GRIT

I have always loved numbers. Growing up, I couldn’t wait to get the Hockey News Yearbook and just go through the pages of stats. I’d probably still be just as excited for the yearbook if it wasn't for the internet and the quality of the Hockey News in the last few years; although, this year’s issue did include Corsi and Fenwick team stats. The acceptance of “Advanced Stats” in the NHL is growing and I could not be happier. I would like to think I understand most of the new stats but I would consider myself really green when it comes to them.

I am a Flames fan, so all I ever hear about is Grit. Over the last year, I thought it would be great to be able to track Grit. What is Grit though?

gritchart.com

Thanks to Sportsnet and likely more credit to @bookofloob, there is the GritChart.

According to the rankings on the graphic, it would suggest that Grit consists of Hitting, Fighting and Blocked Shots, while being disciplined by avoiding the penalty box.

During the 2014 NHL playoffs, I thought I would try and come up with a formula for Grit. It took some toying around with, and by watching the games, it made me understand Grit more. Now as far as formulas go, I can’t say this one is foolproof or even accurate, but it does give a number where each player can be ranked using the same stats.

To further the point about in-accurateness, the Grit Stat relies on some of the worst tracked stats in the NHL. Every arena has a different definition of a hit, so right there it is already flawed, but there is no other option, so I will have to go with what is available to me.

Because the formula includes all four stats from the GritChart, some adjusting was needed. How can the stat reward the player because of a fight, but then also hurt them by getting a 5 minute major attached to it. Why should a player lose out on Grit Points when they get a 10 minute misconduct in the last minute of a game because the referee wants to regain control of the game.  Also I noticed in the playoffs, when there were coincidental minors, most of the time it was because both players were being “gritty”, and neither player really hurt their team by spending the next 2 minutes in the penalty box.

When I attempted to track Grit during the playoffs, I omitted those penalty minutes. I was tracking the total Grit for each team rather than each player. Over the 93 games, the team with more Grit won 52 of those games, or 56%. When I started to look at individual players, I found the formula to be more player friendly than team friendly.

This summer, I entered the data to try and rank players by Grit. At first, I thought the results would end up being basically the anti-Fenwick stat. In theory, when a player does not have the puck, they will be doing other things on the ice to get the puck back; hitting, blocking shots and when all else fails… fighting. As for the penalty minutes, because I took the data from the 13/14 season, I did subtract 5 and 10 minute majors but not any coincidental minors as I did not go through every boxscore. If you split the 620 players in half, the top half in Grit had an average FF% of 48% and the bottom half 52%.

After entering all the data, I noticed that penalty minutes were quite influential to the stat. I left it that way because it makes sense. I would think that taking a bad penalty is the opposite of having positive grit. Because of the focus on penalty minutes, the top 10 players have less than 20 minutes of adjusted penalties on the season. Fighting also had a big influence on the stat as you would need to scroll down to 67^th in least amount of Grit to find the first player to have a fight last year. One result that surprised me was how low the Grit Score was for the so called “Pest”. This made sense though after because of all the bad penalties they do take.

As mentioned above, I thought Grit would be the anti-Fenwick stat, so I thought I would compare the two.

I then came up with 4 categories.

1.       Players with High Grit and Low FF% (Under 48%) - Low possession but is able to make up for it with Grit

1.       Keaton Ellerby

2.       Kevin Klein

3.       Rob Scuderi

4.       Luke Schenn

5.       Matt Martin

6.       Tom Sestito

7.       Dan Girardi

8.       Luke Gazdic

9.       Rich Clune

10.   Chris Tanev

2.       Players with Low Grit and High FF% (Greater than 52%)  - Not showing Grit because they are too busy trying to score

1.       Jaromir Jagr

2.       Evgeni Malkin

3.       Jason Spezza

4.       Alex Semin

5.       Matt Cullen

6.       Eric Staal

7.       Jeff Skinner

8.       Justin Williams

9.       Patrick Kane

10.   John Tavares

3.       Players with High Grit and High FF% (Greater than 52%) - The kind of Gritty players you want on your team

1.        Patrick Maroon

2.        Ryan Clowe

3.        Marcus Johansson

4.        Ryan Getzlaf

5.        Kyle Clifford

6.        Milan Lucic

7.        Brent Seabrook

8.        Rob Klinkhammer

9.        Jarome Iginla

10.    John Michael Liles

4.       Players with Low Grit and Low FF% (Under 48%) - What are they doing on the ice?

1.        Radic Dvorak

2.        Justin Fontaine

3.        Saku Koivu

4.        Erik Haula

5.        Ed Jovanoski

6.        Ryan Smyth

7.        Dave Bolland

8.        Nate Prosser

9.        Eric Condra

10.    Marcus Kruger

I also thought it would be fun to see other categories.

1.       Top Grit from the Facepunchers (Minimum 7 fights)

     1.       Mike Brown

     2.       Matt Martin

     3.       Tom Sestito

     4.       Luke Gazdic

     5.       Rich Clune

     6.       Patrick Maroon

     7.       Chris Neil

     8.       Krys Barch

     9.       Tom Wilson

     10.   Matt Hendricks

2.       Least Grit from the Facepunchers (Minimum 7 fights)

     1.       Zac Rinaldo

     2.       Adam McQuaid

     3.       Fraser McLaren

     4.       Eric Gudbranson

     5.       Matt Carkner

     6.       Anthony Peluso

     7.       Clayton Stoner

     8.       Antoine Roussel

     9.       Jay Rosehill

     10.   Jared Boll

3.       Most Grit from Goal scorers (20+ goals)

     1.       Ryan O’Reilly

     2.       Ryan Getzlaf

     3.       Milan Lucic

     4.       Jarome Iginla

     5.       Brayden Schenn

     6.       Joffrey Lupul

     7.       Ondrej Palat

     8.       Frans Nielsen

     9.       Wayne Simmonds

     10.   Troy Brouwer

All the stats I got from NHL.com and war-on-ice.com . I will try and get the spreadsheet up on google docs at some point for everyone to explore.

Grit Chart

Hi Mike! (you will probably be the only one reading this) I didn't want to try and fight with 140 characters to explain all my thoughts about GritChart on twitter so here we are.

So I base everything off this graphic. At first glance it is just 4 stats, well 3 stats and one that isn't tracked very well. I had fun at the beginning of the year, and photoshopped what 2013 would look like and noticed that with the rankings, the ability of not getting penalty minutes is considered grit. Which makes sense.. You have all the hitting, and fighting. being nasty without taking the penalty (although 5 for fighting); Grit could help you win the game.

So after a lot of tweaking to get a formula to calculate Grit, I came up with this:

       (Hits) + (Blocked Shots)
 (((Penalty Mintues - (Fights X 5) +1 ) /2)      + (Fights X 2))


Now explained in English. I would consider Hits and Blocked Shots equal stats in the GritChart, therefore add them together. Then divide it by the number of Penalty minutes (took all the 5 minutes fighting majors out) divided by 2 because it shouldn't be twice the stat Hits or Blocked shots is. The addition of 1 in the formula is in case a team goes without taking a penalty and then you are unable to divide by 0. In that case, it would just be Hits + Blocked Shots = Super High Grit!!! Then lastly you add the number of fights multiplied by 2 because it should be considered the most Grittiest stat of them all.

Example -

Game 4 of Tampa Bay and Montreal

Lots of hits and blocked shots with low penalty minutes created a high grit number. Everything looks fine.

Here is my problem with Sportsnet's GritChart. It doesn't take in consideration the type of penalty. The last 2 games of the Anaheim/Dallas series has been really chippy near the end with lots of visual Grit. The ref's and linesmen have been breaking up the fights before they happen and handing out 10 minute game misconducts like candy on Halloween. So the more penalty minutes lead to a smaller Grit number.

Game 3 of Anaheim and Dallas

Letting them fight would triple the GritChart score, but they probably would still get the 10 minutes misconducts anyway. So maybe to get an accurate GritChart score, you would only need to use penalty minutes which put the team on the penalty kill. Any time two guys get kicked out, for wanting to have more grit, shouldn't count. Anytime two players both get roughing calls, the team's GritChart score shouldn't be penalized for showing that grit.

This seems more accurate to me, or am I thinking too much into this. Should it just be straight numbers found on he stat sheet or should the type of penalty be in consideration. Either way, Sportsnet's Grit Chart is just too simple and not well explained.