Two time Stanley Cup Champion. Olympic Gold Medalist. Calder Cup Champion. Memorial Cup Champion. World juniors gold Medalist. OHL Champion. Winner.
Mike Richards is the only man in hockey history to have won a Memorial Cup, Calder Cup and Stanley Cup as a player. He is the only skater to have played in two seven-game NHL playoff series where his team came back from being down 3-0 in the series to win it. Winner.
Mike Richards is exactly who people mean when they refer to intangibles, winning and hard-nosed, defence-first, “Canadian” hockey. Until now that is, because Mike Richards just cleared waivers, and has been assigned to the AHL again Manchester Monarchs less than a year after hoisting his second Stanley Cup.
ATTENTION Rogers and Shaw customers. Already enjoying Sportsnet ONE? Now get access to digital editions of Sportsnet magazine at no extra cost.
The drop off from his peak has been rapid and unexpected. Los Angeles surrendered Wayne Simmonds, Brayden Schenn and a second-rounder to Philadelphia in exchange for a $5.75-million dollar anchor who’s going to hold them down in some form through at least the 2020 season. Richards has—for the time being at least—become the poster child for why NHL GMs should avoid long-term contracts (or trading for them).
Back in October, Richards was mentioned in an article I wrote about the rapid decline of aging NHL skaters. One of the key points was how scorers tend to drop off fairly quickly due to physical wear and tear and an inability to generate shots at the same rate they did in their younger days. Richards was particularity noteworthy due to his relatively early peak output from age 22 to 24 followed by a steady decline to where he finds himself today at 29.
In his early career, Richards generated much of his offence playing the point on Philadelphia’s power play, and received top-line minutes alongside veterans like Simon Gagne and Mike Knuble at even strength. When Knuble left before 2009-10, Richards saw ice time alongside Claude Giroux and in front of Chris Pronger.
First-line offensive production at 5v5 can be crudely sorted by individual scoring at 5v5 versus 5v4. The threshold for top-90 forwards falls around 1.90-plus pts/60 at 5v5 and 3.80-plus pts/60 at 5v4. Richards’s peak output at 5v5 came in ’07-08 when he posted 2.12 points per 60 minutes. He ended the season with 75 points in 72 games. His top-end production overall (and with the man advantage) came in ’08-09. He posted 80 points in 79 games, but he was producing only 1.84 pts/60 at 5v5, largely thanks to scoring a ridiculously high 5.58 assists per 60 on the No. 5-ranked power play in the league.
Context matters a far greater amount when evaluating players than many observers realize. While Richards appeared to be a key component defensively to good Flyers squads from 2007 through 2011, it could be argued that the elite talent around him was helping boost his scoring numbers rather than the other way around. If we examine his 5v5 offensive production in comparison to his teammates’ it’s apparent that his contributions were superseded by others on his squad. PAy particular attention to his individual scoring chances produced (iSC) and the percentage of team scoring chances produced while he was on the ice (iSC%).
The reasons pointed to for Richards’s slide are numerous, ranging from body type to poor off-season training to a physical playing style to lingering injury effects to long term fatigue due to one of the heaviest game loads of any young player around the league through his 20s. Any or all of could be the case. Whatever the reason, there’s no doubt his decline has been precipitous, even while seeing progressively easier usage year over year. His expectations have sunk to the point that the difficulty of minutes he’s played at 5v5 this season are comparable to those played by second-year teammate Tanner Pearson or rookies Leon Draisatl and Andre Burakovsky… and he’s performed significantly worse than all three of them.
Richards’s contract should stand as a shining example of what GMs need to avoid when evaluating young talent in a system designed to keep assets cost controlled through their first seven years in the NHL. He will keep reaping the rewards of those offensive numbers early in his career through the year 2020, but there’s no room for a $5.75-million player not pulling his weight for the the reigning Stanley Cup champion. The most likely way we see Richards move back to an NHL roster as a regular-season feature is if L.A. eats part of his contract in a trade or buys him out. Time will tell, but I wouldn’t put it past an NHL GM fraternity that definitely values winning, and Richards has done a lot of that.