Taylor Hall is 9th, among forwards in the entire NHL, in even-strength scoring over the last three years.
How has he become the most unfairly maligned player in the NHL?
Hall is 9th in p/60 as well, and scored only 24 less points than Sydney Crosby (who lead the league) over this period. Hall played in 27 less games than Crosby. He played less games than every single player who outscored him over the last three seasons.
He is a strong possession player who drives play and produces offense at even-strength at a rate that is the 9th best out of 700 some-odd players over a three season sample size.
I cannot stress enough how important even-strength scoring is. It is arguably the single most important thing a player can do, and doing it consistently is as rare as it is important.
If you can score at even strength and play decent defense, which Taylor Hall does, you are unquestionably among the best players in the world.
He also makes every player he plays with significantly better, which is something not every player who scores more than him can say.
Hockey is a game about scoring and defense. There's a bunch of minutia, but really, if you score more than 691 other players, play a competent defense and improve the value of your less talented teammates, what else is there?
Statistically, Taylor Hall is among the most effective players in the NHL.
Not "one of the best wingers" or a "guy with a lot to prove" he is literally a top-ten NHL forward by anyway you can measure it.
But he seems to be poison.
A total Phil Collins.
It's a sad fact that people tend to either ignore or be unaware that there are good players on bad teams and bad players on good teams. Now, this isn't 100% always the case, but I think we could all think of an example or two where a player on a perennially crappy team was underrated.
Another thing is that in those situations where there are good players on bad teams, the players seem to take the brunt of the blame. Taylor Hall was the leader of the Oilers and they were absolute garbage the entire time he was on their team and simultaneously their best player.
Ergo, Taylor Hall and being a loser must be correlated.
Forget for a second that we have factual evidence of literally dozens of great individual seasons by players whose teams have missed the playoffs.
Forget for a second that hockey is a team game where the impact of a single non-goalie player is only felt for about a third of a game, and is not all that great.
The fact is, Taylor Hall is a loser. Apparently.
Maybe Peter Chiarelli didn't make a terrible trade. The NHL is nothing if not extremely conservative, and the league's general managers constantly show that they base decisions as much on folk lore and irrational thinking as they do anything sensible. (Recent Example: 'We had to trade Hall because we needed room for McDavid's voice' (paraphrased)).
It's entirely possible that the entire NHL thinks Taylor Hall is a loser.
When a team is bad, we for some reason blame the player, not the management who assembled them. The Oilers made easily 10 to 100 horrible managerial moves since they drafted Taylor Hall. To say they were mismanaged is far too kind. It would be more accurate to say that they were ran into the ground by a level of incompetence that is nearly incomprehensible at this level.
Taylor Hall did not fail season after season to identify quality draft picks after the first player was off the board. He didn't fail miserably, year after year, to acquire a goalie, identify talent in any way, or round out the roster with even average complimentary players.
Despite having a Hall of Fame start to what is almost certainly (barring injury) to be a Hall of Fame career, he is somehow a pariah that gets traded straight up for a player not even close to breathing the same rarefied air that he breathes as one of the elite of the elite.
What can possibly explain no team in the league being willing to offer up more than a B level defenseman for a player who is among the league's best forwards by any conceivable measure ?
What can explain Team Canada not naming him as one of their first players, let alone picking three or four injury replacements ahead of him?
Or two of the NHL's most respected analysts suggesting that Wayne Simmonds should get the call ahead of him.
Again, just for posterity: Taylor Hall is the 9th highest scoring forward in hockey over the last three years. He is good defensively, he drives possession, makes everyone he plays with better and scores at even-strength, which is nearly impossible, as we all know.
Also, it's not impossible that he's the fastest skater in the NHL. And he plays a gritty, hard-nosed game. He isn't just a perimeter player, or a finesse guy.
The only thing that makes sense is that after the Oilers sucked for six years with him as their best player, other people think he's contagious.
People want easy answers and they want someone to blame. They want a reason for things. I guarantee you there are people in the NHL who run teams, and people reading this probably, who think that it is impossible to lose that much and not have it be your fault.
Whether they think he's a loser, or that he can't win, or doesn't care enough, or is used to losing or isn't a good leader, or can't get it done when it matters or whatever other awful nonsense people will spout, the fact is no one wants Taylor Hall.
Imagine Vladimir Tarasenko got traded for Jason Demers.
That's about what happened to Taylor Hall this summer. Only Demers is probably better than Larsson, and Hall scored more points in less games over the last three years while playing better defense than Tarasenko did.
It's really too bad, because Taylor Hall has done nothing but his job. He was picked first overall and he's been among the best players in the league. What more can you ask for?
If I know him, and I do not in any way, he will use this snub and the low-ball trade value to motivate himself to be even better.
In my entire life watching hockey, I've never seen anything like this.
To be as good as Taylor Hall is, while being treated as if he doesn't exist by Team Canada and exiled to Jersey for a bag of onions is truly one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time.
Logically, there is no way a player of his skills and past performance should have been traded for a second pairing defenseman.
Common Sense would tell you that professional hockey managers would pay top dollar for a player who'd put up the 9th most 5v5 points over three seasons. And that a manager wanting to trade such a player would create a bidding war for this player.
Logic suggest that if a player is among the best at the game's rarest skill (5v5 scoring) he'd be considered to play for his country, especially if he also had the rare ability to drive possession and was the league's possible fastest skater.
But this is the NHL: All decisions are apparently made by using voodoo, astrology and the theory that looking directly at Pierre McGuire's bald head under the right light will allow you to see into the future.
Why is Taylor Hall wearing the Scarlet Letter? It is, an unsolved mystery.
All stats corsica.hockey and herochart by ownthepuck.ca
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