Penguins Go to WAR

At the end of each season, PensBurgh does a terrific in-depth evaluation of each prominent Penguin. For yours truly, one of the most fascinating features is a set of charts that display a player’s WAR, short for Wins Above Replacement.

WAR is a stat you may be familiar with from baseball. In the simplest of terms, it measures a player’s contributions (or wins) for his team, while at the same time providing a method of comparing a player to his peers based on position and role, which in hockey is determined by TOI.

You’ll notice in the following table that in some cases, a player’s role doesn’t necessarily line up with the way he’s actually used. For example, Marcus Pettersson is categorized as a depth defenseman when he’s often cast in a second-pairing role.

WAR can be expressed as a number or in this case, a percentage, with 50 percent being the break-even mark between being better than a replacement player or worse. It takes into account factors such as even-strength offense, even-strength defense, power-play offense, short-handed defense, penalties taken and penalties drawn, as well as finishing, strength of competition and teammates.

That cursory description aside? I don’t have a clue as to how WAR is actually calculated. I looked at a couple of in-depth articles explaining the intricacies of WAR and my brain immediately froze. (I barely passed college calculus and still have no idea how I pulled it off.)

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to put together a table displaying WAR data for all our prominent Penguins, including newcomers Jeff Petry and Ty Smith. I’ve also included our unsigned free agents and recent tradees Mike Matheson and John Marino. No data was available for Josh Archibald.

Likewise, in some cases values for the ’21-22 season weren’t available.

I’ve only displayed overall WAR, along with even-strength offense and defense percentages. Kind of the equivalent of a 20,000-foot flyover. 

A few shockers to point out, namely the even-strength defense values of Jake Guentzel, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang. Smith, too (yikes)!

On the flip side, the extremely impressive overall and offensive WARs of Guentzel, Malkin and Sidney Crosby. Chad Ruhwedel’s remarkably strong numbers, too.

Data is courtesy of JFresh Hockey and TopDownHockey.