Dear Elliotte Friedman,

Hello. How are you? I’m good. Almost done Christmas shopping, so that’s nice.

Anyway, I write to ask you to stop talking about the idea of the Washington Capitals trading for Brock Boeser, especially in exchange for Anthony Mantha. Please consider. In exchange for your renunciation, I will donate 69 United States dollars to the charity of your choice.

We’ve been on this beat for awhile, most recently when Friedman called Washington a “dark horse” in the running for Boeser, who has been empowered by Vancouver to find a new team. Friedman expanded on the story on Friday’s 32 Thoughts podcast.

“I do think the Capitals are one of the teams that have interest in Boeser,” Friedman said. “There was someone from another team in the Capitals’ division who said to me today that they think that the Capitals have had interested in Boeser before.”

Washington’s prior interest in Boeser was rumored at last season’s trade deadline.

More worryingly, ELF seemed to suggest this scenario isn’t entirely hypothetical. “Some people have said this is a complicated deal that will take time.” The context implied to me that Friedman meant a deal for Washington to get Boeser specifically, not just any deal by Vancouver to move on from Boeser in general.

Friedman was clear in saying that the idea of Mantha being part of a deal was his opinion.

Boeser, 25, was once on the cusp of stardom. Runner-up for the rookie of the year in 2018, Boeser was good for at least twenty goals and twenty assists in shortened seasons. But the Minnesotan seems to have lost his scoring touch.

Here are Boeser’s goal totals at even strength and the power play.

But I think I learn more seeing his five-on-five production as rates.

Boeser’s goal scoring has cratered. If he wasn’t getting so many secondary assists (which are basically statistical noise), he’d be looking even more worse. His individual offense rates (shots attempted, expected goals, etc.) remain stable, so the drop could be explained by shooting percentages, which have fallen from above 10 percent in seasons past to under six percent this year.

But that’s just the dashboard. What’s going on below the water line is far more critical in understanding how bad this trade would be. Here’s how HockeyViz estimates Boeser’s impact on play. Red blobs mean more shots come from those locations on this ice — so red up top is good and below it’s bad.

In short, Boeser weakens the offense by four percentage points and weakens the defense by three percentage points. Further, he is unremarkable at finishing his own chances or helping his teammates finish theirs (“setting”). Unlike with his diminishing offense, this has always been the case with Boeser: he simply does not drive play. And it’s gotten worse.

Evolving Hockey measures players’ contributions to a team over the whole of a season as “standings points above average.” By that metric, Boeser has plummeted.

Once a really valuable player, it’s no longer accurate to call Boeser mediocre. He’s south of that. And that makes any equivalence to Anthony Mantha kind of ridiculous.

Whatever you make of Mantha’s goal totals and his frustrating usage (i.e. bottom six, no power-play time), it’s undeniable that he’s one of the team’s most reliable drivers of play. Here’s that same HockeyViz impact chart, but this time for Mantha:

Mantha improves offense by five points and improves defense by seven points. According to Natural Stat Trick, the Caps see their second best improvement in on-ice expected goals percentage when Mantha jumps over the boards, behind only Aliaksei Protas.

Even if he were missing his scoring touch (and I don’t think he is), Mantha’s 6’5″ frame and exceptional fundamentals make him a thoroughly more valuable player than Boeser.

Evolving Hockey has a measurement they call RAPM, which essentially plots how much better or worse than average a player is at various metrics. In this next visualization, there are three offense metrics:

• GF/60: actual goals scored by the team per hour,
• xGF/60: expected team goals per hour, pretending league-average goaltending all the time,
• CF/60: shot attempts by the team per hour,

Then two defensive metrics:

• xGA/60: expected opponent goals per hour,
• CA/60: shot attempts by the opponent per hour.

So here’s Mantha head-to-head with Boeser over the past three seasons:

It’s no contest. Even if he’s not flashy and not as physical as a coach might want, Mantha does everything right, improving both sides of the ice by about one standard deviation. Boeser has some offense upside too, though the goals are higher than expected and the defense is atrocious.

I need to emphasize that I pulled three-year numbers above. If you just go by this season alone…

Boeser breaks the damn Y-axis on defense. His problem isn’t low shooting percentage; it’s that he’s atrocious without the puck.

Trading for Boeser is a bad idea. Trading Mantha to get Boeser would be a sucker’s move. Trading Mantha at all while he’s subtly carrying freight during Washington’s otherwise middling five-on-five play would be stupefying. I don’t know where these rumors are coming from, but if it’s from the Capitals that would be a sign of rank incompetence in their front office.

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— good tweet pete 🌮 (@peterhassett) December 7, 2022

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Headline photo: @milliemantha/Instagram, @Canucks/Twitter