Goin’ to WAR with Our Penguins

With the recent influx of brand-new Penguins, I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking up stats as a way of getting a feel for our newbies. One of my favorite ways to familiarize myself with a player is to look at his WAR chart, short for Wins Above Replacement.

Being a stat nerd at heart, I thought it would be cool to list the WAR for each member of the team. Prominent departures, too.

Before we get to the tables, a quicky WAR review. Just so I’m not reinventing the wheel, I’m going to pirate my explanation from last summer’s article.

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 his role, which in hockey is determined by his position and ice time (TOI).

You’ll notice in some cases a player’s role doesn’t necessarily line up with the way he’s actually used. For example, Evgeni Malkin is categorized as a first liner even though he’s our second-line center.

WAR can be expressed as a number or in this case, a percentage, with 50 percent being the break-even mark. 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 haven’t 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.

Anyway, without further ado, here are the tables. For the sake of simplicity I’ve listed four categories of WAR…overall, even-strength offense, even-strength defense and finishing, since that was a hot-button issue for last season’s bunch.

The equivalent of a 20,000-foot flyover. 

For those who crave a deeper dive, I’ve listed all the subcategories that go into determining overall WAR for forwards and defensemen at the bottom of this post.

Data is courtesy of JFresh Hockey, TopDownHockey and AllThreeZones.

Among our forwards, I was especially interested to see how newcomers Noel Acciari, Lars Eller, Vinnie Hinostroza and Matt Nieto were rated. (I couldn’t find an up-to-date WAR chart for Andreas Johnsson.)

Acciari, Eller and Nieto each has a fairly solid even-strength defensive WAR. However, when it comes to finishing, they’re varying degrees of bad, with Acciari bringing up the rear with a WAR of 11 percent.

Hinostroza’s the opposite side of the coin. Even-strength defensive WAR, not so hot. Surprisingly good at finishing considering he only scored two goals for the Sabres last season in 26 games.

However, taken as a whole, we may not see a hoped for (and needed) boost in production from our bottom-six.

Definitely a concern.

Elsewhere, one forward sticks out like a sore thumb. No, I’m not talking Geno or Sidney Crosby, whose numbers are for the most part exceptional.

Rather, Mikael Granlund’s WAR, overall and otherwise, is obscenely bad. Dear Lord.

Hindsight’s 20/20. But count me among those who feel Kyle Dubas should’ve bought out Granlund’s contract when he had the chance. Dubas has given lip service to trying to restore Granlund to his former decent self, but…man…that looks like a tall mountain to climb.

If he’s trying to work a trade? Good luck with that. Other GMs aren’t blind.

Don’t forget, Jeff Carter’s still lurking about (overall WAR of 22 percent), although given our added depth he’ll likely be mothballed…or consigned to the press box except in dire emergencies.

Among our blueliners, a few things jump out. Kris Letang and Pierre-Olivier Joseph are excellent offensively but have really bad defensive impacts. (No huge surprise.) Marcus Pettersson is a quality defenseman, except when it comes to finishing. Jeff Petry wasn’t bad. He just wasn’t great, sterling finishing WAR aside. And we have quality depth defensemen in Mark Friedman and Chad Ruhwedel.

Perhaps my biggest surprise? Newcomer Ryan Graves’ iffy ratings, especially when you consider how solid his traditional stats are (i.e. goals, assists, plus-minus, blocked shots).

For fun, I tossed would-be blockbuster acquisition Erik Karlsson into the mix. Based on WAR and the eye test, the silky Swede is your prototypical breathe-life-into-your-team-at-one-end-of-the-ice-and-kill-it-at-the-other-end player. Very reminiscent of former Pens Hall-of-Famer Paul Coffey, who was brilliant offensively and in transition and God-awful in our zone.

I can only imagine the carnage in both directions should he and Tanger ever share the ice.

As for our departures, with the notable exception of Jason Zucker who I HATED to lose, I’m struck by how bad the offensive impacts were. Yet I’m also struck by how good the defensive WARs are, especially for Brock McGinn, Nick Bonino, peppery Josh Archibald and Teddy Blueger. Not to mention the surprising finishing numbers for McGinn, Bonino and Kasperi Kapanen, who seems to do little else well.

Anyway, I found going to WAR with our Pens fascinating. Hope you will, too.

Here are those subcategories I mentioned.