Toronto Maple Leafs: Wins Above Replacement Analysis

The Toronto Maple Leafs hit the New Year in second place in the NHL standings.

The best part of the Toronto Maple Leafs season so far is that they are in second place in the league despite having missed Auston Matthews for 15 games and William Nylander missing 29 games. No matter how you shake it, the Leafs healthy lineup is insane.

Since we spend a good portion of our time arguing over who is good and who isn’t, I thought it would be fun to do an article on Wins Above Replacement.  

On the wonderful stats site corsica.hockey, there is a stats called WAR – wins above replacement – which attempts to synthesize all stats into one easy to use number that is meant to represent how many wins a given player is worth so far compared to a random replacement player.

Corsica also has GAR – goals above replacement, and the Athletic has Game Score – all three are useful tools and I honestly have no idea which one on is best.  I have chosen to use WAR, but all three are interesting and useful.

Of course no single number is the gospel, but they do give a good idea of who is performing well.  So take it with  a grain of salt, and enjoy!

Toronto Maple Leafs WAR

For perspective, I’d like to star by listing the top five current WAR players in the NHL:

1. Joe Pavelski  2.9 WAR

2. Elias Pettersson 2.68

3. Alex Ovechkin  2.57

4. Jeff Skinner   2.52

5. Andrei Svechnikov  2.39

Toronto Maple Leafs franchise centre Auston Matthews is eighth 2.05.  Not too bad when you consider how many games he missed. If we convert it to WAR/60 minutes, then Auston Matthews is the best player in the NHL, worth .32 Wins for every 60 minutes of icetime.

Unsurprisingly, John Tavares is rated as the next best Leafs player, worth 1.2 Wins.

Tavares is followed, in order, by Hyman, Kadri, Kapanen and Rielly.

Next up is Dermott, Marner who is rated to be worth .44 wins.

Now, clearly, I think some of the problems of this stat are shown in the fact that Marner is ranked so low, something which I believe is because this stats focuses on shot rates as the most important thing, and Mitch Marner is a pass-first player.

Here is the WAR rationale (linked) and for the ease of reading, here is the ranked order of importance as given by the linked article:

Offensive shot rates
Defensive shot rates
Offensive shot quality
Defensive shot quality
Shooting
Penalties taken
Penalties drawn
Zonal transitions

One important factor in analyzing anything is to not completely write off the data just because you don’t like the conclusions.  Mitch Marner is 6th in NHL scoring and in fact not one of the top ten NHL scoring leaders is in the top five of the WAR rankings.

This suggests that we massively overrate assists, which I think is something worth thinking about.  You could write off the stat because of that, but before you do, take a look at the top five WAR players from last season: Ovechkin, McDavid, W.Karlsson, Couture, Kucherov.

By WAR/60 it was Ovechkin, McDavid, Matthews, and is anyone seriously going to argue that that is an inaccurate ranking of the top three players in the NHL?

Based on what I remember about last year, that checks out pretty good.

Back to the Leafs

We left off at Marner, as he was the last player who was significantly positive.  Marleau, Ennis, Gauthier, Johnsson and LIndholm are all slightly positive.

Getting into the negative we find that Jake Gardiner is just below even at -.02 WAR.  Not a good stat for my boy here, but he does play with Zaitsev (-.24) and he does play the most 5v5 minutes, and the toughest.  I am surprised he isn’t worth more, but again, like Marner, most of his value comes from assists. (Ozhiganov has the same rating as Gardiner, but plays with Dermott in much easier situations).

After Zaitsev, the next worst player is Brown, followed by Ron Hainsey, the absolute worst on the team at -.59. No one else meets the ice-time qualifications.

Based on the WAR numbers the Leafs ought to consider giving more ice time to Travis Dermott, less to Ron Hainsey, and consider finding ways to get Kadri a couple more minutes per game.

One final thing that might be interesting to Toronto Maple Leafs fans, considering recent rumours: Colton Parayko leads all NHL defenseman in WAR value, while Morgan Rielly is 9th and Dermott is 13th.

The worst defenseman by WAR in the NHL is not Ron Hainsey – but he’s eight worst, followed closely by Justin Faulk, another oft-rumoured acquisition.  Zaitsev is 27th worst.

This is fun, but remember to take it with a grain of salt – no one is telling you that Mitch Marner sucks!!

stats from Corsica.hockey