The Most Valuable Players of the 21/22 Season To Date: 2022-Mar-01

With plenty of data on the 21/22 season, we have enough to take a look at which players have been the most valuable in terms of their actual performance. First, let’s take a quick refresher at how Impact and Value are determined.

Impact is the combined offensive and defensive impact a player has at 5v5, relative to a replacement level player. We’ll use the same approach to calculate actual Impact as we did to calculate Projected Impact at the start of the season by calculating a theoretical 5v5 GF/60 based on individual offensive statistics. (The difference between this theoretical number and actual result can generally be attributed to line mate effects, although that’s a subject for another day.) Replacement level players are defined as 25th percentile players out of the pool of NHL players with at least 200 5v5 minutes this season.

Value is the Impact as defined above, converted into a cap hit. It’s important to note that the actual Value is a reflection of a single season performance and, as such, there are more extreme values than we see in the projections. The actual value is useful for understanding a player’s single season performance but it should not be used when looking at what a player should actually be paid (we want to use multiple seasons of data for that).

To ensure we have a suitable large sample size for each player, we’ll look at players with at least 200 minutes played at 5v5 this season.

So, which players have been the most valuable so far this season?

Forwards

Mason Marchment leads all forwards in actual impact by a large margin. All signs point to a return toward earth at some point, but there’s no denying he’s been a fantastic story in Florida. Two Flames sit near the top of the list as Johnny Gaudreau and Matthew Tkachuk have lead the Flames into the Pacific Division lead.

Notably absent on the current top 10 list is Connor McDavid, who has an actual value of $7.7M so far this season due to lower than projected 5v5 primary assist rate and average defensive impacts.

While the top 10 are obviously providing exceptional value to their teams this season, most players are much closer to the projected numbers. Below is a look at the full set of NHL forwards with at least 200 5v5 minutes. The annotated players have the greatest differentials between actual and projected results.

Defensemen

Cale Makar is making a strong case for the Norris with no one else really at the same level and, unlike Marchment at the top of the forward group, Makar’s outstanding performance was expected based on the projections. There is an interesting mix of veterans and youth here, with a resurgent Drew Doughty making the top 10 alongside youngsters like Adam Fox and Timothy Liljegren.

Here’s a look a the full set of NHL defensemen with at least 200 minutes.

Goaltenders

For goaltenders, the value curves are a strange shape (teams seem to pay the most for average goaltenders) so they don’t extrapolate well to the full range of actual impacts. As such, we’ll just look at actual Impact for goaltenders.

Igor Shesterkin is putting together one of the best single season goaltending performances in recent memory. Thatcher Demko and Jonathan Quick are other standouts among regular starters. Goaltending controversy has made it’s way to St Louis, with both Ville Husso and Charlie Lindgren sitting among the leaders.

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