NOthing for KOVY.

Yeah, adding Kovalchuk to the pre-existing Washington roster would help, but who are you giving up in return? A top-4 defender, a top-6 winger, a prospect that projects as a 2nd-3rd line player and a 1st round pick. It’s hard to pick direct analogs for the players here, because WSH really only has 3 top-4 defenders on the team and Fehr and Chimera are on our 3rd line, but could be 2nd line players elsewhere.

But my real objection to your point is this — WSH already scores the most goals in the league. By a mile. Almost .6 G/G higher than the second place team, SJS. Adding more goals isn’t as useful when you’re already scoring at that rate – it doesn’t matter if you beat a team 4-2 or 6-3, just as long as your number is higher than their number at the end of the game. PIT is no slouch in the goal scoring department either, averaging 3.03 G/G.

Someone did a fascinating analysis (I can’t remember who and I can’t find it on google, please forgive the lack of link) on the probability of winning a game given the number of goals scored. As it turns out, scoring 3 goals is going to win the game the majority of the time in the NHL and that result makes intuitive sense — there are only 5 NHL teams that average more than 3 G/G. Scoring 4 goals gives you something like an 80% chance to win the game and scoring 5 is a 90%+ chance.

Why is this relevant? The benefit you receive in percentage of games won as you add more scoring falls as your scoring rises — those of you who remember your econ classes, this is marginal benefit. There’s a diminishing return on adding offense after a point, somewhere in-between 2 and 3 goals per game; WSH and PIT are both well past that point. Pittsburgh and Washington would get a higher return on their trade-able assets by improving their defense, or goals-against per game, whether that’s through a better forecheck or a better blue-liner.

NJD paid a steep price for a rental and it made sense for them – they’re great at preventing goals and awful at scoring them. The Kovalchuk trade landed right in their sweetspot for efficiency and effectiveness improving the team. Ansi Salmella isn’t as good as Johnny Oduya, but Paul Martin will probably come back after the Olympic break, so that’s like getting a deadline acquisition right there, at no cost in assets. Ilya Kovalchuk is an upgrade on every winger in the league not Ovechkin and arguably Gaborik, so he’s certainly going to score more than Nicklas Bergfors. WSH or PIT matching the Devils’ package didn’t make sense for either team for this particular asset. Good on both Ray Shero and GMGM for declining.