Exploring A New Player Evaluation Tool

There is a twitter user I've mentioned before named Domenic Galamini. He routinely does great work, and recently unveiled a new player evaluation tool: ladder charts. Over at his website--Own the Puck--Domenic has a system that lets you sort through all players who played regular minutes the last 2.5 seasons to see what kind of numbers they've put up. Because this is a sweet little toy, I'll throw a few of these charts up so that we get used to them.

The charts are broken down between forwards and defensemen, so let's start with forwards. Here's a graph for Sidney Crosby.

Domenic adjusts a player's corsi numbers to account for quality of competition and teammates, as well as zone starts. He explains his methodology here. As you can see above, he's also helpfully divided each ladder rung into 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th liners. This lets us see whether a certain player is meeting, above, or below expectations.

Moral of the story: Crosby is terrible and we should trade him (for those who don't take sarcasm well, I am kidding).

Here's a less talented forward (putting that politely).

Sutter's puck possession while a member of the Penguins has been sub replacement-level. That's not good. He also hasn't scored very well in terms of 5v5 pts/60.

Turning to defensemen, here's a guy who is very good at his craft.

Letang crushes his peers in every category. As Adam Gretz said last night, Letang might be underpaid.

Finally, here is a defenseman who shouldn't be in the NHL.

The Penguins would do well to find a trading partner for Scuderi or use a regular buyout on him this summer. He won't be benched so long as he's paid $3.5 million, so better to force the coach's hand by shipping him out.

Anyways, that's a brief introduction to this really cool website. You can search by players and pull up their charts with ease. Let me know if you have any questions!