About NHL Player & Goalie WARs

The ScotiaStat NHL WARs are my take on player contribution during the course of a season. The model is inspired by the works of those before me, but probably most heavily influenced by the wonderfully descriptive work that Dom Luszczyszyn has been putting out since he introduced gameScore.

The ScotiaStat NHL Player & Goalie WARs use 100% public data from MoneyPuck, PuckIQ and NHL. The WARs are measured in Wins Above Replacement. Replacement is measured as the (number of teams * 12 + 1)th forward, (number of teams * 6 + 1)th defenseman and (number of teams * 2 + 1)th goalie. For example, in 2014 a replacement forward would be the 361st ranked forward by WAR, a replacement defenseman would be the 181st ranked defenseman by WAR and a replacement goalie would be the 61st ranked . In 2024, those numbers change to 385th, 193rd and 65th respectively.

WAR is accumulated throughout the course of the season and are displayed on player cards the same way, as opposed to a prorated value. Prorated value is important contextually as if a player were to miss part of the season due to injury, the prorated value would show their pace if they hadn't missed games. With that being said, prorated value can be very misleading without context. For example, Ryan Poehling's 2018-19 season gives him the best single season prorated WAR since 2014-15. For those (like me) who thought there had to be some sort of mistake, it wasn't. Poehling scored a hat trick in his only game that season. If he didn't place first in prorated WAR, there would be a problem. I could have filtered him out of the dataset, but he's important for team wins, which I'll get into further down. 

Player WARs are the sum of Offensive and Defensive WARs. 

Offensive WARs are calculated using goals, primary assists, secondary assists, expected goals, powerplay impact, offensive impact, faceoff differential, penalties drawn and giveaways.

Defensive WARs are calculated using matchup strength, blocked shots, faceoff differential, penalties taken, penalty kill impact, defensive impact and takeaways.

Goalie WARs are calculated using wins, losses, overtime losses, shutouts, goals saved above expected, goals saved above expected 5 on 5, high danger expected goals, high danger goals, medium danger expected goals, medium danger goals, low danger expected goals and low danger goals.

All of Offensive, Defensive and Goalie WARs are regressed to the mean by season and by position (forward, defense or goalie).

A dataset with WARs for the past 10 seasons can be found in the google sheet attached.

• One of the limitations of the MoneyPuck dataset, is that a players team, is only the team they finished the season on, even though their statistics will be from the whole season. This will affect players moving between good and bad teams midseason. ie can't distinguish between how many goals against came from the first vs second team they played for.

• Team/Line results might be impacting team stats too heavily.

• There is currently no measure for quality of teammates.

On the left side, there are 3 WAR values. The first circle near the top left of the card is split into 2 parts. The outer green circle shows the players percentile rank in WAR among all players in the position. The inner circle split into 10 parts is to show you what percentile the player falls under. If the player's percentile falls beside the first and brightest red section, than they are in the 0-10th percentile in WAR (which is not good). If the player's percentile falls beside the last and brightest green section, than they are in the 90-100th percentile in WAR (which is very good). The same concept applies to the Offensive and Defensive WARs. 

The values displayed inside the circles are the player's actual WAR values. Using Leon Draisaitl's card below, he has 2.43 Overall Wins Above Replacement, 2.44 Offensive Wins Above Replacement and -0.01 Defensive Wins Above Replacement. The average WAR for each position and WAR type, is shown below the WAR header. For example, the average forward's Overall WAR is 0.23 and the average defenseman's Overall WAR is 0.17. 

The card is shown with a radar chart to display the percentile ranks of the player in their position for each of the components that go into WAR, as shown on the chart. The first card show below is Leon Draisaitl. He is close to the 100th percentile in Blocked Shots, Faceoffs, Penalties Taken, Takeaways, Goals, Primary Assists, Secondary Assists, Expected Goals, Powerplay, 5on5 Offense and Penalties Drawn. He is close to the 0th percentile in giveaways. The larger the green circle, the better the player will be as the ideal player would have a perfect green circle drawn around each category. 

The red circle is used to show the average percentile for each component and is different per position.