Name: Why I left Draisaitl, Carlson and Couturier off my NHL awards ballot
Brand: theathletic.com
SKU: theathletic-com-104
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Why I left Draisaitl, Carlson and Couturier off my NHL awards ballot

preview

Sep 22, 2020On Sept. 10, was awarded the Selke Trophy as the NHL’s best defensive forward. On Monday night before Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final, won the Hart Trophy as league MVP and finished second in voting for the Norris Trophy as the league’s best defenceman.I left all three off my PHWA ballot entirely.It was tough going against the wisdom of the crowd, especially in my first year of voting, and it’s hard to go much further against the grain than leaving two winners and a runner-up off the ballot. There’s value in thinking differently and it’s a good thing that a voting body isn’t one homogenous blob with the exact same ideals, but not voting for any of Draisaitl, Carlson and Couturier for their respective awards is obviously still bold, to say the least. Though it shouldn’t have been totally surprising given I had written my feelings on it still deserves some explaining, lest it come across as some sort of spicy hot-takery (it wasn’t, I promise).Voting for the NHL awards is an honour I do not take lightly. It’s been a life goal of mine and I thought long and hard over my choices. While it may look easy from the outside, it’s a tougher job than it looks, especially with the scrutiny it attracts. The thing about a sport like hockey where value is so hard to define is that no two people will be perfectly aligned in how they value a player. For the sake of a five player list they may come to the same conclusions but get there in different ways. There’s still a lot of subjectivity to it which leaves a lot of room for debate. That’s a good thing, it makes the discussion around the awards fun, but it also has the potential to turn toxic if a fan base feels their player was slighted. I promise, I do not hate your favourite player or team.So here’s how I voted for each of the three awards in question and why I voted that way.Ryan O’ReillyThis one comes down to a matter of definition. The Selke Trophy has sort of morphed into “the best two-way forward” award and that’s how a lot of people vote on it. That’s fine and I respect anyone who does it that way. But the award’s definition is “best defensive forward” and I’m sticking to that.Purely by definition, offence should not be part of the equation and so defensive acumen is all I considered, which is largely what hurt Couturier. If I went by the two-way forward standard, Couturier would have been on my ballot, no question – probably somewhere near the top. by beat writer Charlie O’Connor is excellent in explaining why Couturier was deserving of the accolade this season. He played big minutes, he had the best Corsi differential by a wide margin per RAPM, a very strong one by expected goals, a decent point rate and he was amazing at the dot. All in very tough minutes, which he excelled in. The two-way resume is obvious.But the defensive side is less rosy relative to the field, especially depending on your analytic of choice. Couturier is very strong in terms of limiting shot attempts, but the discussion has moved past that and by expected goals he doesn’t come up as strong on the defensive side of things. By RAPM he’s behind Cirelli, O’Reilly, Danault, Bergeron and Foligno. He was behind in actual goals allowed to Cirelli, O’Reilly and Foligno, too.My main criteria for the Selke was looking at how players limited offence with respect to expected and actual goals, with a larger emphasis on the expected amount since actual ones can be prone to randomness. There was also a strict criteria that accounted for usage to make sure everyone was playing tough minutes and utilized on the penalty kill. All five on my ballot qualified just as much as Couturier in that regard.In the end, I had six names I felt comfortable with, all of whom excelled defensively this season. That meant one player was going to be left out and it ultimately came down to Foligno and Couturier. I don’t think Foligno gets enough credit for the defensive game he had this season. He was a pivotal part of a stingy Columbus team that ranked third in expected goals against this year. Foligno is a winger, but his minutes were just as difficult as Couturier’s, he played just as much on the penalty kill and his defensive impact was better than Couturier.The major difference? Foligno only played at a 38-point pace and was below average at driving play offensively. By Hockey Viz’s isolated impact, Couturier is plus-15 percent overall while Foligno is plus-13 percent, but defensively it’s Foligno that has the edge in terms of impact. For a two-way award there’s obviously no way Foligno belongs, but voting in favour of defensive merit I felt his play this season was more worthy.Of the three non-conforming calls to make that are being explored here, this one was the easiest. Well, that’s not exactly fair – the least difficult might be more apt. For the other two, I had a fierce debate over the final spot between who I chose and who the larger voting body appreciated more. For this award, Carlson was a little lower on my radar. Definitely in consideration, but there were other names in the mix I considered over him.Carlson had some very splashy point totals and that generally means he played a big role in the offence. He had 75 points in 69 games, an absurd number that led all defencemen by 10. And that wasn’t built up by feeding for one-timers, either; he was a driver at 5-on-5 leading the league in points per 60 among defencemen.The question of Carlson’s total value comes two-fold: how much offence did he actually drive and does it make up for his defensive weaknesses?I had nine names I was debating – the five listed above, Carlson, , (yes, even in just 47 games he was that good) and . Of those nine here’s where Carlson ranked in terms of various on ice-metrics, both raw and using RAPM which accounts for teammates and opponents.OffenceGF/60: 3rdRAPM GF/60: 4thxGF/60: 7thRAPM xGF/60: 8thDefenceGA/60: 9thRAPM GA/60: 8thxGA/60: 9thRAPM xGA/60: 9thOverallGF%: 9thRAPM GF%: 8thxGF%: 9thRAPM xGF%: 9thOh, and on the power play he ranked sixth in goal impact by RAPM and raw totals, only ahead of the three defenders who don’t get time on the top power play unit. Is this your king?In terms of on-ice metrics, it’s very hard to see an argument for Carlson’s merit as the other teams benefitted much more from the presence of their star defenceman than Washington did with Carlson. The defensive metrics are the worst of the field (and among the worst in the league, frankly) and his offence simply isn’t enough to shoulder that burden. Despite all those points he scored, he wasn’t even first in that category suggesting that while he may be more of a focal point to Washington’s offence, it didn’t actually help them score more goals than say, Josi or Hedman.It’s the overall numbers that hurt his candidacy. Of the nine defenders, Carlson was the only one that was outchanced for the year and the only player whose team outscored and outchanced teams with him on the bench. The difference between him and the next worst defender by expected goals percentage here is over 4 percentage points. By goals, it’s close at 3.6. That’s a chasm that’s hard to ignore.Having said that, Carlson’s gaudy point totals aren’t nothing. The fact he was the focal point of the offence and got those last touches before goals, that he set up so many is an achievement is hard to overlook. Anyone who says “well, his expected goals rate was bad” and ignoring his production is missing a piece of the puzzle just as much as anyone who says “well, he got a lot of points” and ignoring his lesser 5-on-5 impacts.There’s a balance to be struck, but even by my model, GSVA, which is relatively generous to point-scoring defenders, Carlson’s total value was lacking compared to some of his peers. Despite the woeful defence, he ranked 13th by GSVA with 2.33 wins, and if you exclude defenders that didn’t play top pairing calibre minutes he moves up to 10th. Carlson had a lot of points, but the difference in actual defensive performance was enormous compared to players like McAvoy, Spurgeon and Heiskanen and it means he definitely isn’t as well regarded as more well-rounded players like Josi, Hedman, Pietrangelo and yes, even 47 games of Hamilton.Evaluating defencemen is hard and there are other pieces that are missing from public analytics that are worth noting too – it’s why I had Carlson higher than 10th, closer to seventh or eighth. But based on everything we do have access to and how strong the field was overall, it was hard to find a spot for Carlson in the top five.This was by far the toughest decision I had to make and I swapped between Draisaitl and Matthews repeatedly, agonizing over the call. Admittedly, I had Draisaitl in the fifth spot for a while simply because of the optics of being a Toronto-based writer and I didn’t want to deal with calls of having any bias in that regard. I felt that fear did a disservice to my ballot, though, that fans should know writers are deeply aware of that bias already and can go too far in the opposite direction in appeasement rather than voting how they actually think.If there’s a bias here, it’s toward my own model and not toward any team. I’ll readily admit that I lean on it a lot (perhaps even too much sometimes), but that’s because I believe in what it tells me most of the time (not all the time, mind you). I know I can’t watch every game, and I know I’ll miss stuff when I do. Over a large sample it greatly fills in the gaps in a way that puts every player in the league within the same context. It helps diminish any bias toward any city because it’s a model, it doesn’t care where a player is from. Every person has a system of guidelines for how they value players, mine is just mostly shaped algorithmically. There may be flaws in that but it leads to fewer errors along the way to have a more concrete system of ideals.By GSVA, here’s how the field was rated.1. Connor Hellebuyck: 4.63 winsT2. Artemi Panarin: 4.13 winsT2. Nathan MacKinnon: 4.13 wins4. David Pastrnak: 4.11 wins5. : 3.97 wins6. Auston Matthews: 3.92 wins7. Leon Draisaitl: 3.62 winsHellebuyck was tops, but I opted for Panarin and MacKinnon over him because I thought what they did at forward was more impressive. A goalie would have to be incredibly ahead in a season to be put first because the position itself intrinsically leads to more value. I discounted Pastrnak a bit for being on a super line and dropped Marchand out of the conversation because I didn’t want to vote for two players on the same team. That left Matthews and Draisaitl vying for the final spot.When it comes to win values, there’s always error attached to it. We see “four wins,” but what that really means is “somewhere between 3.5 to 4.5 wins, give or take” and that error-bound itself may be generous. It means that despite Draisaitl being 0.3 wins behind Matthews in GSVA, 0.1 wins behind in WAR and 1.4 wins behind in xWAR (where Matthews led the league), there was plenty of room for discussion between the two. It’s worth getting into why there was a difference and why Matthews was ahead in the first place given Draisaitl scored 30 more points than him because it’s obviously not a consensus opinion.The big thing is that points are not a total value stat. Points mean points – they tell you how many points a player got. That’s it. Draisaitl already got an award for having the most points, it’s called the Art Ross Trophy. There should be more to the Hart than which player had the most points.GSVA, WAR and xWAR go farther than raw production, they consider not only a player’s offensive contributions, but weight them more appropriately, contextualize them, all while adding defence to the equation. It’s that latter part that often gets ignored and greatly bridges the gap between these two players who were on opposite ends of the spectrum this year.By individual production it was obviously not close. Draisaitl only had four fewer goals, but just as many individual expected goals while also doubling Matthews’ assist total. None of that is being taken away from Draisaitl – his individual numbers were truly excellent. The difference is their play at 5-on-5 and it’s a similar argument to what held back Carlson, only to a lesser degree because defence matters a lot more for defencemen than it does for forwards. That’s something my model accounts for, which is why Draisaitl still grades out very well despite weaker defensive numbers.With Draisaitl on the ice, the scored 0.34 more goals per 60 than the with Matthews on the ice. The issue is they also allowed nearly one more goal against, which is a massive problem. The Leafs earned 58.7 percent of the goals with Matthews on the ice, while the Oilers were only at 52.8 percent with Draisaitl. By expected goals, the gap was just as large with Matthews at 55.7 percent and Draisaitl at 48.7 percent with the difference again coming mostly on defence. With the Oilers allowing 2.92 expected goals against per 60 with Draisaitl on the ice, it’s hard to ascribe his weak goals against numbers to bad goalie luck – they bleed chances against with him on the ice. Among forwards, that 2.92 mark was the 13th worst in the league. I would guess that it’s probably a lot easier to score a lot of points when a player is less committed to the defensive side of the game. That was probably by design in Edmonton given the team has two all-world offensive talents, but given the smaller edge in terms of goal share, I’m not sure it’s working as well as it could.Game Score, the stat that drives GSVA, is meant to be put on a similar scale to points so it might be easier to explain the math that way. In terms of just individual production, plus offensive play-driving, Draisaitl’s Game Score was 104, a little less than his point totals (likely due to a lot of secondary assists) while Matthews was at 83, a little more due to a high share of goals. But their defensive impacts were polar opposites with Draisaitl’s being worth minus-14 points and Matthews’ being worth plus-14.That’s the major difference between the two and it’s how Matthews makes up the ground lost in the point-scoring race. He’s the very rare talent that can score goals at an elite rate at one end of the ice and defend them nearly as well at the other end. His defensive game took a huge leap this year and that adds a lot of value to his overall game.If Draisaitl’s defensive game was even average, this would be no contest. In fact, he’d be an easy choice to win the award and would be worth 4.33 wins. But it wasn’t this year and that should matter. Hockey is a 200-foot game and while I have little doubt that Draisaitl was the best offensive player this year, he’s knocked down the ladder a bit due to his defensive shortcomings. Every part of me wanted to overlook that because his offensive game was just so brilliant this season, but there was just a bit too much to look the other way.For those wondering and for full transparency, here’s what the rest of my ballot looked like.1.2.3.4.5.1. Jaccob Slavin2.3. Nathan MacKinnon4.5.Center1. Nathan MacKinnon2. Auston Matthews3. Leon DraisaitlRight wing1. David Pastrnak2.3.Left wing1. Artemi Panarin2. Brad Marchand3.Defence1. Roman Josi2. Victor Hedman3. Charlie McAvoy4. Alex Pietrangelo5. Jared Spurgeon6. Dougie HamiltonGoaltender1. Connor Hellebuyck2.3.Forward1.2.3.Defence1. Cale Makar2. Quinn HughesGoaltender1. Mackenzie BlackwoodData via Evolving Hockey(Photo of Sean Couturier and John Carlson: Len Redkoles / NHLI via Getty Images)

Sep 22, 2020On Sept. 10, was awarded the Selke Trophy as the NHL’s best defensive forward. On Monday night before Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final, won the Hart Trophy as league MVP and finished second in voting for the Norris Trophy as the league’s best defenceman.I left all three off my PHWA ballot entirely.It was tough going against the wisdom of the crowd, especially in my first year of voting, and it’s hard to go much further against the grain than leaving two winners and a runner-up off the ballot. There’s value in thinking differently and it’s a good thing that a voting body isn’t one...

public

Dom Luszczyszyn

Get every sports story that matters. Download The Athletic app: https://linktr.ee/TheAthletic

Why I left Draisaitl, Carlson and Couturier off my NHL awards ballot

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS