Categories: PenguinPoop

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.

FORWARDS 3-Year Weighted Average WAR (%)
Player Role Overall EV Off. EV Def. Finishing
Crosby 1st Liner 94 98 52 81
Malkin 1st Liner 90 96 18 86
Guentzel 1st Liner 75 98 1 65
Rakell 1st Liner 47 79 31 29
Smith 2nd Liner 53 78 20 46
Rust 2nd Liner 30 45 34 30
Granlund 2nd Liner 4 8 1 40
Acciari 3rd Liner 49 65 78 11
Eller 3rd Liner 32 41 60 28
Hinostroza 4th Liner 55 28 35 68
Nieto 4th Liner 54 43 91 37
O’Connor 4th Liner 45 69 63 20
Carter 4th Liner 22 41 42 44

 

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.

DEFENSEMEN 3-Year Weighted Average WAR (%)
Player Role Overall EV Off. EV Def. Finishing
Letang Number 1 68 90 13 87
Petry Top Pair 52 53 57 94
Pettersson 2nd Pair 91 87 88 22
Graves 2nd Pair 41 54 39 50
Rutta 3rd Pair 30 12 75 21
Friedman Depth 82 69 47 52
Ruhwedel Depth 71 62 88 34
Joseph Depth 56 92 11 67
Karlsson Number 1 77 100 0 98

 

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.

DEPARTURES 3-Year Weighted Average WAR (%)
Player Role Overall EV Off. EV Def. Finishing
Zucker 3rd Liner 75 92 36 52
McGinn 4th Liner 74 13 92 74
Bonino 3rd Liner 47 14 94 58
Dumoulin 2nd Pair 46 10 73 64
Archibald 4th Liner 42 36 92 13
Blueger 4th Liner 42 24 82 33
Kapanen 4th Liner 39 30 10 72
Poehling 4th Liner 38 38 38 33
Kulikov 2nd Pair 15 23 45 38

 

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.

FORWARD METRICS CATEGORIES
Goals, Chances, Shots, Shots off HD Passes, In-Zone Shots, Rush Shots, Primary Assists, Chance Assists, Primary Shot Assists, High-Danger Passes, In-Zone Shot Assists, Rush Shot Assists, Zone Entries, Chance Contributions, Shot Contributions, Zone Exits, In-Zone Offense, Rush Offense
DEFENSEMEN METRICS CATEGORIES
Goals, Chances, Shots, Primary Assists, Chance Assists, Primary Shot Assists, NZ Shot Assists, DZ Shot Assists, Entries, Exits, Exit Possession Rate, Exit Success Rate, Passes, Entry Denial Rate, Poss. Entry Prevention, Entry Chance Prevention, Shot Contributions, Chance Contributions, In-Zone Offense, Rush Offense, D-Zone Retrievals, Retrieval Success
Rick Buker

View Comments

  • Hey Rick,

    Interesting stuff! Particularly, Guentzel’s and Granlund’s 1% on Ev Def%. Can’t get much worse than that.

    Like you, Rick, I am a stat geek. I don’t how much stock I put in WAR, xGA, and xGF, but how does the saying go? “where there is smoke there is fire.” Looking at WAR, xGA, and xGF there is a subjective influence (angle of shot, circumstances leading up to events etc.) however, 1% even with subjectivity speaks volumes.

    Pens4ever, though I find some interest in WAR, etc as a starting point, I, also, distill down to GF-GA 5-on-5 but I try to weigh it in terms of WOW numbers (multiplying the avg numbers your line mates and opponents would have as a correction factor).

    • Rick & The Other Rick
      You know how I feel about numbers!! Everyone takes what they feel is important
      when analyzing stats and validating their point of view. I worked with many, many
      Stat guys at the Pro level and their are several issues that make stats unreliable
      which I won't go into detail about, but what I always found interesting is at the end of
      the day for them to complete their assessment they have to rely on someone
      else's opinion. That's not why I commenting. I've listed a few observations below:
      Rick, Great job with the article.
      1) IMO - we currently only have (4) top six players on the roster. Crosby, Malkin, Guentzel
      and Rakell. Smith & Rust are tweeners - They fall between 2nd and 3rd.
      2) Even though the size and toughness issue hasn't been addressed I believe our 4th
      line has improved from last season.
      3) What concerns me is with the limited production we'll again be getting from our
      bottom six Sullivan will happily be forced to play Carter & Granulund significant
      minutes. As much as I hope neither player is with the team when the smoke
      clears we don't have anyone in the wings with possibly the exception of Nieto that
      can give us 13goals, 16asst (Carter) or 10goals, 31asst (Granulund).
      4) I can also see this coming - Nylander & Pussiteri on the 3rd or 4th line. These are
      not 3rd and 4th NHL type players.
      5) Rick great point about Karlsson and Leturnover playing together. Well, IMO it would
      be great to see Letang included in the trade for Karlsson but because of his
      existing contract I know this will never happen. You put Karlsson on the Power Play
      with Crosby he'll have 100pts next season.

  • Good article...but I am not a big fan of all the advanced analytics.
    The only numbers, as a fan and a coach I look at are plus / minus and TOI , plus points per game. Along with how your PK is doing, and goalies save percentage and GAA.
    Plus /minus in my eyes is the biggest, if more players are minus...not good for your team.
    If your team can't kill penalties...again your in trouble.

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