Oh my, here we go again. I’ve already gone into Douglas Murray in-depth at even strength, and shorthanded, and it ain’t pretty. There’s not much to go over for Murray that hasn’t already been debated to death, but we’ll cover it quickly.
Murray is very slow, like slower than Hal Gill, and without the good sense to play cautiously. This leads to a lot of bad defensive reads, especially odd man rushes against. Murray is a big hitter, but he has to actually catch someone to do it. He provides essentially no offense to speak of and has seven career goals in 465 games.
He played a little bit better in Pittsburgh than he did in San Jose, but he was still very bad. So what can we expect?
In the following graph, the blue line is Murray’s even-strength Fenwick percentage from 2007 to 2013, the red line is his team’s even-strength Fenwick percentage without him on the ice, and the green line is Murray’s offensive-zone start percentage, giving us insight into his usage and role. All statistics are at even strength, and all are rolling 10-game averages. What this means is that aside from the first 10 points in the graph, every point represents a 10-game sample, giving us a better grasp of trends.
With all that information on one graph, it can look a little messy and be tough to decipher, so I’ve included trend lines for each statistic. To understand the trend lines, blue turns into black, red turns into yellow, and green turns into purple. The x-axis is simply the games to represent time, and the y-axis is the percentage in decimal form, and the placement of the y-axis is the beginning of the 2013 season.
Would you believe that Murray used to be good? In fact he was so good for two years, that even though he’s been clipping along at around 40% Fenwick for a season, his trend line has only just now fallen below par. What does this mean? Does it mean that he can rebound and be good?
No.
The only way Murray is going to look good is if he’s paired with Subban, and that will drag Subban down at even strength like crazy. There is literally nothing, nothing that I can find to justify this player ever being put in the lineup. A raw rookie would be better, even one of the lower-end ones. Darren Dietz might be better.
Jarred Tinordi being so dominant during the preseason was the best thing that could have possibly happened, because he should push Murray out of the lineup. Marc Bergevin clearly thought he was getting the player Murray used to be, but he should have done more homework on this one.
