Goin’ to WAR with Our Penguins (’24 Edition)

In what’s become a rite of summer at PenguinPoop, I decided to publish my annual Goin’ to WAR with Our Penguins article, vintage 2024. Following last summer’s format, I’ve organized the tables into three separate groups…Forwards, Defense and Departures.

Before we get to the numbers, a quickie review of WAR, short for Wins Above Replacement. 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.

You’ll notice in some cases a player’s role doesn’t seem to line up with the way he’s actually used. For example, Michael Bunting is categorized as a third liner even though he’s often been utilized in a top-six role. The same goes for Drew O’Connor.

In hockey a player’s role is determined by his position and ice time (TOI).

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.

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. 

Data is courtesy of JFresh Hockey, TopDownHockey and AllThreeZones.

It’s important to note the numbers in most cases represent a three-year weighted average, with the obvious exceptions being rookies and players who’ve played less than three seasons.

Anyway, without further ado, here are the tables.

I found it fascinating that the WAR numbers pretty much defined who we were as a team…and vice versa. We were paced by the high-profile core of Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Erik Karlsson and Kris Letang, a group that generally produced strong overall and offensive results, coupled with subpar defense.

On the flip side of the coin, our no-name bottom-six generally had solid defensive impacts, but produced little in the way of offense due in no small part to poor finishing.

In particular, rookie forward Valtteri Puustinen stood out as a player who was good offensively and defensively, albeit one who struggled mightily to tickle the twine. Given that Puusti actually possesses a pretty good shot, I’m hoping he’ll improve in that regard this season. Ditto fellow Finn and former fourth overall pick Jesse Puljujärvi.

Note the lack of second-liners for WAR purposes.

On defense, it’s hard not to be impressed by Marcus Pettersson’s strong numbers across the board…except for finishing. Our dearth of second-pair defenders is both instructive and revealing. It was, indeed, a case of Karlsson, Letang and Pettersson and then hold your breath and hope for the best. And the former pair weren’t exactly pillars of stability, defensively.

We definitely need to rethink the way we construct our blueline corps. The Panthers, for example, employ a mobile puck mover in Gustav Forsling, three hard-to-play-against all-arounders in Aaron Ekblad, Brandon Montour and Oliver Ekman-Larsson and a pair of rugged stay-at-home types in Niko Mikkola and ex-Pen Dmitry Kulikov.

Along those lines, physicality among our rearguards is a trait we neither possess nor fully seem to appreciate. Again, I cast an eye toward (and a stone at) coach Mike Sullivan, who seems all too eager to forget that competitive stay-at-homers like Ian Cole, Ron Hainsey and Olli Määttä were an integral and undervalued component of our Cup winners.

As for the departures, Jake Guentzel’s obvious offensive impacts were offset by a ghastly defensive rating (0!!!) and a surprisingly low finishing WAR of 47. Perhaps we didn’t err as much as people think when we dealt the plucky, popular free-agent-to-be.

Fellow trade-deadline departure Chad Ruhwedel’s WAR numbers are surprisingly solid. Going by the eye test, I thought his play slipped quite a bit this past season. An impression backed up by poor underlying metrics.

At any rate, looking at the black-and-gold in aggregate, POHO/GM Kyle Dubas has his work cut out for him as the business part of the summer approaches. Let’s hope he’s up to the considerable task of remaking this team in a better image.