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Friday, February 18, 2011
Player Worth by position, NHL
Hawerchuk shows us that the NHL allocates 59% of their marginal salaries on forwards, 32% on defensemen, and 9% on goalies.
Goalies of course make up one-sixth of the ice time, so it seems that “per minute”, goalies are valued less. Which is perfectly reasonable, if we remember that goalies are one-way players (only play on half the ice), while the rest of the team plays on both sides.
If we think of it in terms of “action minutes”, and remembering we also have powerplay and penalty kill time, we have this many action minutes per position:
170 forwards
120 defensemen
30 goalies (i.e., 60 minutes per game divided by 2)
-----
320 action minutes
In terms of shares of action minutes, forwards are 53%, defensemen are 38%, and goalies are 9%.
But wait, I presumed that one minute of playing is one minute of “action”. Seeing that the average playing time for a defenseman is 20 minutes and for a forward it’s 15 minutes, it seems to me that teams accept that there’s less action for a defenseman than a forward. So, let’s try something else.
1 minute of playing time
= 1 minute of action time for forwards
= 0.75 minutes of action time for defensemen
= 0.50 minutes of action time for goalies
Working it out again:
170 forwards
90 defensemen (120 x .75)
30 goalies (i.e., 60 minutes per game divided by 2)
-----
290 action minutes
Our new percentage is:
59% forwards
31% defensemen
10% goalies
Compared to the 59, 32, 9, it seems to me that the NHL has pretty much settled on a seemingly optimal split.
This is NOT the way I would normally do it. The way I would do it is to look at wins above replacement, and do the split in that manner.
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