"Clutch."
What does it mean? How do you point to whether or not someone is "Clutch".
It is probably one of the more frequently used phrases in hockey, but it is a somewhat mystical and romantic sort of description. Justin Williams is, indeed, clutch. Dave Bolland...well...he is also clutch I guess. Or was clutch at one point. He was so clutch it got him a fantastic payday with the Florida Panthers.
That aside, clutch is a description that can be rather vexing and frustrating for a stat nerd like myself. You cannot point to a number and say, "Yup, he was clutch. Just look at this." No such thing exists.
Well, when it is the hockey offseason, you have time to experiment.
Baseball is the forerunner in sabermetrics. There is no questioning that. Hockey, however, is following close behind and seems to be getting better every day. One of the stats that got me musing on the whole clutch thing is baseball's slugging percentage. For those who do not follow baseball, slugging percentage is a simple formula of weighting type of hits over total ABs. Home runs and triples are weighted more heavily than your everyday singles. It is so simple, yet in conjunction with other stats it is effective in letting you know who has the big hits. A high average does not necessarily mean a high slugging percentage. Players like Adam Dunn come to mind. He was notorious for his swing and miss style, but his power was undeniable. Dunn used to log strong slugging numbers with an average that hung just above the Mendoza line (.200) on regular occurrence. In fact, one of Dunn's most productive seasons in terms of home runs came in 2012 with the White Sox when he clobbered 41 home runs and drove in 96 RBIs. Know what is average was? A cool .204, the worst of his major league career. Maybe a player of similar ilk exists in hockey? They score few goals but make them count. Maybe they score a lot of goals and make a ton of them count. Maybe there are players of the opposite camp. They score a lot of goals, but tend to be in lopsided scorelines when teams have given up or games are out of hand. Who knows right?
With all of this thinking, I decided to put pen to paper in a manner of speaking. If you follow me on twitter you will have noticed some interesting graphs (Oh yes I love my graphs) and talking points about players like Datsyuk and Couture in relation to
"Impact Plays". It is time to clear the air.
I present to you with two statistics born out of my frustration with the description "Clutch" and the admiration of baseball's slugging percentage. A stat that hopefully bridges the gap between the arcane description of "Clutch" and actual players whose timeliness and ability to score big goals is unparalleled. I present to you two new stats:
Timeliness
Impact Plays
So what are they exactly
Timeliness is just what you think it is: How timely are the goals and primary assists that players contribute? If they score 30 goals how many of them are in blowouts? How many of them actually mattered? Was the team up 4-1 when they scored them? With the
"Timeliness" rating.
So how did we get
"timeliness"?
Timeliness has a direct relation to
"Impact plays". Originally, timeliness ratings were supposed to be a standalone statistic. Like most ideas though, it spider webbed to bigger and better things. You can thank New Jersey Devil's forward Danius Zubrus for this. Zubrus scored four goals last season. Three of them were what you could consider
"Plays of significance".
Impact Plays are as follows:
A game tying goal, go ahead goal, or game winning goal.
At this point you may be getting the idea of how we got timeliness and eventually
"Impact plays"
Timeliness was originally intended to measure the "Clutchness" (For lack of a better term) of a player. Players like Zubrus, who only scored four goals, but made three of them count, obliterated the competition. In no way, shape, or form, could I make the case that Zubrus was a more clutch player than Alex Ovechkin. Thus, the real meat of the new stat was born. Impact plays (at a per 60 rate). Impact plays are, like previously stated, a game tying, go-ahead, or game-winning goal. Each goal was weighted by type and by period scored. Ergo, a 3rd period game-winning goal is weighted higher than a 1st period game-winning goal. A 3rd period game-TYING goal is also weighted higher than a 1st period game-winning goal. You can start to understand just how these calculations were put together. So, for example, if a player has an Impact goal per 60 rating of 3.00, he scores roughly 3 impact goals per 60 minutes. Mind you, these players are weighted, so it could be three 1st period game tying goals, or one game winning third period goal. Nevertheless, you can start to get an idea about which players score the big goals for their team. (Trust me, some of them are very surprising)
In simple terms, impact plays are basically big plays. Game-tying goals, game-winning goals, go-ahead goals. Timeliness is, more or less, how important the goals were that the player scored. Timeliness on its own is deceptive because it pays no mind to the actual
AMOUNT that players score. As you get to know the statistic more (hopefully) in the coming weeks, you will realize that a high timeliness rating that is coupled with a low amount of impact goals is unsustainable in many regards. Most of your top end scorers in the league register timeliness ratings around the same rate as their per 60 rates.
Do we got it? For the most part? Good. Excellent. Moving on.
With all of this in mind, it was hard to shy away from someone etched into the annals of Kings' history. A man SO clutch he was nicknamed "Mr. Game 7", much to his reluctance. We are, of course, speaking about recently departed Justin Williams who is now a member of the Washington Capitals.
On top of being interested in the Kings as a whole (And putting together all of the impact and timeliness numbers for the LA Kings roster last year), Justin Williams was a player focused on due to his mystique as a clutch player.
Do I need a stat to tell you how clutch Justin Williams was? No, not really. It is pretty obvious given his 2013-14 and 2012-13 post-season performances. Nevertheless, it is a good starting and intorduction point for the new statistic.
Williams has a mystique about him. An ice water in the veins, big game, sort of player. How much of that holds true? Well, simply put. All of it.
No. 14 had an altogether average year in production. His impact plays and timeliness were also, relatively average.
In fact, here is the Kings entire roster in terms of impact playmaking and timeliness from 2014-15.
First and foremost, impact
goals per 60 and timeliness:
Justin Williams slots in at the extreme left of the graph. Not a good start.
Here are the per 60
PLAYMAKING plays:
(It should be noted at this point that only PRIMARY assists were counted. Secondary assists, while important, are far too volatile to include in any sort of valued statistic. Goalies, after all, get secondary assists.)
Williams slots in around the middle of the Kings lineup.
While you may be saying that 2014-15 was a bit of a down year for Williams, he has really had little variance in his impact plays over the last four years.
Take a look:
If you look at the dark blue bar and the dark green bar you can see that Williams' overall impact goal and assist per 60 rating have stayed fairly consistent over time.
Now, commence the regular season to playoff transformation.
Goal scoring:
Playmaking:
There it is.
For one reason or another, Justin Williams absolutely turned it on in the playoffs. He was scoring more frequent impact goals and at more timely junctures in games in playoffs versus regular season. Maybe you are saying that it is something that is common amongst all Kings players. Guess again. Two of the Kings more timely players in terms of playmaking and goalscoring, Anze Kopitar and Jeff Carter, actually saw a REDUCTION in impact plays and timeliness.
As you can see here, Carter (Green) and Kopitar (Blue) actually saw reductions in impact scoring in the 2013-14 playoffs versus the regular season. Williams (Yellow), however, did not.
There are a number of reasons you can point to for these numbers. Mainly, it is the playoffs, teams lock it down on the top two lines. That would leave Kopitar and Carter matched up against some of the toughest centers in the game in Thornton and Toews, while Williams is able to run wild on a third line. Nevertheless, the 33-year old routinely cashed in on big plays at big times. For once we have a statistic we can point to in saying that, "Yes, Justin Williams is extremely clutch."
Given the extensive research done on the subject, we can also find out things like....hey Marian Gaborik and John Tavares were almost identical players last year in scoring big goals for their respective teams!
Or, wow, Anze Kopitar scores 33% of his impact goals or assists in the third period!
Maybe it is me just nerding out on stats, but it seems to be a relatively untapped area of hockey analysis. With time, hopefully I can uncover more and more in the coming weeks (preferably before the 2015-16 season starts!)
Keep an eye on HockeyProspectus.com over the next week or so as I round out the top-50 scoring players in the league in relation to impact scoring and timeliness and release the data I am gathering. It is a brand new statistic that I have found to be very interesting in shedding light on which players score big goals for their teams. All thoughts and feelings on it are welcomed as it continues to evolve and grow.
What it has told us so far is that Justin Williams is indeed a clutch player who turns it on in the post-season (If the stat had not checked out in this regard I would have started over...). Get there Washington Capitals, and you have a player who indeed lives up to the name of "Mr. Game 7."....even if he does hate it.
Oh
It also tells us that Pavel Datsyuk is still awesome.
More to come on Impact plays and Timeliness in the future! Questions? Concerns? Critiques? Feel free to email me or send a private message via hockeybuzz! I have a lot of information waiting to be released so if you are curious on any specific player let me know. I look forward to the response.
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