Measuring Penguins First Quarter Performance—Part II

Other Rick’s excellent article in which he assigned the Penguins first quarter grades got me to thinking about my own evaluation and how I would rate our players.

While my colleague and I differ to an extent on our methodology, especially when it comes to our goalies, there is some overlap. I agree that the bottom-line measure of any player is to contribute to your team scoring while preventing your opponent from scoring. And that, at least to a degree, one of the best measures of a player’s performance is to compare on-ice goals for to on-ice goals against 5-on-5.

In addition to actual Goals For Percentage (GF%), I also like to factor in Expected Goals for Percentage (xGF%), since it takes into account varying roles, situations and opportunities.

For example, I would expect a play driver like Sidney Crosby to have a higher xGF% than, say, a fourth-liner like Blake Lizotte or Noel Acciari.

As a general rule, you want your actual performance to be greater than your expected performance.

Accordingly, I’ve ranked our forwards and defensemen based on the differential between their GF% and xGF%. I’ll refrain from assigning letter grades. Rather, I’ll let the numbers do the talking.

The results? Eye-opening, to say the least. Especially in Crosby’s case. I’d expect Sid’s metrics to be higher across the board.

Of course, like any other stat, this isn’t a be-all-end-all indicator of a player’s worth. In some cases, most notably Rickard Rakell’s, it’s a matter of exceeding a bar set very low. Same with Bryan Rust. In other instances, as with Lizotte and young guns Ben Kindel and Ville Koivunen, it’s the opposite, as in failing to produce up to the comparatively high expected output they helped generate.

Then you have players performing well against fairly solid expectations. Forwards Filip Hållander, Anthony Mantha, Justin Brazeau, Evgeni Malkin and Acciari would fall into this category, along with defensemen Erik Karlsson, Parker Wotherspoon, Caleb Jones and…remarkably…Ryan Graves.

The player who’s fooled me the most? Defenseman Ryan Shea. Going strictly by the eye test, he’s really impressed me. He looks so much faster and more assertive than in the past. Yet his numbers are decidedly underwhelming. Although in fairness, they’re skewed more than a bit by an ugly minus-4 performance against the Wild last Friday. Letang’s too.

As for the goalies? According to MoneyPuck, Arturs Silovs has 5.82 Goals Saved Above Expected (GSAE), which ranks 20th in the league out of the 75 goalies who’ve appeared in at least 1 NHL game. A couple of notches behind in the 22nd slot is Tristan Jarry with 4.81 GSAE. Sergei Murashov is 47th with a GSAE of .08.

So there you have it. My quick ‘n’ dirty look at our individual first-quarter performances.