Islanders 21-22 player report cards: Josh Bailey

The team-level report card was pushed out yesterday, and well the New York Islanders didn't get a good grade. A passing grade, but just barely. Now that the team-level report card is in, it's time to look at individual players.

I'm going to start with forwards in alphabetical order (based on their last name). Just like the team-level report card, these player-level report cards will take into consideration a few aspects of the game to give an overall grade.

First one up is Josh Bailey.

New York Islanders 21-22 player report cards: Josh Bailey

Offense: C+
In his previous four seasons, Bailey was producing, on average, 0.72 points per game. That's basically a 60-point player (59.4 to be exact). Bailey put up 44 in 74 games a pace of 49 over a full year. Effectively losing ten points in production isn't a massive fall-off, but it's still not a great fall either. I feel like we might be seeing the end of the Bailey peak. At 32-years-old that's not a hot take.

His goal scoring was where you expect it to be. Fourteen goals in 74 games are right about where we've seen Josh Bailey for years now. It's still not a great number but it would be unfair to expect him to score more goals this late in his career.

Overall his offensive input can be best described as: 'OK'. So a C+ seems fair here.

*Defense: F
Quantifying defense is hard to do. But I feel like 5on5 xGA/60 (relative) does a good job at showing how often the other team gets a good scoring opportunity while Bailey is on the ice compared to his teammates. It's not perfect, but I think it paints a good picture.

Bailey finished with the fourth-highest xGA/60 Rel on the team with a 0.25. So you might think: "oh that's good". And honestly, I did too. I thought the fourth highest is good. But we're talking about goals-against. A higher number means Bailey allows more goals against per 60 compared to his teammates. ( I really want to thank Tim for correcting me.) So fourth is in fact not good.

I had initially given Bailey a C+ here but after realizing I have to flip the ranking for relative xGA/60 I've got to give Bailey an F here.

Impact vs Reliance: D+
The last metric I want to look at is how impactful Josh Bailey was versus how much the team relied on him. To help me here I'm going to compare his average game score on the year over his average time on ice relative to the other forwards on the team.

If the game score rank is higher than his ice time rank his impact was above his reliance, that's clearly good. The opposite would be, well, not good.

Bailey finished the year with a 0.36 average game score according to HockeyStatCards.com. That's seventh for forwards. But Bailey finished fourth in average ice time for forwards at 16:53 per game. His impact was not matching his usage. In a bad way.

A grade of D+ I think works here. His impact wasn't top-six but he he was played like one. That's not ideal.

Overall: D
Josh Bailey ends the year with a D. It just wasn't a good year for him. Perhaps that's not totally fair. The guys that should be ahead of him on the roster didn't exactly pick it up so that's probably why we saw the Islanders rely on Bailey so much.