Feed Me A Stray Cat
Registered User
Often times we love to compare player X to player Y based on their point production in a given season or career. It's a fair enough estimation of offensive talent, especially over a large sample size, but I'm curious just how much teammates and ice time player into it.
For instance, if you were to stick a replacement level player on the wing of Nicklas Backstrom and Alexander Ovechkin for a full season, how many points would you expect? Or to look at it through another lens, if you took Nicklas Backstrom and put him on the fourth line, how much would his production suffer? Let's assume complete polarity in PP opportunity, so by the player will get 3 minutes of PP ice time per game in a good situation and none in a bad one.
You can tease out the TOI effect by looking at per 60 metrics, however I wouldn't be surprised if it's not a linear relationship. It might get harder to produce at a per 60 rate with more ice time due to increased competition and fatigue.
Obviously a replacement level player would also lower overall line production, so these things can't be looked at a in a vacuum.
However, my suspicion is that not enough credit is given to opportunity as a determinant in point production.
For instance, if you were to stick a replacement level player on the wing of Nicklas Backstrom and Alexander Ovechkin for a full season, how many points would you expect? Or to look at it through another lens, if you took Nicklas Backstrom and put him on the fourth line, how much would his production suffer? Let's assume complete polarity in PP opportunity, so by the player will get 3 minutes of PP ice time per game in a good situation and none in a bad one.
You can tease out the TOI effect by looking at per 60 metrics, however I wouldn't be surprised if it's not a linear relationship. It might get harder to produce at a per 60 rate with more ice time due to increased competition and fatigue.
Obviously a replacement level player would also lower overall line production, so these things can't be looked at a in a vacuum.
However, my suspicion is that not enough credit is given to opportunity as a determinant in point production.
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