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 67th 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.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment