First Quarter Penguins Grades

Our Pittsburgh Penguins are now at the end of their first quarter, so it is time to offer up my grades for players and coaching staff.

Forwards and Defensemen

Since this is only a quarter point and there isn’t a whole lot of time for me to look in too much detail, I am limiting my grading schemes. As anyone who has read anything I have written when it comes to grading, I strive to be as objective as possible. For the Forwards and defenseman, I chose to look at their Primary Points (Pnts’) per 60 minutes 5-on-5, where Pnts’ is defined as the sum of their Goals (G) and their Primary Assists (A’), the Team Goals For (TGF) per 60 minutes 5-on-5 for which they were in the ice, and the Team Goals Against (TGA) per 60 minutes 5-on-5 for which they were on the ice.

I limited my grading to those players who played a minimum of the league average of ice time (TOI) – 1 Standard Deviation from the mean. For Forwards the cut off was 103 minutes, for Defensemen the lower limit of TOI was 109.

Then I treated those data as if they were a test score, I divided the individual stat by the average stat, multiplied it by 75% (letter grade C) and recorded the grades (converted to letter grades). I averaged the 3 categories (tests) to come up with the overall grade.

Any players that didn’t make the lower limit of TOI are considered Incomplete (Inc)

Without any further ado and with no personal bias (as you will see, some players I try to defend have gotten less than stellar grades while some players I have complained about have gotten pretty good grades),

Forwards	Po	Pnts’	TGF	TGA	OA
Sidney Crosby	C	A+	A+	D	B+
Radim Zohorna	LW	A+	C+	A+	B+
Jake Guentzel	LW	A+	A+	F+	B
Bryan Rust	RW	A+	A+	F+	B
Reilly Smith	RW	A+	C-	B	B
Evgeni Malkin	C	A+	D	C+	B-
Lars Eller	C	C-	D+	A+	C+
Drew O’Connor	LW	F	D	A+	C-
Matt Nieto	LW	F+	C	A+	C-
Noel Acciari	C	F	D	A+	C-
Rickard Rakell	RW	F	C+	B-	C-
Jeff Carter	C	F	F	A+	D+

Player	Po	I Off	T Off	T Def	OA
Erik Karlsson	D	A+	A+	B	A-
Kris Letang	D	A+	A+	C+	A-
Marcus Pettersson	D	C-	A+	B	B
Ryan Graves	D	D+	C+	A+	B-
Ryan Shea	D	F	F+	A+	D+
Chad Ruhwedel	D	F	F	D+	F+

Goalies

I treated the Goalies in similar fashion using their 5-on-5 Save Percentage (Sv%) and their Points Percentage (Pnts%) which was defined by the number of team Pnts (tPnts) they contributed to the team divided against the total possible tPnts, as the 2 tests to be averaged. To get their grades, just like the Forwards and Defensemen, I Divided the Goalies individual score by the league average and multiplied it by 75%, again just as if the stat was a test. (191 minutes TOI was the lower limit for the Goalies)

Goalies	Sv%	Pnts%	OA
Alex Nedeljkovic	C+	D+	C-
Tristan Jarry	C	D	D+

Coaching

There is a basic truism that anyone who has ever really been given responsibility to a group of people and truly grew as a leader has or will learn and that is the person in charge of process is accountable for outcome. To that end, the coaching staff IS the group responsible for outcome, and since the Head Coach is in charge of the entire Coaching staff, Mike Sullivan is responsible for outcome.

Outcome, for a hockey team is their tPnts. Since every team is at a different point in terms of Games Played GP, we have to look at tPnts%. Since Hockey games are potentially worth 3 Pnts with Over Time Losses (OTL), the average is not 0.500 but varies on the number of OTLs; at this point of the seasons 0.549 is the average. Setting this as the 75% or C gives our Penguins Coach, whose team is currently sitting at 0.500 numeric grade of 68.3% or a D+

Conclusion

These grades are not all that good, are they? Well let’s face it, the team is currently not in the playoff picture and was not on Thanksgiving Day.

The importance of my statement about the team not being in playoff position is that 76.2% of the teams in playoff position on Thanksgiving Day make the playoffs, leaving our Penguins fighting for 24.8% of the 16 playoff slots, or 4 slots. At the best, our favorite flightless fowl are a bubble team fighting for a playoff berth, they don’t deserve a whole lot of good grades.