Philadelphia Flyers: Evaluating Forward Performance
Dec 18, 2014; Philadelphia, PA, USA; Philadelphia Flyers right wing
Wayne Simmonds(17), center
Scott Laughton(49) and center
Brayden Schenn(10) try to hold up linesman Tim Nowak (77) who knocked into the bench by Florida Panthers right wing
Jimmy Hayes(not pictured) and Philadelphia Flyers defenseman
Luke Schenn(not pictured) during the third period at Wells Fargo Center. The Panthers defeated the Flyers, 2-1 in a shootout. Mandatory Credit: Eric Hartline-USA TODAY Sports
Today I’ll be looking at the Goals Above Replacement for the Philadelphia Flyers forwards. The only criteria used for making the chart you’ll see below was that the player had to have accrued at least 300 minutes of ice time last season (2014/15).
The fine folks over at War-On-Ice have had an ongoing series of blog posts outlining their relatively new Goals Above Replacement metric, or GAR.
This metric incorporates a broad range of factors such as penalty differentials, face-offs, shot differential and scoring to try to evaluate a player’s ability across all spectrums of the game. The statistic is still being refined by the team at War-On-Ice but I thought it’d be fun to look at how each Philadelphia Flyers’ player fared in regards to this metric.
The Forwards
GAR for each Philadelphia Flyer from the 2014/15 season
GREEN = GOOD / RED = BAD
So what do we see…
- Voracek was, at least in the lens of GAR, the best Philadelphia Flyers player this past season. You wouldn’t be going out on a limb to prove that position even without this metric though. He was absolutely brilliant.
- Sean Couturier once again showcased his phenomenal shot suppression abilities. I’m really curious how Hakstol plans to use him in this upcoming season. I just hope for Couturier’s sake that he isn’t buried int he defensive zone anymore.
- Matt Read was not good this year. Hopefully this crappy season will have been just an outlier and we will be able to blame his poor performance largely in part due to that nagging high-ankle sprain. He did seem to play more like what we are normally accustomed to as the season wore on.
- The fourth-line contributions of Chris VandeVelde and Ryan White were pretty significant considering their bargain basement AAV’s of $575.000. The Flyers forward depth will be in good shape if these kind of contributions from their bottom-line forwards continues.
- Zac Rinaldo is not a good hockey player. Surprise!
- Pierre-Edouard Bellemare was an outstanding penalty-killer for the Flyers and it shows. His shot rate against was second only to Couturier, so that’s definitely something to be proud of.
- Claude Giroux is very good at playing hockey. Duh.
- It’s looking more and more like Brayden Schenn just isn’t going to become the player the Flyers thought they were getting in the Mike Richards trade. That isn’t to say that he’s bad, he was good for almost 4 more goals than a replacement level player, but he isn’t going to be a productive 2nd line guy.
- Avert your eyes from the names R.J. Umberger and Vincent Lecavalier. If you stare long enough you will go blind. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I mean, at this point nothing more needs to be said of either of them. They are contract albatrosses.
As i stated at the beginning of this piece this metric is still being refined. It’s certainly not the be-all end-all statistic to determine a player’s over all ability. What it is is another tool that will help us better understand the game.
Seeing the development of new evaluation metrics like this is always exciting. It not only helps reinforce already held beliefs about how good of a player Claude Giroux or Alex Ovechkin are, but helps reveal the underrated guys like Bellemare who aren’t getting on the score sheet but are contributing big in areas you don’t see in the box score.
In my next piece I will be using GAR to help evaluate the Flyers’ blue line.
Hockey, please come back.
All data mined from War-On-Ice.
Next: Fantasy Hockey Spotlight: Top Goalies Heading into 2015