Penguins Go to WAR

At the end of each season, PensBurgh does a terrific in-depth evaluation of each prominent Penguin. For yours truly, one of the most fascinating features is a set of charts that display a player’s WAR, short for Wins Above Replacement.

WAR is a stat you may be familiar with from baseball. In the simplest of terms, it measures a player’s contributions (or wins) for his team, while at the same time providing a method of comparing a player to his peers based on position and role, which in hockey is determined by TOI.

You’ll notice in the following table that in some cases, a player’s role doesn’t necessarily line up with the way he’s actually used. For example, Marcus Pettersson is categorized as a depth defenseman when he’s often cast in a second-pairing role.

WAR can be expressed as a number or in this case, a percentage, with 50 percent being the break-even mark between being better than a replacement player or worse. It takes into account factors such as even-strength offense, even-strength defense, power-play offense, short-handed defense, penalties taken and penalties drawn, as well as finishing, strength of competition and teammates.

That cursory description aside? I don’t have a clue as to how WAR is actually calculated. I looked at a couple of in-depth articles explaining the intricacies of WAR and my brain immediately froze. (I barely passed college calculus and still have no idea how I pulled it off.)

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to put together a table displaying WAR data for all our prominent Penguins, including newcomers Jeff Petry and Ty Smith. I’ve also included our unsigned free agents and recent tradees Mike Matheson and John Marino. No data was available for Josh Archibald.

Likewise, in some cases values for the ’21-22 season weren’t available.

I’ve only displayed overall WAR, along with even-strength offense and defense percentages. Kind of the equivalent of a 20,000-foot flyover. 

A few shockers to point out, namely the even-strength defense values of Jake Guentzel, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang. Smith, too (yikes)!

On the flip side, the extremely impressive overall and offensive WARs of Guentzel, Malkin and Sidney Crosby. Chad Ruhwedel’s remarkably strong numbers, too.

Data is courtesy of JFresh Hockey and TopDownHockey.

			3-Year Weighted Average WAR (%)			2021-22 WAR (%)
Forwards	Pos	Role (TOI)	Overall	EV Off.	EV Def.	Overall	EV Off.	EV Def.
Crosby	C	1st Liner	95	99	65	92	99	48
Guentzel	LW	1st Liner	90	99	2	83	98	1
Rust	RW	1st Liner	76	63	26	69	63	23
Malkin	C	2nd Liner	93	95	11	97	94	16
Rakell	RW/LW	2nd Liner	33	70	16	70	78	43
Carter	C/RW	2nd Liner	38	56	34	24	38	22
Zucker	LW	3rd Liner	71	58	52	43	73	74
Kapanen	RW	3rd Liner	59	34	27	40	32	49
Blueger	C	3rd Liner	53	14	90	59	31	89
McGinn	LW/RW	3rd Liner	57	23	78	42	26	65
Poehling	C/LW	4th Liner	11	34	16	NA	NA	NA
			3-Year Weighted Average WAR (%)			2021-22 WAR (%)
Defense	Pos	Role (TOI)	Overall	EV Off.	EV Def.	Overall	EV Off.	EV Def.
Letang	RD	No. 1 D	75	84	14	74	74	15
Petry	RD	Top Pair	79	89	48	NA	NA	NA
Dumoulin	LD	2nd Pair	54	17	72	50	15	68
Rutta	RD	3rd Pair	33	41	54	NA	NA	NA
Smith	LD	3rd Pair	6	41	4	NA	NA	NA
Pettersson	LD	Depth	75	41	96	74	29	97
Ruhwedel	RD	Depth	85	62	94	97	73	93
Friedman	LD/RD	Depth	91	93	48	NA	NA	NA
			3-Year Weighted Average WAR (%)			2021-22 WAR (%)
Unsigned	Pos	Role (TOI)	Overall	EV Off.	EV Def.	Overall	EV Off.	EV Def.
Rodrigues	F	3rd Liner	62	72	76	65	90	88
Heinen	LW/RW	4th Liner	55	50	68	75	77	78
Boyle	LW/C	4th Liner	45	12	44	53	12	60
			3-Year Weighted Average WAR (%)			2021-22 WAR (%)
Traded	Pos	Role (TOI)	Overall	EV Off.	EV Def.	Overall	EV Off.	EV Def.
Marino	RD	2nd Pair	78	35	80	NA	NA	NA
Matheson	LD	3rd Pair	70	79	49	NA	NA	NA