I’m very sympathetic to the writer who talks about JFJ’s physical play having an impact on the game. I value physical play myself and have long been complaining that the team needs more of it. Hell, I’ve heard Pat Quinn talking about the same thing w.r.t. this particular player, and I know he values it too.

Jacques is a “chaos player” which is not all a bad thing. Unfortunately with this particular player it is mostly a bad thing, as the Oilers are getting owned when he’s out there almost regardless of teammates or opposition. The numbers confirm he brings almost nothing offensively, and by eye he is the worst defensive player this team has seen in a number of years. Appears to have no clue as to defensive positioning.

It’s certainly not for want of opportunity … JFJ started the year on the first line with Hemsky and Horcoff, and got an extended and entirely unwarranted stint with Horcoff and O’Sullivan, a unit that was bleeding GA at the rate of one per game. Now he’s finally played his way down to the Black Aces, and while the Oilers do miss that physical element I don’t think they miss the rest of the package even a tiny bit.

Nice post Derek. I largely agree with your conclusions but I’m not ready to say that he couldn’t be useful. The coaching staff has been abominable in how they’ve used him this year. His QC is third among Oiler forwards despite his QT being dead last irrelevent (the “dead last” is coming from playing a lot with Horcoff who’s rated very poorly in the QC/QT rankings; the fact that it’s based on +/- makes it a bit wonky sometimes). This probably goes some of the way in explaining his bad relative Corsi numbers, at least with the defenders. If Jacques is pretty consistently taking top opponents – a role he’s completely unable to adequately fill – while other players are taking on lesser lights it seems pretty clear that the defenders should be doing much better without Jacques out there than with him. Looking at the forwards he’s played a lot with so far this year you don’t see too many plugs and fourth liners. The other issue in the forward comparisons is who is replacing him. For all of them except Stortini they usually have Penner when they don’t have Jacques. That’s a pretty difficult comparison to live with even for a more-than-adequate fourth liner (not saying that Jacques is that, just that an adequate fourth liner would look awful compared to Penner). If we agree that Penner can drive results, Jacques is in tough to look anything but terrible. Basically, I think we know he’s useless against difficult opponents (gee, really?). I don’t think we can know for sure that he’s totally useless. He might actually be okay as a 4th liner, though the Stortini comparison is surely disconcerting. Still, I hope they try him in a fourth line role going forward to see if that physical element can be effective in (a) fewer and (b) sheltered minutes. It would be interesting to see him get several games with Stortini and Cogliano and then compare their results with him to their results with Moreau. I think Jacques would still look bad (though he may not as, in the past, he’s been able to put up good results in the AHL/preseason which is a level just below NHL caliber and a lot of fourth lines may well be the kind of players he can kick around) but it would be a fun experiment to see how good/bad Moreau is.

I too think JFJ will be a good 4th liner. Banging bodies around is his thing

Personally, I condone Quinn’s continued use of Jacques. Actually, I think he should get more ice time…….