Point Efficiency Rankings

Which players make the most of their ice-time?

Time for the eagerly-awaited (using an entirely fabricated definition of the word "eagerly") end-of-season update to the WPEF rankings.

For the full, more-complicated-than-it-needs-to-be explanation behind this, follow the LINK to the original blog on this.

As a simplified explanation, WPEF (Weighted Point Efficiency Factor) is a measure of how well a player scores points taking into account:

• Number of minutes that player gets to play
• How those minutes and the points the player gets are split between even-strength, powerplay and short-handed situations (PP points being less valuable or well-earned than ES points, which are in turn less valuable than SH points)
  

You could see WPEF as the number of points per game a player achieved if they had played exactly 20 minutes per game all at even strength.

The numbers
The list below is the top 100 players ranked by WPEF over the 2008/09 NHL regular season. It excludes anyone who scored fewer than 20 points in the season – it gets a bit distorted for low points, low minutes players. You can see that players with relatively more ESPs and SHPs and those with fewer minutes per game benefit at the expense of PP hogs who play more.

Not perfect, but gives a pretty decent picture of a few players who do pick up the tougher points with limited minutes though.




Observations

• After a long run in top spot, the Bongomeister himself, Alexander Semin, is controversially squeezed out by the late, but not especially long charge of Marian Gaborik. Could Gaborik sustain that scoring pace over a whole season? Doubtful. Could he even avoid twanging his groin for longer than a week? Who knows...
• Gaborik's abbreviated effort would also place him atop the WPEF rankings stretching back to 1997/98 (beating the 1.16 by Peter Forsberg in 02/03 and Daniel Alfredsson in 07/08 - all helpfully illustrated HERE) - Semin and Zach Parise also managing to join the hallowed "1.00 Club", previously entered only 33 times in 10 years
• A handful of players (Rene Bourque, Alex Burrows, Andrew Ladd, Craig Conroy) stand out as players who have produced a decent number of points with relatively little ice-time and hardly any PP time
• Is the Big Three really the Big Five? Parise and Datsyuk have favourable WPEF numbers compared to Malkin, Crosby and Ovechkin - and particularly noticeable that they get around two minutes less per game on the PP than those three do
  

Ow, that really hurts!

Injury stats update - end of season awards!

[Explanatory note: I tracked these injury stats on a monthly basis for most of the 2008/09 season - this is the last of these updates, covering the whole season.]

This is the final update for the 2008/09 regular season looking at which teams were hit hardest by injuries by trying to place a value on the games missed by players due to injury/illness.

The concept again - multiply each game missed by a player by his 2008/09 cap charge, then take the aggregate of these figures for each team and divide by 82. This indicator of value lost to a team by injury/illness is called CHIP (Cap Hit of Injured Players).

The table below shows:

• Total CHIP for each team over the 2008/09 regular season
• Movement in ranking since 28 February
• The player who has contributed most to the team's CHIP figure
• The number of players with a CHIP contribution of over $250,000 (think of it as being equivalent to a $1m player missing 20 games or a $4m player missing five games)
  

Overcoming Philadelphia's season-long stranglehold ("Hey! That's never a stranglehold - it's just the usual anti-Flyers officiating conspiracy!") on top spot, St. Louis sneak in with a late surge to be crowned The Most Injured Team in the NHL 2008/09.

The continued absences of the Blues' Kariya and Johnson and (eventual) recovery of Philly's Briere proved crucial down the stretch. This, perhaps, makes the Blues' success at fighting their way into a playoff spot even more remarkable.

At the other end, the Rangers' almost freakishly-good fortune in avoiding significant injury absences essentially lasted all year. Not even an injury to Sean Avery due to throttling by opponent/teammate/coach/ex-girlfriend to speak of. Also mildly interesting to note that four of the six teams with the lowest CHIP missed the playoffs.

The second table is the top 30 individual CHIP contributions:



A minor surprise in the race here - Marian Gaborik looked like a lock to win all season, but his tissue paper groin managed to hold up long enough to fit in a brief stretch of games right at the death. Hence, this award also makes it way to the Gateway City by a sliver as Paul Kariya bests both Gaborik and Joe "Snowblower" Sakic.

Notes/Disclaimers

• Figures include (and are arguably distorted by) some players on long-term IR, such as Mike Rathje. They do exclude a few minor-leaguers who seem to have been on the NHL club’s IR
• There's probably a few inaccuracies and inconsistencies in there - I did the best I could with the information out there
• The cap figure doesn't really correlate to the "worth" of a player in some cases, e.g. where rookie bonuses are included this year (Erik Johnson, Zach Bogosian), where players are seeing out an old (underpaid or rookie) contract (Paul Stastny, Henrik Zetterberg) or where players are horrendously overpaid (Scott Gomez, Wade Redden)
• I've stuck a full team-by-team listing of games missed and CHIP numbers by each player on the web HERE - knock yourself out...
• Injury/games info courtesy of tsn.ca
  
• Cap info courtesy of hockeybuzz.com

Ryan Callahan - a personal slurpfest

Yes, I'm far from the first person to do a "this player on my team is really underrated and this is why you should know about him" blog - and others can do those so much better than I can - but here goes anyway...

This is not (just) in response to today's Game 2 performance against the Caps - excellent again as it was - this really could have been written at any point over the last couple of months, so significant has Callahan's contribution to the Rangers been down the stretch and so far in the playoffs.

Since I'd do a less than stellar job of eulogising about the guy, I'll cheat and just post a link to Pierre LeBrun's article from today on ESPN.com:

Callahan is Rangers' under-radar MVP

All I'd really add to that is that it's great to see Callahan start to fulfil the promise he showed two years ago, after enduring a pretty rough season in a few ways last year. Apparently Torts has suggested he could hit 35 goals next year - maybe a bit of a stretch in my opinion, but if he can be a consistent 25-30 goal threat while continuing to contribute in all other facets of the game, that will be fine by me.

Hopefully, Callahan's emergence also helps to illustrate to a few people (not least Glen Sather) that the Rangers can draft and develop talent the right way and that Ranger fans appreciate having successful homegrown players in the line-up.

Playoff success 101b

Part III: PP or not PP?

It's been a while, but since I've now unexpectedly re-discovered that the NHL season does in fact not end this Sunday, what better time to carry out another essentially meaningless and unproductive analysis of playoff trends?

(My previous investigations can be found HERE and HERE – not essential reading, but might make some of the following slightly more understandable, since I can't be bothered with another full explanation.)

Today's hypothesis is another of the well-worn lines spouted by your favourite hockey analysts (and Brian Engblom) at this time of year: You can't win in the playoffs without a good powerplay

As it's almost two sides of the same coin, I thought I'd also look at whether a strong penalty killing unit was any indicator of success.

The Werk Wot I Did

• Similar to before, order all NHL teams by both PP and PK rank in each of the last 10 regular seasons (back to 1997/98 – 2004/05 was excluded as it wasn't very interesting to look at)
• Look at how these numbers translated to playoff failure or success
• Construct the usual tables to try and illustrate whether there are any strong trends
  

Obvious drawbacks

• Much as before...10 years isn't a huge sample size and regular season performance doesn't automatically translate to post-season play
• There is also likely to be a certain amount of correlation between this analysis and the previous ones (which looked at goals for and against, if you really haven't clicked on the links above) – high-scoring teams are more likely to have a strong PP (or teams with a strong PP are more likely to be high-scoring), similar with defense and the PK
  

Key



Ranking charts
The charts below show the overall league PP and PK ranking and the stage of the playoffs each team made. At the bottom of each is the average rank of the teams reaching each playoff round in each year, with the overall 10-year average in the far right column. (Note that the average for each round includes all teams that made that round, not just those that got knocked out.)




Observations

• The 10-year average rankings are pretty similar when comparing PP and PK – a slightly higher PK ranking for Cup Finalists compared to PP (9.3 vs 11.2) being the main difference
• There doesn't appear to be much of a correlation between PP/PK success and playoff progress (possibly only a weak relationship when looking at PK alone) – while there are clusters of highly-ranked teams in each case that made the Conference Finals or better, there are plenty of examples of mid-ranked teams doing well
• The correlation between GF/GA ranking and just making the playoffs seems to be a bit stronger than for PP/PK ranking (i.e. the 10-year average rankings are a bit lower) – the playoff teams (in colour) in these charts are less concentrated towards the top
• Notable anomalies: The 2006/07 Canadiens and 2005/06 Wild being top-ranked in PP and PK respectively, but missing the playoffs entirely; the offensive juggernaut that was the 2002/03 Devils managing to win the Cup despite having the worst regular season PP in the league
  

This season?
The chart below shows the current (through games played on 9 April) PP and PK rankings – teams that have clinched playoff spots in orange, the four teams still in the race in the West in purple:



Observations:

• As noted on the NHL.com front page today, PP success rates are up this year (as a Ranger fan, I have seen absolutely no evidence of this phenomenon though) – in the last 10 seasons, there have tended to be three or four teams with a PP% above 20%, but there are eight at the moment
• Average rankings for playoff teams are not too dissimilar from those shown above (a little on the low side if anything, but higher than last year)
• It's not unprecedented for the Blue Jackets and Rangers to have overcome lousy PP numbers to make the playoffs, but still difficult to expect a deep run without some improvement in that area
• On the PK side, the Kings are much improved (bottom-ranked in each of the last three years), the Wings have slumped significantly (cause for concern?) and the Leafs' PK% is the worst in the last 11 seasons by some distance