New York Rangers Sign Josh Jooris

There were some fears yesterday that the Calgary Flames would lose Josh Jooris when he went and followed the New York Rangers Twitter account. Those fears were confirmed today as the team announced that they had signed the Flames forward/winger. The terms have yet to be released.

Jooris was an important part of the Flames during his first season with the team lining up and center and winger and performing amicably on the penalty kill. He managed to put up some points, albeit nothing to write home about. The main attraction to Jooris were the possession stats.

Last season he didn't perform nearly as well. He didn't break out of single digits in primary points and the relative numbers against on the penalty kill were actually worse than the rest of the team. That left the possession as the sole lure to retaining him.

Jooris is probably better than a number of forwards on the team. Players like Brandon Bollig, Matt Stajan, and Lance Bouma were noticeably worse than Jooris and arguments could be made that he was still better than Micheal Ferland and Garnet Hathaway. That said, those players are all fourth line players, some of whom might have the ability to fill in on the third line, but shouldn’t play there regularly. This seems to be a fair assessment of where Jooris would fall – these are players that shouldn’t be retained for too much money since they can be replaced relatively easily.

Analytics people will probably loathe that the Flames let Jooris walk away. People who look strictly at production might celebrate the fact that he's gone. While the true value of Jooris probably lies somewhere in the middle and he would have at least made a useful addition to the fourth line, the team clearly felt that they had more pressing roster signings to make and Jooris went by the wayside.

by Les Mavus