The stellar fellas over at WAR on Ice have given us their first official WAR postings. They have been up for a couple weeks now and I have made mention of them in my past couple articles, but seeing is we are going to be getting into Draft Prospect Profiles soon I wanted to take one last day to just make a simple Stat & Analysis piece. This one is going to be lighter than some of mine because I didn't want to make this inaccessible. Also my birthday is tomorrow so I decided to give myself less work.
GAR is WAR for hockey. Each category tells you how many goals the players performance in that part of a game was worth. I took the liberty of filtering out only the devils of this season and reformatting it into the table you see below:
GAR = Goals Above Replacement
FO = Faceoff
PT = Penalties Taken
PD = Penalties Drawn
SRF = Shotrate For
SRA = Shotrate Against
S = Shooter
G = Goalie
Notables
Good
Stephen Gionta - Look at ma boi Gio. One of the Devil's Advocate alum that actually made me look smart, Stephen Gionta was on the short list of players that were possibly fat to be trimmed before the year. All he did to respond was register the 5th most goals above replacement of all skaters on the team, and 3rd of all skaters still on the team (Bernier and Cammalleri were higher)
Travis Zajac - at 5.89, Zajac produces more goals above replacement via Shotrate Against than any forwards other than Blake Wheeler, Darren Helm, and Patrice Bergeron. This isn't unusual either as he produced over 4 in the category last year and over 3 two other times. At 5.89 though, Zajac's defensive performance is worth 1 win all by itself. Unfortunately, Zajac giveth and Zajac taketh. His offensive numbers were atrocious at -3.02 rate and -0.73 as a shooter
Cory Schneider - I know I shouldn't continue to mention how amazing this guy is because it's not good journalism to routinely state the obvious, but our favorite ginger finished 3rd in the league among all players in GAR with an absurd 30 mark. That means that Cory Schneider was work 5 wins by himself. Now that might not seem like a huge number, but it is, and most Devils fans would probably say he's worth even more. He wouldn't have been a Vezina candidate regardless this year though because Carey Price decided to become a demigod.
Bad
Dainius Zubrus - He's just so done. Did you know this guy played 74 games for us this year? That's 4th on the team. Well the WARBoard doesn't have much nice to say about him. And by that I mean we might just as well have signed Oedipus, post-eye-gauging. Only Mark Fraser (7) was worse. They both need to be gone. I am still not quite over the return of Fraser. I just think I've never seen a worse hockey player in a Devils Jersey.
All defenders - No, really. Damon Severson was worth under 2 GAR and he was the highest one. Well we had a higher one, but sent him away because he was too good. Andy Greene was actually a negative player. He was worth -0.04 GAR. That shocked me. Most comes from being worth almost -4 for shotrate against. That's bad, but things could be worse. Two times worse. Just ask Jon Merrill and his -8 SRA GAR.
Quick Hits
Henrique was injured in December and saw a percipitous decline in production thereafter. Also still led team in points and was the 4th best skater left on the team in terms of GAR.
WARBoard agrees with John that Michael Ryder should take a long walk off a short pier.
Keith Kinkaid played in 19 games. That sounds really high. Regardless he was in the top 15 despite rarely playing.
Your Thoughts
What do you think of these stats? Interested in learning more? What was weird about the chart? Please leave thoughts below.