Picking the Midseason NHL Awards Using Analytics

Who have been the league's best players at the half-way mark?

We are rapidly nearing the halfway point of the COVID-shortened season and strangely, it’s been… not that strange. The bizarre outcomes we all expected to come out of a smaller sample and the extraordinary circumstances of the new divisions have for the most part not come to pass, and for the most part we’ve had the chance to see the teams and players we already knew were good play really really well.

That being said, everyone always enjoys a good awards debate, and while we might not be looking at a repeat of the 2020 Draisaitl Wars (/WARs), there is sure to be some vitriol thrown in this year’s trophy races. So I thought I would chuck my picks into the ring and cheerfully wait to get torn apart - as is tradition.

My choices will be heavily informed by analytics (especially Patrick Bacon’s RAPM isolate and WAR model) but with a consideration for the limited sample size available right now. I will not simply be a stenographer for what the models put out, but they will be the guiding force in the conversation.

Visualizations found in this piece can be accessed at my Patreon.

Calder Trophy

Winner: Kirill Kaprizov

Runners-Up: Josh Norris, Nils Höglander

This race is deceptively close and so much of it comes down to the tension between underlying results, production, percentages, and what’s truly going on under the hood. Kirill Kaprizov’s play-driving numbers have been unremarkable; he’s solid at generating offensive scoring chances and not great defensively. He’s currently rocking a 12.3% on-ice shooting percentage and his linemates have scored over 6 goals above expected when he’s on the ice (compared to the quality of the shot’s they’ve taken). Under normal circumstances these are the types of results you would say are bound to regress. Picking Kaprizov, then, is a bit of an article of faith that he is one of the small coterie of playmakers in this league who can elevate their linemates’ finishing on the strength of their passing ability; whose on-ice scoring chances are more dangerous than the public expected goal models can measure.

He ranks 2nd in the league in 5v5 primary assists per 60 minutes, which is pretty impressive for a rookie. Watching his assists from this season, I think you can see both a bit of luck and tremendous passing skill at play here.

So for now, Kaprizov is the guy. But I won’t be shocked to see him displaced by the end of the season.

Who’s the challenger? Josh Norris, a real dark horse in my mind. He’s been the opposite of Kaprizov, putting up remarkable underlying numbers - especially defensively, where he ranks in the 99th percentile of WAR - without the gaudy point totals to match. That’s not to say he isn’t producing, and a 40 point 82-game pace is perfectly respectable considering his defensive play. If he can continue to drive play in Ottawa’s top six like this he might have a legitimate case by the end of the season. He has comparable production to flashier rookie and teammate Tim Stützle but the opposite analytical profile (the young German has the second-worst playdriving numbers in the league).

Nils Höglander rounds things out for me (really hoping that Sens fans’ Norris-based goodwill balances out the Stützle thing). He’s been a very nice complementary play-driver for the Canucks so far and frankly this rookie class is poor enough for that to do the trick. Kevin Lankinen has fallen out of consideration for the time being as his results have (utterly shockingly) fallen back to earth, and I would need to see Kahkonen play more games for him to factor in.

Jack Adams Award

Winner: Joel Quenneville

Runners-Up: Dean Evason, Barry Trotz

We might honest to God get a Jack Adams winner who actually deserves it and isn’t just riding a PDO wave. In a shortened season. What is going on?!?

The Panthers might seem like one of those percentage luck-based mirage teams, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. They’re a top five 5v5 team in the NHL, in large part because have considerably tightened up defensively this season, going from 21st in Expected Goals Against per 60 last season to 7th. You gotta give the coach credit for that.

Dean Evason also gets a nod for not screwing up what Bruce Boudreau was previously doing in Minnesota while also optimizing some player deployment quite well, and Barry Trotz has the Isles playing just as well at 5v5 as they were in the playoffs last season.

Selke Trophy

Winner: Joel Eriksson Ek

Runners-Up: Aleksander Barkov, Philip Danault, Sidney Crosby, Jesse Puljujarvi

First thing’s first: there are players with better defensive numbers than these five, like Riley Nash, Marcus Foligno, Teddy Blueger, etc. I would consider these players to be the real top shutdown guys in the league, but when it comes to the Selke I do feel the need to limit things to top-line or at least top-six forwards.

I was a big fan of Joel Eriksson Ek last season, totally taken back by his tremendous underlying numbers and bewildered why the Wild weren’t giving him bigger opportunities. The loss of Mikko Koivu didn’t give them much choice but to run with the young Swede and he has rewarded them with his best season yet. His scoring chance suppression numbers are pristine and he is doing it against quite difficult competition relative to the quality of the player’s he’s been deployed with.

I do have to give lots of credit to Aleksander Barkov as well; for years, Barkov has been good at the nitty-gritty work of in-zone defence - the stick checks, the pass blocks, the puck battles, etc. but has played the game at an overall tempo that resulted in his team surrendering a lot of excellent scoring chances against when he was on the ice.

This season, as the entire Panthers system has tightened up and he has been separated by the all-offence Jonathan Huberdeau, Barkov appears to have fully committed to a possession-heavy two-way game that completely suffocates opponents.

Also in the running here are the eternally unheralded Philip Danault, who has been a whipping boy for the Habs due to his utter lack of production but who has kept the puck far far away from his net; a resurgent Sidney Crosby who’s been a force at both ends after dropping off a bit defensively last season; and the forechecking demon Jesse Puljujarvi whose tenacious play all over the ice has made the Oilers’ top line better. (Puljujarvi technically leads these forwards in defensive WAR but I value the defensive work done by these centres more heavily than his complementary forechecking-based chance suppression.)

Vézina Trophy

Winner: Marc-André Fleury

Runners-Up: Andre Vasilevskiy, Thatcher Demko, Philipp Grubauer, Jake Allen

Not a lot to talk about here. As far as I’m concerned goaltending performance is a single-stat thing: goals saved above expected. At the end of the year, whoever saves their team the most goals (measured in a way that considers shot quantity and quality) should win the Vézina, since that’s a goalie’s only job. The public models for this aren’t perfect, but they’re the best we’ve got and certainly more telling than the stats used by 95% of the people actually voting. Fleury currently ranks first in this stat, so he’s my guy. Vasilevskiy is second, etc. etc. This ranking will probably be different next week, let alone at the end of the year. Goaltending is goaltending, let’s not linger.

Norris Trophy

Winner: Pick One of the Below:

Adam Fox, Charlie McAvoy, Ryan Pulock, Adam Pelech, Jeff Petry, Jonas Brodin

This race is wide open, especially now that Cale Makar is sidelined for the forseeable future. You could make a good case for any of these six players (none of whom finished top three on NHL.com’s list, by the way. No Victor Hedman or Drew Doughty because, frankly, piling up points on the powerplay is not what qualifies somebody for a Norris trophy in my mind.

I cannot pick between these six players, as hard as I try. So I’ll just lay out the case for each.

• The one qualifier on Adam Fox’s elite underlying numbers last year was his lesser deployment - Fox came into the season as the 3rd right defenceman on the Rangers’ depth chart and ended the season with low overall time on ice and quality of competition. Could he repeat the feat as a #1 defenceman. Yep! Fox is playing over 24 minutes a night and absolutely crushing them, proving that his combination of hockey IQ and transition skills can translate to a bigger role.

• Charlie McAvoy was the best defenceman in the NHL at 5v5 last season and you can make the case that he’s been the best this season as well. He’s put the team’s defence on his back this year and - as usual - put up elite numbers at both ends of the ice. The one hit on McAvoy is the powerplay, where he doesn’t play that much and doesn’t excel when he does. But if the hockey media can pick guys based almost solely on what they do during ~10% of the game, I can pick someone based on what he does in 90% of it.

• Ryan Pulock and Adam Pelech have been the best defensive pair in the NHL this season, and rank #1 and #2 among defencemen in TopDownHockey’s Wins Above Replacement model. They are the backbone of an elite defensive team, by far the Islanders’ best duo both defensively and offensively. The knock on them is of course that they play together, and although they’re done very well apart from one another that’s not exactly easy to overcome. On top of that, neither is playing clear #1 minutes - Pulock at 22 minutes a night and Pelech at 21.

• Jeff Petry has a lot of goals. So many goals that it’s breaking a whole bunch of models. This puts me in a delicate spot because generally speaking I view defenceman finishing as such a random variable that I don’t care about it that much. But they exist and we’re talking about a single-season performance so I can’t ignore them entirely. As usual, Petry is rocking crazy Corsi and Expected Goals numbers, and although the isolate models are attributing quite a bit of that playdriving credit to Joel Edmundson (something that should be fixed swiftly as Edmundson pairs with Shea Weber) looking as his past results it’s pretty clear who’s driving the boat.

• Jonas Brodin, the King of Defensive Defencemen, is playing the biggest minutes of his career and doing superb work as the Wild’s #1 guy. His offensive playdriving numbers, which for a long time have been unremarkable-to-bad, are actually well-above-average this season, which warrants him some serious consideration in my mind.

Hart Trophy

Winner: Connor McDavid

Runners-Up: Auston Matthews, Aleksander Barkov, Sidney Crosby, Andrei Vasilevskiy, Marc-André Fleury

The crazy thing about McDavid’s season is that it could be - and arguably should be - even better. He leads the league in scoring by seven and is on pace for what would be 140 points in an 82 gaame season; he leads the league in 5v5 scoring as well. But he’s shooting at well-below his career average - for the first time since 2017 he is scoring at a below-expectation rate. That’s nuts, and means that we might actually see an even more impression McDavid than we saw in the first half. It also hurt his WAR - if he was finishing at his regular pace, he would be leading that category by a longshot.

But let’s not ignore the most important development here, which is that Connor McDavid is no longer a defensive liability. At least for now. He has been average-to-good all season at preventing scoring chances against as he has shifted his offensive game a little away from the counter-attack frenzy it was in the past to a more overwhelming possession-based attack. This was the one thing holding him back from no-holds-barred domination, and now it appears to be a thing of the past.

So what about Matthews? He is scoring goals at a torrid pace, even as he has slowed down due in part to a nagging wrist injury. He leads the league in WAR by a solid margin as a result of his excellent finishing ability and has been better at creating offence overall than ever before. The defence is definitely a point of contention - isolate models credit the Leafs’ top line’s scoring chance suppression to Mitch Marner while fans point to more aggressive play from #34 in his own end.

Elsewhere, Barkov and Crosby have been by far the biggest drivers for their respective teams, with each providing extraordinary two-way play in a high-pressure #1 centre role. And Fleury and Vasilevskiy are the top goalies in the league and have helped take teams with strong but not exceptional underlying numbers to the top of the standings. Patrick Kane? For the second year in a row he is the worst defensive player in the league, which weighs down too heavily his strong offensive numbers for me.

Conclusion

For hockey fans, the NHL awards mostly function as a way for us to rip eachother apart. I’m sure there was something in here that made you want to tear your hair out in frustration, so have at it! At the end of the day we know how these trophies are going to be awarded: sorting NHL.com by points, maybe even looking at the standings page, or even going by pure gut feeling. So let’s enjoy these ultimately futile debates in the meantime.