Looking at Calder Candidates halfway through

I wanted to look at Calder candidates, mainly because the Flyers have two, and also because I figure the award again will go to the player with the flashiest G-A-Pts-Plus/Minus, not necessarily the one who drives play forward, or draws penalties, or has a high on-ice scoring percentage and a high on-ice save percentage. Last year that guy was Michael Grabner, and we all know Logan Couture won it over him and Jeff Skinner. Hey, all 3 are great players but the best overall performance belonged to Grabner.

So how I decided to take a look at Behind the Net and do some simple comparisons. Not enough to make Eric proud, but just to get a hint at what's really going on under the hood. Maybe we can find the most deserving rookie, at the half-way point - and predict who'll actually get the award since there's a good chance it won't be one who shines quietly. I am not including defensemen because it's harder to measure them, I think, and I'm lazy. After the jump, the numbers.

I looked at NHL.com to find the rookie scoring leaders, and BehindtheNet.com for the advanced stats. I took six categories that I'd want in my rookie of the year, and ranked them 1 to 6 by importance to me: CorsiRel, CorsiRelQoC, PDO, Pts/60, OZoneDiff, and PenaltyRatio. OZoneDiff is simply (OZoneFinish - OZoneStart) and PenaltyRatio is (PenTaken/60)/(PenDrawn/60), so less than 1 is good and zero is perfect. For a straight ranking of candidates, I took the average of each player's rank in the six categories. For a weighted average, I used a sliding scale of sixths: (CorsiRel x 1), (CorsiRelQoC x .83), (PDO x .67), etc. It's somewhat crude but it gets the job done. (Edited 24 January to fix the 2nd table, and revise somewhat the following paragraph.)

First chart is the BehindTheNet data in full, sorted by CorsiRel: (I apologize for the formatting, the table is too wide and got cutoff. I don't know how to make it narrower.)

The second chart shows my six categories in order from most important to least, with each player's rank and the Weighted Rank over the six categories. Just below that are the same numbers, and the straight Average Rank. For giggles, I also included rank in Points (G+A), just to see -- but points are not calculated in the rankings.

The first two things that jumped out at me were the performance of Carl Hagelin of the Rangers and Nick Johnson of the Minnesota Wild. Have you seen any mainstream writers mentioning these guys as Calder candidates? I hadn't. I'd heard of Hagelin since we play the Rangers but didn't realize how well he's doing, at least in these six categories. And Nick Johnson? Whodat? Good player, evidently! Great CorsiRel, seems to face tough competition, and really moves the play forward. But he doesn't score much, so he'll be ignored. Notice also that Hagelin is 10th in points of these 12 forwards; welcome to Ignore, Carl. You don't deserve it.

The next thing was that the top 6 are the same in weighted and straight average rank - except for the #4/5 slots, occupied by Henrique and Cody Hodgson (Vancouver) in straight rank, and Landeskog/Henrique in weighted rank. Landeskog has excellent Corsi numbers, but is sheltered and loses out a bit with the O-Zone and Penalty metrics. Hodgson plays tougher minutes, and shines in PDO and in drawing penalties, enough to make them switch places in my criteria system. Henrique suffers in PDO but is pretty solid otherwise, with a bit of a low Corsi Rel - but is well-rounded enough to keep him in the top 5.

So from this data and the way I chose to evaluate it, looks like Carl Hagelin is my top Calder Candidate, with Read and Couturier trailing him closely. And the odds-on favorite, I suspect - Nugent-Hopkins, is strictly middle-of-the-pack, and trails Nick Johnson. Go figure.

All these guys, including Johansen and Greening, are doing a great job in the NHL at their age. So kudos to all of them. How do you guys (and ladies) see this ranking, and what are your thoughts on who (so far) is most deserving? Did I grossly misjudge a particular category, maybe Corsi QoC or the combination of that and O-Zone Start %? (This is my first foray into comparing these things on my own. And I wasn't up to plotting QoC vs. O-Zone start to find the heavy lifters.) Also, do you think Matt Read's age matters? Despite his extra years being at college level, does being 25 automatically give you an advantage? Not saying he's disqualified, more of a "head start".