I feel like simply calling JK Rowling a transphobe isn't strong enough anymore. Like. This is not your grandpa calling you by your deadname at a restaurant kind of transphobic. This is her wanting to eradicate all trans people (with an extra special hatred towards trans women specifically). This is her trying just that by personally funding transphobic hate groups with millions to push around laws in the UK. It is not hyperbolic to call her a dangerous, genocidal maniac.
It's not about cancelling a problematic writer. It's about literally trying to save lives by denying her as much money and power as possible.
I’m so happy for newer Sharks fans who get to come in for the Mack and Will era but I don’t know if those of us who have been in the trenches for years can fully explain how completely incomprehensible it feels that those are our guys.
sometimes rpf is like "i think they were actually fucking for real but but i can't 'prove it' so i'm going to vividly imagine it and then write it" and sometimes it's like "i know they weren't fucking but i think it would be hot so i'm going to viviidly imagine it and then write it" and sometimes it's like "i think they very well could have been fucking and if they weren't then i think they probably wanted to but for various reasons never did so i'm going to implement that theory & tension it into a beautiful story where i create a world where they can be together and fuck nasty" and i think that's beautiful
I know everyone is eating up the jealous!Will content surrounding the new baby sharks but can you just imagine jealous!Mack?? Like Mack is the newly appointed captain and pushes for Will to get to know everyone because they’re the vets now. They should set a good example. Then it backfires right in Mack’s face. Because of course, the perfect golden boy yet again charms everyone in his vicinity without even trying and suddenly Mack can’t help but overthink the hint of sparkle he swears he saw in Stenberg’s eyes when Smitty invited him to the team dinner even though literally everyone on the team is invited. Now whenever he wants to have his totally-normal-and-not-at-all-clingy hushed conversations with Will in the corner of practice, a member of his fan club comes over and everts his attention. I mean, Mack can’t blame them. Will is a fun guy! But he’s Mack’s guy. He just wants to haphazardly throw a football around with him! Alone!!! But of course the people’s princess always smiles and lets their teammates join when they ask.
It only gets worse when Will actually thanks Mack for encouraging positive team relationships. He thinks it was a great idea and super beneficial for everyone. And now Mack feels silly and immature for being so territorial.
hey could you expand on the fact that wsh has a better defensive rating that Quinn Hughes? I’m very new to hockey and the most common things I’ve heard, esp across other platforms like tiktok, that Hughes is one of the best defence men in the league and will’s defensive game needs heaps of work??? Like verbatim I’ve heard ppl call Hughes the best defenseman on multiple occasions so how does this discrepancy happen? Is it just different people’s interpretations of stats and the game?
I would literally love to, Anon! Buckle up, because this can get a little technical at times but I’ll do my best to make everything easy to understand. Full analysis of Quinn Hughes & Will Smith's defensive metrics, plus my take on the discrepancies between the metrics and how people discuss both are under the cut!
The first thing I want to make abundantly clear is that when people say “best defensemen” they almost never exclusively mean “best defender” —confusing, I know. They mean best player in that position, which includes far more than just defensive impact. Like with forwards, truly elite defensemen are expected to have a pretty complete 200ft game. This means impacting in all three zones, and having high usage rates. That said, important to note that even though I’ll be almost exclusively using the numbers here, my bias does exist. I flat disagree with people who think Quinn Hughes is the best defenseman in the league. I do think he’s an elite, game changing player, but I don’t think he’s the best player in the league, at his position or in general. For Will Smith, I agree with the notion that his defensive game needs work, but I think it’s in some very specific areas (not necessarily all around or “heaps of work” as you’ve worded it here) and I think that he’s more disruptive than he’s often given credit for. But you asked about the numbers, so let’s dig into that.
For this, I’ll be looking at Net Rating, rather than the individual stats that go into the model, otherwise this would be far too long. Still, there’s nuance in these stats that must be acknowledged. That said, Net Rating (and defensive and offensive rating) has been developed with a lot of awareness of that nuance and very careful precision to try and account for it, so I feel pretty comfortable trusting the numbers.
Net Rating is essentially a measure of a player’s value in wins—an all encompassing stat when looking at players’ skill and impact over the whole game—that can be broken down into two sections: Defensive Rating and Offensive Rating. Here's how both measures break down:
Offensive Rating: A weighted combination of goals, primary assists, secondary assists, individual expected goals, faceoffs, penalties drawn, expected goals for impact at 5-on-5, goals for impact at 5-on-5, power-play goal impact and usage.
Defensive Rating: A weighted combination of blocked shots, faceoffs, penalties taken, expected goals against impact at 5-on-5, goals against impact at 5-on-5, penalty kill impact and usage.
Offensive and Defensive Rating are both centered around an average skater at their position where positive is always good. An average player by Net Rating is right at zero. Note, because goalies exist, offensive metrics still hold more weight because they can be more easily isolated to an individual player.
Okay now that we understand the numbers, let’s look at Quinn Hughes’ stats analytics from this season:
His O Rating of +21.5 puts in him the 99th percentile, is the 6th highest in the league, and the 2nd highest among defensemen. His Net Rating of +14.6 puts him in the 96th percentile, is the 35th highest in the league, and the 17th highest among defensemen. What stands out here is that his D Rating is -7, which is in the 1st percentile (meaning the bottom 1% of the entire league). Out of 716 total players who played in 20 or more regular season games, Quinn Hughes’ defensive rating ranks 709th, or 8th worst in the league.
Here’s his rating for every game this season by percentile:
As you can see, his O Rating started high and pretty much stayed there, really hitting his stride just before the trade to Minnesota. His Net Rating is a similar story, with less consistency. His D Rating is all over the place though, he had a lot of pretty good defensive games, and a lot of really terrible defensive games. What this tells me is that his defensive impact is extremely inconsistent and likely pretty susceptible to opponent match ups.
My personal ethos is that no matter how talented a skater is in one area, their game has to be more comprehensive to rightfully be considered “the best,” and especially with defensemen, I can’t justify giving the title of best defenseman in the league to a skater who is so completely inconsistent in their own zone, especially to such an extent that their overall defensive rating on the season ranks 8th worst in the entire league among all skaters.
For comparison, this is Cale Makar’s overall stats analytics and rating percentiles over the course of the season:
His +17.6 O Rating and +23.4 Net Rating both put him in the 99th percentile, and his +5.9 D Rating puts him in the 97th percentile. Among all skaters, his O Rating ranks 15th, D Rating ranks 27th, and Net Rating ranks 7th.
Looking at their Net Rating side by side, here’s how they compared throughout the season:
While Quinn Hughes had some spikes where he played a better overall game than Makar did, overall throughout the course of the season Makar played not only a better, more comprehensive game, but did so with far more consistency than Hughes did. Consistency matters, but also requires a bigger picture perspective, which sometimes gets missed.
As for Will Smith, here’s his overall stats analytics and rating percentiles over the course of the season:
His +7.2 O Rating puts him in the 89th percentile, his -1.3 D Rating puts him in the 25th percentile, and his +5.8 Net Rating puts him in the 84th percentile. For his first year at a new position and only his second year in the league, that’s incredibly good impact. In fact, offensively and overall I’d argue that’s damn good (at least top 16% of the entire league good according to the numbers). His defensive game does need work (remember the average for position would be 0, so his -1.3 rating does mean that defensively, his impact is below average for a forward with his usage metrics) but the numbers aren’t as concerning as people often make it appear with how they talk about it.
Here’s how his and Quinn Hughes’ D Ratings compared over the course of the season:
Like noted above, Quinn Hughes was all over the place, but Will’s rating was on an upward trend at the end of the season as he worked on his defensive game, and he was trending back towards league average for forwards, which is impressive given his already above average offensive and net impact ratings. Will’s got work to do, no doubt, but his defense is no where near as terrible as people claim (besides, defense at the NHL level is usually where skaters require the most development anyway) and he’s got the IQ, talent, and work ethic to continue to improve, especially as he continues to get more comfortable on the wing and playing at the NHL level in general.
So to answer your question about discrepancies between the way people talk about Quinn Hughes and Will Smith and the actual statistics, I think it’s a combination of people’s interpretations of the game and also Quinn Hughes’ impressive offensive impact that really explains it. Quinn Hughes is a high profile, impactful, highly intelligent and skilled skater. His Net Rating isn’t misleading, and it does mean that overall he’s a player in the top 5% of the league (ranks 35th among all skaters), but so much of that is entirely offensive impact. I just don’t think that’s enough to call him the best defenseman in the game. I wouldn’t even place him top 3.
As for Will, I honestly can’t say why people act like he’s not as good as his is. Part of it could be the Mack comparisons just because they’re playing every game together, and Mack’s insane—I honestly don’t know.
What I do know is that he’s an insanely talented player with a high ceiling that he’s nowhere near hitting, and largely I have zero doubt that he’s going to prove everyone who’s ever under-sold him or doubted him completely wrong. That includes everyone who likes to doom-post about Will being moved to the fourth line or possibly traded. All those people are doubting and underselling Will as well. He’s a damn good hockey player, one of the biggest assets the Shark’s have, and is coming off of an impressive sophomore season. He’s not going anywhere.
This is so long but it was a really fun deep dive, and I hope that answered your question!
the first time you hear someone say that mack looks at will with the same intensity that he watches the puck with you’re like booooo that’s so corny and it is but the worst part is that it’s true and there’s actually just something deeply wrong with mack
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