Friday, March 06, 2020
Introducing Naive WAR for the NHL
This is the the simplest I can make WAR for the NHL. In other words, Naive WAR.
For this iteration, we start with the absolute core: goals, assists, time on ice, and saves. In a FUTURE iteration, we can add other facets, namely defense, scoring opportunities, and splitting EV, PP, and PK. But, that’s not the objective HERE. HERE, the objective is to lay the foundation, to convert the the basic stats into the WAR currency: Wins and Losses.
I’ll work through the Edmonton Oilers. The Oilers are 36-32, meaning .529 win% on 68 games. We are going to allocate 60% of the games to the forwards (40.8), 30% to the defensemen (20.4), and 10% to the goalies (6.8).
The forwards total 12,215 minutes played. Since they have 40.8 games, that means each 299 minutes converts to 1 game. Draisaitl has 1538 minutes, which we divided by 299, to give us 5.1 games. We do that for all the forwards. For defensemen, the conversion is 389 minutes per game. Darnell Nurse has 4.1 games.
For goalies, it’s 602 minutes per game. Mike Smith gets 3.5 games and Mikko Koskinen gets 3.3 games.
Ok, now we’ve established the game shares of each player. The total adds up to 68 games. Since the Oilers won .529 per game, we multiply that to establish the base for each player. Draisaitl base is 2.7 W and 2.4 L. What this base represents is what an average Oilers player would have, given that number of games.
Draisaitl is not average. So, we need to figure out how much above average he is. In this NAIVE WAR, we can only work with G and A. The Oilers have 215 goals and 366 assists. If we multiply the assists by 0.5874, we get 215. In other words, our metric will give half the value to goals and half the value to assists. Draisaitl has 43 goals and 39 adjusted assists for a total of 82 goal… something… 82 goal contributions? Whatever. It’s 82.
The average Oilers forward has 35 minutes on ice per goal contribution. Which means that Draisaitl is 38 goal contributions above average. The goal to win conversion is to divide by 6, so we have +6.4 Wins Above Average Oilers. (Again, using only G and A, and not adjusting for PP. We start somewhere and we start here. That’s why it’s NAIVE WAR.)
Since Draisaitl has a base of 2.7-2.4, we add 6.4 wins and subtract 6.4 losses. That gives Draisaitl 9.1 wins and NEGATIVE 3.9 losses. Because the “-” is already used for the “positive” losses, we will follow the lead from Bill James, flip the sign to “+” for “negative” losses. And so Draisaitl has a 9.1 + 3.9 record.
Here’s all the Oilers.
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