mind trying to make the case because I want to give him the benefit of the doubt (and I at least think he deserves Hall of Not Bad status). 

 

 

To analyze Glade's career, we'll compare it to the following players:

 

-Joseph McWolf: a HoF player. A first-gen in S63, McWolf put together a full 8-season career in which he won two Labattes and a Valiq.

-Maxim Kovalchuk: a HoF player. Starting in S62, Kovalchuk switched to forward after five seasons but managed to impress on defense in that time, winning a Labatte, a Valiq, and two Wyldes. Here, we'll just consider his stats on defense.

-Ryan Kastelic: NOT a HoF player despite being the current all-time leader in TPE. He would win a Cup in S63 with Riga, but never put up any individual awards. Like Kovalchuk, Kastelic also switched positions, but has enough of a body of work present for it to be comparable.

 

 

Where to start, where to start...I suppose we'll start with points, because this league has a weird obsession with offense above all else regardless of position.

 

 

From the standpoint of points, we see everyone above Glade. You'll notice, though, that McWolf had a longer career (which is a bonus, but also tends to skew the numbers if we speck purely in terms of totals). Ultra-nerds will also notice that Kovalchuk is the only one of these players to play in S62, an abnormally high-scoring season for the time, and that this likely contributes to his point total starting as high above the others as it does.

 

What should we do to compensate? Here, I'm going to introduce the concept of what I'm going to call the "Glade Window", or a view of each player's career in as similar of a chunk of time to Shawn Glade's full 6-season career. What this means is the following:

 

-McWolf's stats will be evaluated from S64-69 (his 2nd-7th post-draft seasons, analogous to Glade's)

-Kastelic's from S63-67 (his 5 seasons on defense, no change from the above)

-Kovalchuk's from S63-66 (we'll start from his 2nd season to exclude S62 as an outlier)

 

And what this gets us is the following:

 

 

We'll see this doesn't change much at the moment about Glade's numbers. We do see that Kovalchuk's early career success can't just be attributed to S62--as he's still on pace above the others--and that Glade's point total still falls short of McWolf's.

 

Well, all right then. We've established that Glade doesn't quite stack up to the others in this article in terms of points. We are talking about defense, though, so let's find out what happens when we look at our main defensive stats.

 

 

 

I don't care for hits as a metric to evaluate many players, because in many cases, it's just a question of play style and whether the builder chooses to dump points into Checking. In this case, we see McWolf running away with it on both charts, and Kastelic trailing far behind--but if memory serves right, that's just because one upgraded CK and the other didn't. What I will note is that Glade does project to a respectable hit total, around 1,200 for an 8-season career if I'm eyeballing it correctly, but that isn't mind-blowing enough to make a huge difference. Let's move on.

 

*this graph is wrong for McWolf's first season--I don't know why--but it gets his eventual career total right.

 

 

SB is a stat that I love for defensemen, especially those on good teams, and we can see that Glade isn't that far off from the pace set by McWolf and company. He's still under it, though, and when we look at career totals, he's quite a bit under it. 

 

So far, there's nothing to suggest that Glade belongs in the Hall of Fame, or that his career ended up being any better than any of the others we've looked at. But we've only looked at three numbers, so let's look at more, shall we?

 

 

 

Doesn't this just throw a wrench into our plans to exclude Glade from the conversation? Here we have our first stat where Glade does stack up to the rest--though he comes in third among the group in totals, he's second when we adjust for a view of others over Glade's career. That is to say, when Glade was playing, he was a better goal-scorer than McWolf and Kastelic. A couple notes about this, though:

 

-The claim that Glade "paved the way for two-way defensemen" or that it "just wasn't a thing at the time" is false--if anyone did that (not that I know enough about league history to know if anyone did in the first place), it was Kovalchuk doing it better a season earlier.

-This also makes Assists vs. Time a potentially very interesting graph--if Glade comes in last in points and 2nd-3rd in goals, there's probably a big drop-off between Glade and others in assists that doesn't favor Glade too strongly. I didn't care enough to plot this, but it follows that one relationship would lead to another.

 

So...not a Hall-of-Famer?

 

Hold off just a second more.

 

I remembered this article from a long, long time ago in which @Victor dropped a bit of information that one might find potentially useful--at the conclusion of his career, Glade held the all-time record for goals by a defenseman in the playoffs. Playoff stats are worth looking into, after all.

 

 

I've done what's called normalizing for these numbers--hit totals are obviously higher than goal totals, so what I've done is a simple division of all the numbers in a given category by the highest number in that category. For each, the leader in that category will be shown at 1 here, while the others are represented as proportions of that total (for example, the leader putting up 100 hits will be shown as 1, while someone who put up 50 will be at 0.5).

 

Glade leads the group in every single category. Impressive, right?

 

Well, sure, but we've just spent an entire article comparing these other players to Glade in the amount of time they and Glade had to play with. What if Glade just simply had more time?

 

That was the case here, for sure--Glade the GM was criticized for trading his own player to contenders back in the day on more than one occasion. Without comment on whether this was the right move (and I wasn't involved enough to know the semantics one way or another at the time anyway), this led to Glade the player, well, playing for very good teams with a lot of playoff time. It got him, on average, a championship every other season, and he played 72 playoff games compared to, for example, 34 for Kovalchuk or 37 for McWolf. 

 

What if we look at the above stats on a per-game basis?

 

 

In a given playoff matchup, Glade was still the best goal-scorer, but he was far from the best defensive player and he still manages to fall short of Kovalchuk in points. It's true that the same logic I used with McWolf above applies to Glade to some extent--total numbers do mean something--but when we look at his overall performance within those total numbers, we get a perfect 72 games that looks like this:

 

72 GP | 25 G | 49 A | 74 P | +14 | 155 HIT | 115 SB

 

Which is still a very good body of work for a defenseman in the mid-60s, for sure--it just isn't good enough to make up for the (relative) shortcomings of the rest of his career.

 

 

Overall, I think it's safe to conclude that Shawn Glade is not a Hall of Fame player--though it isn't for lack of trying.

 

 

I hope you enjoy this series, because I'd like to write more at some point! Always nice to have people encourage me to take a look at their old player, as was the case here.

 

 

Others mentioned:

@McWolf

@Enorama

@Banackock

 

1,602 words | 3 weeks

[Nykonax 1,563]

shawn glade also traded himself 4 times to win cups

[ShawnGlade 1,010]

9 minutes ago, Nykonax said:

shawn glade also traded himself 4 times to win cups

I know you love this narrative, other than the fact that yknow, Davos needed a two-way defensemen which *gasp* Shawn Glade was. Neither time did it work out, and both times only one team offered for him. Didn't even win the cup the first time I was traded, I re-signed because I loved Beaviss. Ask yourself, if I was that desperate for cups, why would I not just request a trade to a certain team? Why would I give up assets on the team THAT I MANAGE to do it?

[ShawnGlade 1,010]

Good write-up, a lot of my claims that "I paved the way for two-way dmen" were built on what I thought was true, but actually seeing the numbers and comparables, I'll admit that maybe Glade wasn't the top-leaguer I remember. I will say though, I still think Glade was *overall* the best playoff performer of all these players. IIRC, he scored 3 G7 OT winners in his career, which I know clutch-ness isn't much of a factor but it's something I guess.

 

Overall I really enjoyed reading this though, and I just know an insane amount of time went into this, it's awesome to see deep dives of older players regardless of who it is

[Nykonax 1,563]

1 hour ago, ShawnGlade said:

Why would I give up assets on the team THAT I MANAGE to do it?

cause ur desperate for a cup what

[Enorama 2,030]

Is it time that we talk about Kastelic having a fair amount more era-adjusted points than Tsujimoto despite spending half a career on defense?

[Gustav 6,322]

3 minutes ago, Enorama said:

Is it time that we talk about Kastelic having a fair amount more era-adjusted points than Tsujimoto despite spending half a career on defense?

 

No

[Enorama 2,030]

4 minutes ago, Gustav said:

 

No

 

 

[dlamb 1,324]

29 minutes ago, Enorama said:

 

 

wtf fuck u

[Enorama 2,030]

10 minutes ago, dlamb said:

wtf fuck u

 

You're at least better than Taro!

[Gustav 6,322]

5 hours ago, Enorama said:

 

You're at least better than Taro!

 

Though not more valuable 

[McWolf 3,114]

sure two way defensemen weren't a thing for the first 62 seasons of the VHL

[Daniel Janser 2,111]

14 hours ago, Enorama said:

 

 

Just for my curiosity: how do you adjust the points in accordance with the era?

[Enorama 2,030]

2 hours ago, Daniel Janser said:

Just for my curiosity: how do you adjust the points in accordance with the era?

 

The regular era adjustment creates a ratio for each season based on how much gross scoring there was in that season compared to the average. Then the players point total in a given season is multiplied by that ratio to inflate or deflate it as necessary. 

 

The alternate adjustment does the same, but just uses the top 10 scorers points totals instead of league-wide scoring. 

[Nykonax 1,563]

31 minutes ago, Enorama said:

compared to the average

whats the average

[Daniel Janser 2,111]

27 minutes ago, Enorama said:

 

The regular era adjustment creates a ratio for each season based on how much gross scoring there was in that season compared to the average. Then the players point total in a given season is multiplied by that ratio to inflate or deflate it as necessary. 

 

The alternate adjustment does the same, but just uses the top 10 scorers points totals instead of league-wide scoring. 

Okay just to get it correctly: you took the average points scored per season of 84 season. lets say this is 100 to keep it simple.

Then you compare it to the average points scored for the respective season you want to evaluate. Lets say for the sake of argument an assumed season had 80.

 

If then a player had scored 50 points in that assumed season you would adjust it to 62.5 (50*100/80)?

 

And the same for the other but you only take the top-10 scorer of each season into consideration?

 

[Enorama 2,030]

8 minutes ago, Daniel Janser said:

Okay just to get it correctly: you took the average points scored per season of 84 season. lets say this is 100 to keep it simple.

Then you compare it to the average points scored for the respective season you want to evaluate. Lets say for the sake of argument an assumed season had 80.

 

If then a player had scored 50 points in that assumed season you would adjust it to 62.5 (50*100/80)?

 

And the same for the other but you only take the top-10 scorer of each season into consideration?

 

 

Yes, except for the first example I took total goals per team, not the sum of all players. This way I was able to capture bot goals as well, for seasons when bots got actual playing time on some teams. 

[Victor 10,828]

What a lovely source you unearthed there with 2 beautiful shots at both Shawn and Dil hidden between some juicy facts. Masterfully done.

[Gustav 6,322]

Week 2

[Gustav 6,322]

Week 3