The Puck Stops Here
Does Offensive Point Shares Underrate Gretzky’s 215 Point Season?
by PuckStopsHere on 08/31/11 at 12:45 PM ET
Comments (3)
Lately, I have been looking into the point shares system published by Justin Kubatko at hockey-reference.com. This is an attempt to credit the points teams have in the standings to individual players on the team. I have first looked at offensive point shares and the top individual seasons by this method. One of the more surprising results is that the season when Wayne Gretzky set the record for most points in a season in 1985/86 with 215 points is ranked tenth in the best all time seasons. Five other Gretzky seasons, two Mario Lemieux seasons and two Phil Esposito seasons rank above it.
This has to do with the way the point share system treats assists. When Gretzky set his point record he did so with a lot of assists. Gretzky scored 52 goals and a record 163 assists for his 215 points in the 1985/86 season.
The offensive point share system uses one formalism of goals created significantly to rank player’s offensive contributions. It arbitrarily ranks assists as being less valuable than goals. It uses goals plus half of the assists whenever assists are used in the calculation. Thus is reduces this season’s value significantly because it was assist heavy.
The problem is that not all assists are worth half a goal. This is a choice put into the system which over the longterm seems to hold up relatively well but it fails in individual cases. Some players do little to create goals with many of their assists. They get them for incidental touches of the puck before a goal is scored. Other players (and Wayne Gretzky is by far the best example) created the goal with their assist and were much more important to the goal that the actual goal scorer. There is no easy way to differentiate the value of assists in historic data, but it may be possible to do so in modern games. This can be done if assists are treated differently depending upon how they occur. Are the assists rebounds, passes that directly contributed to the goal, passes that indirectly contributed to the goal, incidental touches, faceoff wins etc.? If we separated the types of assists we might find that certain types of assists are far more valuable than others. This will take study and a new formalism to be developed.
The only thing we can do easily from statistical records is to differentiate between primary and secondary assists. Primary assists are the player who had the puck directly before the goal scorer and secondary assists are the player who had the puck before the primary assist. There have been studies trying to make some sense of this. Some people value primary assists more than secondary ones but I think that is not satisfactory. We need more information about assists. There is a wide range of ways they can occur and too many different things are lumped together.
A simple way to think about assists is that they are something that happens to all players who are on the ice when their team scores a few goals. Given enough playing time ay player, including a goalie will collect a few assists. The more offensive a player’s style the more assists the player will collect. It is those assists above and beyond the threshold of incidental assists that are meaningful in terms of goals created. When a player like Wayne Gretzky puts up 163 assists in a season and no other player in the league has more than 93, it is clear that his assists are creating a lot of goals. He creates a lot more assists above and beyond the threshold of incidental goals than any other player and those assists are instrumental in goal creation. A player with an extreme number of assists likely is more instrumental in creating goals with his assists than a player who scores only a few assists. Thus players who get lots of assists are most likely getting underrated by this system and Wayne Gretzky’s 1985/86 season is an extreme example of this.
In general assists are not worth as much as goals, but this is not always true. A player who gets a lot of assists is most likely creating a lot of goals. They are likely creating more goals than the goals created calculation gives them credit. Thus this system underrates Wayne Gretzky’s 1985/86 season. It is a candidate for the best offensive season of all time and this system rates it too low in tenth place.
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Comments
If some assists are more valuable than others for the reasons you’ve described above, then some goals are more valuable than others, as well. Not for their impact, but for the skill and effort necessary to score them. I’m talking more about a skilled shot versus a garbage goal, etc.
What are your thoughts about the sensitivity of weights on assists (in this system), including weighing goals and assists equally?
Posted by SteMaturin on 09/01/11 at 09:45 AM ET
To truly do this right, we cannot have an arbitrary weighting of goals relative to assists. The weighting must be meaningful. For it to be meaningful, I think we have to better understand who created the goal. This means not all goals scored are created equally and not all assists are created equally. The reason I have pointed this out with assists is because there is a much greater variability in their value. Some assists completely set up goals and others are incidental touches of the puck. Its really hard to score a goal where you have less part in the goal creation as some of the most incidental assists.
Posted by PuckStopsHere on 09/01/11 at 01:31 PM ET
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Great column TPSH.
Posted by Lindas1st from New England on 08/31/11 at 04:03 PM ET