**photos above of Mark Scheifele via James Carey Lauder-USA TODAY Sports, Brandon Hagel from Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images, Kyle Connor via Steve Roberts-Imagn Images, & Cutter Gauthier from Sportskeeda.com**
Kia ora koutou, it’s everyone’s favourite Kiwi (*who is also a fan of the Winnipeg Jets, lives in Sydney, and now writes for Arctic Ice Hockey).
I’ve been making sports metrics for many years now. I started working out with the NFL Combine, then NBA Draft scouting, some MLB metrics (including fixing OPS), and now a few for the NHL Draft and general scouting.
Disclaimer: Metrics are good for crunching numbers and scouring large data sets for possible value. They use maths to find targets to be scouted/investigated/vetted afterwards. Ideally you would have years worth of these metrics, to chart growth with. This metric is only using last season’s data, and there are always anomalies in small sample sizes. So bear that in mind, because I don’t and generally just go gung-ho all-in.
Scheifele for Hagel…done!
KFC for Gauthier…done!
Why? Read on…
Why make a True Value (TV) metric?
So we can compare apples with apples. Because I feel hockey’s current metrics have nothing that is useful to me, apart from NHLe (NHL Equivalency)…and it’s deeply flawed.
NHLe in a nutshell, is the sound idea to compare scoring between leagues. They set the bar at 100 with the NHL and gave every other pro and junior league in the world a lesser value.
So far so good. To predict how well a player in say the KHL does, NHLe divides the player’s total points by the amount of games they actually played and multiplies this by the KHL value, and finally .82 to adjust for the 82 game season in the NHL.
This gives you a guesstimate about how many points this player would produce playing in 82 games at the same TOI (Time On Ice) as they already had in their league, except for the NHL level. Good for the draft and charting a prospect’s growth over successive seasons, if the values are correct…yet the NHLe calculations include major oversights, in my opinion.
1) GOALS: Because when it comes to points: Goals are apples and assists are not even oranges, they’re appleseeds, because the come from the event that is the apple. They don’t even count on the scoreboard at all. If your club scores 4 goals with 8 assists and the opposition score 5 goals with 5 assists, you don’t win 12-10. You aren’t even happy with a moral victory. You lost, and you know it, because deep down you know goals are much more important.
2) TOI: is SOOO VERY OBVIOUSLY important, yet completely overlooked entirely in NHLe. Player A gets 2 goals every 20 mins TOI per night, and Player B gets 2 goals in 10 mins TOI a night. Who is better? They’re the same in NHLe, and that’s stupid.
3) TOI: Even Strength, Power Play, and Penalty Killing are apples, oranges and bananas. Not really comparable. PK is time spent defending, producing next to no goals. PP is time spent scoring, producing a LOT more goals per minute than ES (Even Strength). Bad teams > good teams on PP. ES is pretty much neutral. An arm-wrestle producing an average amount of goals. Good teams > bad teams at ES.
These are tantamount to the fundamental mistakes baseball made for a century. So I made my own metric to try and address these issues…..and called it True Value (TV).
TV = True Value points produced, adjusted to use new goal and assist values (extrapolated to 82 games like NHLe), but normalised to 10 mins per game. Why 10 mins? Because it’s easy to guesstimate and multiply. He plays 20 mins, double it. He plays 16 mins, times 1.6…etc.
What TV does is allow you to compare apples with apples. Players plain and simple. No benefits of PP, no penalisation for being on the PK. So basically, it is as if every player you look at played 82 games per season and only received 10 mins of ES ice time every game. Every one is thus on an equal footing.
Also, it’s not limited to the NHL, you can put any player in the world in the metric and just lower the level from 82, using the NHLe values (obsolete as they may be). It fixes all the flaws of NHLe (apart from the values which I’m still working on). Thus it’s ultra useful for draft scouting. Also in an upcoming article, I found a use for it in trying to identify targets the Winnipeg Jets should focus on in trades and free agency.
TVa – A variation which is simply TV age-adjusted to be an indicator of how soon this player will decline (old), and also how much this player will likely cost/be valued (young and productive). Although the draft version has a different age adjustment focus, to be explained later. You can look at it as the player’s approximate value in the trade market.
EXAMPLE: This season, rising Anaheim Ducks’ star Cutter Gauthier had 41 goals and 28 assists for 69 points in 76 games. Extrapolated to 82 games this is 74.4 pts and THAT becomes his NHLe 74.4 for the 2025-26 NHL campaign.
Here is where it gets wildly different.
1) TV values goals and assists DIFFERENTLY, because they are simply not the same value. Goal > Assist.
There are two easy ways to do this correctly.
A) Keep assists = 1 and raise goals. Making more overall points.
B) Keep goals = 1 and lower assists. Making more overall points.
C) Not correct, but closer to the current system, find the points ratio of goals to assists and reduce both of the A option values until 1 goal + 1 assist = 2 points again. Easier for the everyday fan to understand. Making similar overall points.
Initially I went with option A. The upshot then was Gauthier accrued a TV (True Value real points) of 97.4 pts in 76 games at an average TOI of 17 mins 15 secs. That is the raw re-calculation.
2) Now TV separates his average TOI, which was 17.15 secs (17.25 mins as a percentage) into PP, PK, and Even Strength and values them differently as well. The easiest way to do this, is to adjust the TOI up or down, so this now becomes TOIa (Time on Ice adjusted) of 19.54 mins (as a percentage again).
3) Now TV normalises down to 10 mins to make it easy to extrapolate or compare with others. Once this is factored in, presto Gauthier had a 63 TV (meaning 63 True Value points having been scored, after conversion to 82 games at 10 mins TOI). To normalise for minutes, divide the total you want by the actual minutes then multiply by how many you want, in this case 10.
4) As I mentioned, I initially went with Option A above and Gauthier received a TV of 63 points per 10 mins over a fictional 82 games. Multiplied by his TOI, 17.25 mins that would be 109 total points, compared to the current systems 74.4 NHLe. Since I figured this +40 pts would be difficult for the casual fan to fathom, I eventually went with Option C above, which reduces the truth to something more palatable, thus a TV of 39.9. Multiplied by 17.25 mins that would be 69 total points. Coincidentally, he same as he scored in 76 games, but at 82 games…though adjusted down to only ES to see the plain player.
He’s actually really highly rated because of the 41 goals. The players on the chart below with slightly higher ratings, David Pastrnak (TV 40.1) and Mark Scheifele (TV 40.2), both had at least 100 pts last year. So Gauthier is not just somebody that you used to know!
So would you swap Gauthier for KFC now?
He’s 6.5 years younger, scored more goals, and hopefully on a cheaper contract (but who knows now after his center got $18m AAV)? He’s already ahead of prime KFC in production at 22, what’s his ceiling then?
How about Scheifele for Hagel?
Again he’s 5.4 years younger, he plays over 2mins PK and so he can probably defend better. Now if we take this natural scorer off the PK and transfer those minutes to PP, the expectancy is he would score 6.5 more goals and 17.5 pts total. That would take his NHLe up to 118 pts for the 2025-26 campaign.
However, after SCOUTING only a little deeper, it seems Hagel is quite unique as in he’s worse on PP than ES. In 2025, at 2.67 mins of PP, he scored no goals and only 11 assists, despite scoring 35 goals and 55 assists total in 82 actual games. In 2026, 5 goals and 7 assists across 71 games at 2.25 mins, after scoring a total 36 goals and 38 assists in the same time.
It turns out that (according to Puckpedia and DailyFaceOff) Hagel plays as a defender on their PP, and presumably all the points go to Nikita Kucherov (46 pts and 37 pts in PP 2025 and 2026 respectively), Jake Guentzel (28 pts and 30 pts) and Brayden Point (31 pts in 2025). In fact, last year Guentzel led the league in PP goals with 17, Point was tied for 2nd, with Leon Draisaitl with 16… Ahh! The joy of playing the PP with Kucherov, unless you’re Hagel. The special teams are killing his production.
Hagel is seemingly a 1st line talent, stuck on a 2nd line, and worse playing defender in PP, and also 2 mins on PK. Put on a team with way less talent (hint, hint), it seems he would thrive. He’s been 5th in ES goals (per 82 gms) for the last two years. This is a 100 pt player, languishing on a good team, let’s get him somewhere to shine!
This week, I spent some quality time with my calculator to look at almost 100 NHL players, including some of our Winnipeg Jets such as the previously mentioned Scheifele, along with his teammates Kyle Connor, Gabe Vilardi, Adam Lowry, Cole Perfetti, Morgan Barron, & Alex Iafallo.
True Value Chart
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As for how our Jets fared, it’s as feared, sadly. Nothing we didn’t already know here. The ‘Untouchable Line’ of Scheifele, Connor and Vilardi went their merry way, putting up points for fun. Unfortunately no-one else did.
I even had to enter Lowry and Perfetti’s 2025 season stats to get a better/truer picture of their likely output. I did that for a couple of other players to see their previous season against last season I earmarked this by putting the year after their christian name, hence Adam25 and Cole25. Barron was fine, TV likes Bear and Lowry more than other scouting metrics would, because they play decent PK time.
Iafallo also didn’t have a down year, but unfortunately his average is below average. He is the cut-off point of usefulness for me. If there are young players with the same score, sure, they may have upside still.
No one else in the forwards was worth entering (this year), Nino and Vlad were on downers, the other oldies didn’t deliver and were sent gently into retirement, whilst the youngsters were all part-timers with very small sample sizes.
The defense, has been somewhat sorted, but the forwards remain an enigma wrapped in a riddle. The Untouchables are lording it over an island of misfit toys beneath. Before we can see a clearer picture, It feel like there are still missing pieces to be added to this jigsaw.
We’ll get into some players I really like in the next article who I would like to see Winnipeg’s front office target…it’s about practical applications of TV and player tiers.
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Thanks guys for taking this journey with me!! Any kudos, queries, or criticisms….just leave a post below in the Comment Section and I’ll address them when the sun’s up in my part of the world.
