On Special Talents, Patrick Kaleta and Ilya Kovalchuk
by Hawerchuk on Jun 29, 2010 4:24 PM EDT
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PrintI'm sure some of you are wishing that I would just shut the hell up about Ilya Kovalchuk and go back to writing about soccer. But I was struck by the suggestion that you'd want to acquire Kovalchuk because he has a special, rare talent...a one-man show, so to speak.
Do you know who else has an elite talent? Patrick Kaleta of the Buffalo Sabres. Kaleta has drawn 72 more penalties than he's taken in his last three seasons. But Kaleta barely plays 10 minutes a night and he misses a lot of games, so his rate stats are ridiculous. Let's run through Kaleta's value:
| Pen +/- | Goals | Wins | Total TOI |
| +72 | +14.4 | 2.4 | 1266 |
This assumes that a penalty drawn is worth 0.2 goals. (Forwards typically have a positive penalty differential, but it's small enough that Kaleta blows it away - his other contributions on the ice are probably equal to whatever he might lose if we go through the details of that calculation.)
In my previous piece, the voting public put Kovalchuk's value at 2.5 wins. Let's put that into context with his annual ice time over the last three seasons:
| Wins/Yr | TOI/Yr | |
| Kovalchuk | 2.5 | 1335 |
And per 1335 minutes:
| Wins/1335 | |
| Kaleta | 2.53 |
| Kovalchuk | 2.5 |
Kaleta is a one-man penalty drawing show. On a per-minute basis, he is every bit Kovalchuk's equal. He faces roughly the same level of competition and gets roughly the same number of offensive zone faceoffs. And yet that production cost Buffalo barely more than the NHL minimum; Kovalchuk stands to make more than $7M a year.
Do we really want Kovalchuk *just* because he has a special talent? Why don't we want Kaleta?
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How many wins was Brown worth? I was just thinking it would be an interesting comparison to look at Brown and Kovy.
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Brown would be the better player even if he just stood at center ice and leaned on his stick the rest of the time.
I love this
But there is the point that you can’t make a good highlight film out of a guy drawing calls from his opponents…
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by red army line on Jun 29, 2010 4:58 PM EDT up reply actions
My points...
Hey dude, Twitter is too short to make my case. My thoughts:
First off, let’s not compare the difficulty of drawing a penalty to the difficulty of scoring. Some people have the unique ability to stare without blinking for hours, but we tend to value someone who’s skills are more useful, like say, a neurosurgeons.
Secondly, I tend to think statistics don’t lend themselves well to hockey as opposed to say, baseball. There are just so many variables to account for over the course of a game (linemates, relationship with coach, the fluidity and speed of the game, whatever).
And last, I guess I said “silly” because, of course he’s the “prize” of free agency. He may not be the best player in the league (as evidenced by the Hart votes), but of the players you listed that GOT Hart votes, he’s the only one who’s up for grabs. Thus, making the “prize”, and driving his price into the $8 million range. Everyone could use him as a weapon.
I like your work, and check the site often. Didn’t mean to be confrontational, just had a different opion. I’ll phrase it better in the future!
hi Justin,
Thanks for the 140+ character response. You won’t be surprised to find out that I’m going to disagree with you. Everybody thought you couldn’t break down a baseball player’s value statistically, and, well, then it happened.
People claim that hockey is too fluid for individual performance to be measured statistically, but that’s not true – if we knew where the puck and all the players were at all times (Atlanta is trying out such a system) then we could actually determine with almost absolute certainty what happened on the ice. Basketball and soccer are fluid games where people have been very successful at valuing players by watching the game in detail. There are a number of people, both at SBN and elsewhere, who’ve done a great job at tracking NHL scoring chances, and we’ve learned a lot about how the game works from them.
As for penalty-drawing, Patrick Kaleta (and Dustin Brown and Petr Prucha and a few others) have a ridiculous amount of talent in this area. Tom Awad noted elsewhere that Kovalchuk’s shooting talent is worth 15-20 goals per season; Patrick Kaleta, in the same amount of ice time, is worth at least 14 goals. These are both rare and extreme talents – just because drawing penalties is undervalued by NHL GMs doesn’t mean that it doesn’t contribute to winning.
Nope, fair enough – both things have their value. There’s always deeper we could go in these conversations. I’d argue that referee’s make subjective decisions and try to even out calls, so if some guy is great at drawing them, the ref would be more likely to come back and call one the other way (as in, your team wouldn’t end up much farther ahead with a great PK creator, where it would with a great goal scorer). Stuff like human error is hard to account for.
I’d agree that new stats have helped us understand the game better, and I’m open to those, for sure (like scoring chances – new and interesting stuff).
Still, I think there are limits to how far they can take us without applying some common sense, our opinions, and hunches on human nature (like say, drafting a guy because he’s from a poor family and you think he has a lot of personal drive vs. a guy with a great plus/minus). Certainly hockey’s statistical limits are more binding than baseball’s.
Anyway, I’ll stop preaching my “I don’t care if the earth is billions of years old and we have ancient fossils, evolution never happened!” style of arguing. Thanks for engaging me!
by jtbourne.com on Jun 29, 2010 5:58 PM EDT up reply actions
“I’d argue that referee’s make subjective decisions and try to even out calls, so if some guy is great at drawing them, the ref would be more likely to come back and call one the other way”
There’s no pointing in saying that you argue this – it’s testable! In fact, I think most of what you’ve said is testable. But this isn’t a question of whether you can have tacos or beer – life is better when you’ve got both.
Has anyone actually done this test then?
It just strikes me as a bit odd that Buffalo is in the middle of PP opportunities last season and the Kings are near the bottom when they have two of the very few guys who draw a high number of penalties.
Of course that’s pretty meaningless since obviously there is a whole team around them contributing to it, so I’d like to see something more in depth. Just don’t have the time to look at it like that myself :/
As for penalty-drawing, Patrick Kaleta (and Dustin Brown and Petr Prucha and a few others) have a ridiculous amount of talent in this area.
I will always give a +1 to anyone who recognizes Prucha’s penalty-drawing contributions. Among the tons of mistakes Sather has made, letting Prucha go for Derek Morris was one of the bigger ones that doesnt get enough press.
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On a related note,
Patrick Kaleta just printed out this post and instructed his agent to file for arbitration on 7/1.
Wait till this year.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I love this. I wrote a blog post trying to compare Kaleta’s value against other agitators near the end of the season (http://nickelcitysports.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/patrick-kaleta-for-mvp/ if you’re interested), but clearly you are far more qualified for this sort of thing.
Actually, I think it would be awesome to see a more adept version of my post, if you’d ever be down for something like that.
by Hattrick12488 on Jun 29, 2010 6:17 PM EDT up reply actions
I nominate this post for the Most Snarky, Yet Intelligent Point award
Loved it. When the cap is involved, efficiency of money spent is more important than just pure talent. In this case, Kaleta’s value comes at a much cheaper price than the value Kovalchuk brings. Both are valuable in different ways, it just matters how much you pay for it.
I do wonder, like commenters on the first Kovalchuk post, if his value could be “enhanced” by a team that could play to his strengths (PP and off zone) and shield him in other situations.
Ryan
Sports Opinionated, Front Office Fans, Pink Shirt Wise Guys: Italian Soccer Podcast & occasionally even Puck Prospectus. Yes, I'm a sports-writing whore...don't hate me.
I do think Patrick Kaleta is a valuable player but the argument here strikes me as a bit goofy for a couple of important reasons. First, I seriously doubt that Kaleta would be able to draw penalties at the same enormous rate if he was given the same amount of ice time as Ilya Kovalchuk in a single season. If he could, that would be pretty incredible. Second, the assumption that a penalty drawn is worth 0.2 goals seems false in that it seems to give zero credit to the players who actually go out and score on the power play. It seems to me that something around 0.05 is probably better but that might be underselling it.
I think 0.2 is a reasonable estimate. The replacement level PP% per opportunity is about 16-17%, but remember that not all opportunities are 2 minutes (or ended by a PPG) – if they were, then the PP rate would be higher. But of course every penalty you draw is a full 2 minutes, so the fact that your teammates take a penalty on the PP should not impact your accomplishment.
I don’t think many replacement players are getting actual PP time. Part of the reason the power play rates are high is that the guys who get paid the money to produce there play there. I would set a replacement level goal differential (IMO, that’s what we should be measuring) on the power play at around +3.00/60 which would credit the guy who drew the penalty with 0.1 goals for every penalty he draws assuming they’re all drawn five-on-five and that each penalty drawn should be given value for a full two minutes. I don’t think either of those are true but hopefully the effects cancel out :) It seems like setting replacement level at +6.00/60 (which is what I understand from the 0.2 figure) is highly excessive considering only 124 players made that target last year which isn’t enough to fill even the first power play unit on all thirty teams.
by Scott Reynolds on Jun 30, 2010 10:39 AM EDT up reply actions
There are some issues that complicate the situation -
1) Scoring rates need to include 5v3; you’ll get more than 124 guys if you do that
2) I’m comparing Kaleta’s drawing skills to a bit below average; I need to compare them to replacement
3) It doesn’t matter that PP players are better – if you set the replacement relative to overall player talent and not PP player talent, you get a vast overestimate of their worth.
I think it’s an interesting question to figure out what a penalty is worth. Reasonable people can disagree on how to set replacement, but I’m not convinced we’re going to get a value that’s much different from 0.2.
Scott is correct that you have to give some of the credit to the PP guys, so you have to lower the bar a bit, but it’ll be far, far more than the 3.0 / 60 that he’s proposing. Remember, most of these guys that produce do so because they play on the PP. Scoring rates / ice time at even-strength are only about 10%-15% different between 1st-liners and 3rd/4th-liners, in aggregate, across the league. I might go as low as 4.5 / 60 (14.5% in traditional PP rates), which would mean that a penalty draw would be worth 0.15.
1) They need to include 5v3 but it’s not like Kaleta in particular will benefit from it. He gets basically no PP ice time. Further, in my view we need to include the possibility that the drawn penalty results in less than two minutes of PP time. It may not be Kaleta’s “fault” that someone on his team takes a penalty but it’s not his “fault” that someone on his team scores either. Both are things that happen x% of the time and both need to be taken into account.
3) Do you just think people are overpaying for PP talent in general? It seems to be something GM’s in this league are willing to ante up for. My problem with setting the bar at +4.5/60 (14.5%) is that there would then be whole teams performing at below replacement level every single year. In 2009-10 there were two clubs below 14.5%, two more in 2008-09, one in 2007-08, four in 2006-07 and three in 2005-06. I have difficulty believing that there will be whole teams who can’t assemble replacement level NHL players for their power play so frequently. The lowest total any team has had since the lockout is the Blackhawks at 11.8%. That awful Thrashers club from 2001-02 was at 12.0%. I would be pretty comfortable setting replacement level at 12.0% (i.e. +3.6/60) and saying that there’s the odd team here or there that underperforms replacement and an extreme outlier once in a blue moon (the 2000-01 Wild had a 9.6% season!). I think that would give the guy who draws the penalty 0.12 goals and leaves 0.08 goals for the guys doing the actual scoring.
by Scott Reynolds on Jun 30, 2010 12:58 PM EDT up reply actions
Power-play goals are a small sample: an average team only scores 50 or so per season. If a team has a “true talent” of 50 goals, say 17%, then at -1 std deviation they will score 43 (14.6%) and at -2 std devs they will score 36 (12.2%), which means 1 team out of 40, or roughly one a year, that has a “true talent” of 17% will have a PP rate of 12.2%.
It’s like goaltenders: once in a while somebody pitches an 0.895, but they’re rarely that bad. The 2000-01 Wild hit 14.7% the next season.
For sure you’ll end up with unlucky seasons in there, but you’ll also have some bad teams have lucky seasons and end up with a higher conversion rate than their true talent would suggest. I strongly doubt that the baseline for an NHL team of replacement players is 17% on the PP. That strikes me more as the average rate for guys who get a decent amount of PP time.
by Scott Reynolds on Jun 30, 2010 6:59 PM EDT up reply actions
And of course Kaleta is not someone who can just have his ice time upped…Otherwise it would have happened. But he has 7th standard deviation talent in a very valuable area.
I’m kind of curious what players are in the seventh standard devation of anything…
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“Very valuable” is still very different from what you presented though. The way it’s presented seems to suggest that Kovalchuk and Kaleta are of similar value because both possess a unique skill when, in reality, Kaleta likely provides much less value, less than one win per season. Personally, I don’t think it would be out of this world for someone to pay Kaleta something like $2M per season if they plan to play him every game.
by Scott Reynolds on Jun 30, 2010 12:39 PM EDT up reply actions
Second, the assumption that a penalty drawn is worth 0.2 goals seems false in that it seems to give zero credit to the players who actually go out and score on the power play. It seems to me that something around 0.05 is probably better but that might be underselling it.
I’m not sure how you get there, Scott. Like Gabe said, the replacement PP% success rate is 16-17%, which is very close to the league average pp% success rate (about 18-19% this year). If a guy draws five penalties, he should be worth almost one goal, as the average team succeeds on the pp 1-in-5 times. Even if he’s not scoring the goals, he’s drawing the opportunities, which are worth something. I don’t get the intuition of dividing his value by 4.
Hockey Blogger at Pensburgh.com
Well, I don’t think replacement power play success in 16-17% for one thing. If we set replacement at 17%, there were eleven teams below replacement level on the PP which strikes me as being ridiculous. Plus, there’s a nice jump from 17 to 20 (1 in 5). I think it’s clear that my 0.05 value was far too low but I’m still not convinced that 0.2 isn’t far too high.
by Scott Reynolds on Jun 30, 2010 1:01 PM EDT up reply actions
That’s a fair point. But my thinking was that even if we set the replacement level pp at 13%, Kaleta’s still at +9.4 goals, or 1.6 wins (1.7 wins/1355). Kovalchuk does have more value than Kaleta, but the original point still stands in my mind that Kovy isn’t as special as this very thin UFA market is making him seem.
Hockey Blogger at Pensburgh.com
Except that Kaleta’s 1.6 wins come over three seasons and Kovalchuk’s wins come over one. There’s a pretty large difference between roughly 0.6 wins per season and, let’s say, 2.4 wins per season. If we say that a win is worth $3M (I kind of made that up but I vaguely recall it from somewhere), that makes Kovalchuk worth $7.2M per season and Kaleta worth $1.8M per season which doesn’t strike me as being wildly unreasonable in either case.
by Scott Reynolds on Jun 30, 2010 1:29 PM EDT up reply actions
I don’t think it’s fair to say Kaleta is at 0.6 and Kovy at 2.5 because Kaleta sees only 45% of the ice time that Kovy sees. I’d look at wins/1355 since it helps to control for the differences in ice time, and at that measure, Kaleta is at 1.7 and Kovy at about 2.5.
Hockey Blogger at Pensburgh.com
I also want to add that I think Kaleta would be less effective overall if he played the same number of minutes per season as Kovy, so he wouldn’t be worth the $5.1M over one season that 1.7 wins/1355 seems to indicate. But he’s still more valuable than most think since drawing penalties is an underrated stat by most GM’s. Kaleta was worth about 1/2 a win this year on drawing penalties alone, and the $1.75M that translates to is three times as much as his salary. Dustin Brown is in the same boat, as his penalty differential alone merits about $2.54M/year, which is below his $2.45M salary this year.
Hockey Blogger at Pensburgh.com
I agree that Kaleta is worth more than his contract last year but you can’t just give him 16.5 minutes of EV ice time (if he plays every game) and say he’d perform at the same level. That’s silly. I think a GM who seriously thought Kaleta was worth, say, $4M would be sorely disappointed.
by Scott Reynolds on Jun 30, 2010 7:03 PM EDT up reply actions
He’s not worth $4M, but I think the point from this post still stands that he and Kovy aren’t as far apart as most think, and that Kaleta’s value comes from a skill that’s undervalued.
Hockey Blogger at Pensburgh.com
Kaleta and pretty much anybody aren’t as far apart as people think because Kaleta’s skill is generally overlooked. To the extent that the point of the post was “Patrick Kaleta is undervalued” then I agree that the point stands. To the extent that the point was “Patrick Kaleta and Ilya Kovalchuk are at all close to providing similar value to an NHL team” I don’t think the point stands at all.
by Scott Reynolds on Jul 1, 2010 3:28 AM EDT up reply actions
Devils fan here
Trust me Kovy is not the man.
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by LoNJDTechnology on Jun 29, 2010 10:43 PM EDT reply actions
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