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Making The Case
#1

Making The Case: Why Andreas Kvalheim Should Win The Dar

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It's fair to say that the last few seasons have not been the easiest to stomach as a player on the Texas Renegades. After a long playoff absence and with it being only now that it looks like they've come out of the other end of their rebuild, it's meant a lot of disappointing seasons and poor returns. One player however who has shone as an individual during this time is forward Andreas Kvalheim. Taken with the second overall pick back in S45, Kvalheim has consistently shown himself to be one of the most talented players in the league, and the brightest spot on a bad team. Now that he's not on such a bad team anymore, Kvalheim's transition this season to superstar forward was clear for all to see, as he put up a juggernaut of a season for the Renegades. Although he was some way off Flacko Lagerfield's incredible scoring pace at the top of the leaderboard, he still was able to put up 60 points as an offensive threat, but it's when it comes to the defensive side of the game that Kvalheim really showed his value this season.

I always disliked how limited the Jeff Dar trophy, the SHL's award for two-way forward, was in the STHS era. It essentially consisted of giving the forward with the most hits and a respectable points total the award each season due to the limitations of the sim. Thankfully, FHM allows us to make use of some more nuanced statistics, including takeaways (finally), Corsi % and Fenwick %, all of which are very useful to be able to try and determine what value a player brings besides scoring goals or making assists. It is also the nature of the new sim that makes these things much harder to judge than they would be in real life situations. The disparity between a good team and a bad team in our league is such that a team can go 0-50 on the season and routinely face somewhere in the region of 70 shots per game. This inevitably inflates figures recorded for those on the worst team when it comes to defensive stats such as shot blocks (if your team is facing a ridiculous amount of shots each game, the opportunity to block a lot more follows along with it) and takeaways (if your team has awful puck possession abilities you're going to have more chances to get the puck back), as we will see below. While the article probably seems inherently biased given that its intention is to convince you why Kvalheim should win, but I've tried to be as objective as possible and consider factors and present them in the best way possible. The two way forward should represent the player who excels at both ends of the ice in my opinion, which means the player who wins it should be someone who delivers exceptionally when it comes to playing defensively, but is also a high scoring, high value player. With that in mind, I've come up with a grading system. I believe there are three critical stats when it comes to assessing an individual player's defensive play based on the raw data I have available (all data as taken from the on site index which doesn't include shot totals against for teams or time of possession for teams, which are both areas that I feel would really help to expand this analysis); takeaways, shot blocks and hits. While I would say hits aren't as valuable of a indicator of defensive proficiency of the others, they are a key aspect of play when the team doesn't have possession and a good indicator of two way ability nonetheless. From the forwards who featured in the top 5 of any of these 3 defensive categories, I formed a pool of players for further analysis. I then assessed these players in FF% Rel and CF% Rel to judge their effect on their team's play when they are not on the ice, before looking at +/-, which I believe to be an indicator of two way ability in some ways (and a stat that potentially helps to level out against the bloated shot block numbers posted by players on teams like Tampa Bay), before looking at the all important point totals. I potentially saved the best for last here, as this obviously separates a pure defensive forward from one who is proficient at both ends of the ice. I believe that the chosen metrics give good coverage of all aspects of play, taking into consideration individual performance and the contribution they make to the team around them. With this in mind, let's not waste any more time and dive straight into some good hockey analysis.

The first category to look at is hits. As mentioned above, this is more or less what was used to determine the Dar winner in the STHS era, so it is a fitting ode to that time in our league's history that we start off there. Below, you can see the top 5 hitting forwards in the league in the S54 season.


Hits:
1 Lil' Manius - 240
2 Atlas Rush - 169
3 Noah Gallagher - 169
4 Andreas Kvalheim - 150
5 Hippo Passamus - 129


If these results had happened 5 seasons ago then it would be a clear win for Lil' Manius, who ran away with the hitting leads among forwards. Finishing over 70 hits ahead of second place, he had a great run playing as a power forward in S54. Kvalheim sits at 4th place in the season, posting 150 hits. Not the strongest element of Kvalheim's defensive game, but certainly good enough to get him into the top 4 of all forwards in the league. Let's keep ploughing ahead, and now look at Takeaway statistics.

For reference, I have included a separate statistic next to the takeaway figure that represents the TA/GA ratio for illustration of a player's ability to control the puck.

Takeaways
1 Collin Gibbles  - 46  (1.483871)
2 Tom Fiddler - 42   (2.210526)
3 Andreas Kvalheim - 38   (1.727273)
4 Ethan Ross - 37   (1.608696)
5 Dick Clapper - 36   (1.241379)


Here we can see a monster return for Collin Gibbles and Tom Fiddler, who both posted over 40 Takeaways, with Kvalheim close behind with 38. Fiddler had a pretty incredible ratio of TA versus GA to go along with it, but I believe that here is the first example we've seen of stat inflation caused by the poor play of the worst teams in the league. The low possession times of Minnesota and Tampa Bay certainly provide plentiful opportunities for both Gibbles and Fiddler to take the puck away from their opponents; it's a shame the index doesn't show things like puck possession times for teams, as comparing this stat to that figure could give some insight into this. Either way, Kvalheim is well up there with the best in the league despite having what would surely be less opportunity to pile up the stats in this area.

The next statistic in our comparison is shot blocks.

Shot Blocks
1 Collin Gibbles - 182
2 Tom Fiddler - 171
3 Ricky Bobby - 135
4 Boruvka Banananak - 129
5 James Ronlain - 124
25 Andreas Kvalheim - 57


Here we see Collin Gibbles leading the league once again, with 182 shots blocked. This is an area in which Kvalheim didn't really excel, as he currently sits 25th in the league, but this is in my opinion the clearest example of the statistics favouring bad teams. All of the top 5 were on Minnesota or Tampa Bay, two teams that notoriously faced a huge number of shots. Not to take away anything from their performances, as they clearly have done very well to put up the shot blocking figures that they have, but in an ideal world I would be able to divide the shots blocked by the number of shots that the team faced in order to view it as a ratio that takes into account the amount of traffic a team faced. With that being said, Kvalheim didn't lead the forwards on his own team in shot blocks, so even with that factor taken into account it was not his strongest area of performance.

Now that we have looked at our initial three defensive categories, we will move on with the player pool we have formed above. For reference, that is:

Lil' Manius
Atlas Rush
Noah Gallagher
Andreas Kvalheim
Hippo Passamus
Collin Gibbles
Tom Fiddler
Ethan Ross
Dick Clapper
Ricky Bobby
Boruvka Banananak
James Ronlain


For these players, we will start by looking at a couple of advanced statistics. I have chosen to use CF% Rel and FF% Rel as opposed to the the pure CF% and FF% numbers as I believe that the relative statistics will give more of an impression of the individual impact that the player had on their teams performance in terms of shot generation against shots generated against (my belief being that this is about as real of a view into the legitimate two way impact of a player outside of the raw totals that you can get). We'll start out with CF% Rel:

CF% Rel
1 Andreas Kvalheim - 8.5
2 Tom Fiddler - 7.5
3 James Ronlain - 6.9
4 Noah Gallagher - 6.3
5 Colin Gibbles - 6.3


Here is where Andreas really starts to come into his own, as he in fact lead the whole of the league in this statistic, not just the prospect pool. It shows the difference that Andreas makes to his team's performance when he is on the ice as opposed to off it, and is a tangible measure of the ability he has to impact the game at both ends of the ice in comparison to those around him. Tom Fiddler has again posted strong numbers here, but we can see that this is an area in which Minnesota and Tampa players mentioned earlier have had strong showings again. We now look at FF% Rel.

FF% Rel
1 Andreas Kvalheim - 8
2 Tom Fiddler - 7.1
3 James Ronlain - 7
4 Noah Gallagher - 6.3
5 Collin Gibbles - 6.2


FF% Rel gives a similar stat to Corsi but doesn't include blocked shots in its formulae (which arguably is a good thing for more defensively minded players). In this category, Kvalheim again leads the pool by a considerable distance.

We now look at something that may be less precise of an indicator of two way ability, but still can be seen as a measure of a player's ability to impact the game around them as a result of their two way play. Looking at +/- here will also allow for us to include a factor that doesn't penalise those who played on better teams and potentially balances out some of the factors that we have seen above. So here's the pool ranked on their +/-.

+/-
1 Hippo Passamus - 42
2 Dick Clapper - 14
3 Lil' Manius - 8
4 Andreas Kvalheim - 3
5 Atlas Rush - -7


Hippo Passamus had a very good season for Buffalo who were the strongest regular season team in the league, so it's not surprising that he sits so far ahead of the rest of our player pool. Clapper played well on a strong New England team that largely underperformed, and Manius played on the also strong New Orleans Specters but sits some way behind Passamus, with Kvalheim being a +3 and sitting in 4th place. It is quite telling that of the 12 players whose raw numbers were good enough to get them into the pool, only 4 were a positive rated player on the season, something which definitely speaks to the effect of playing on a bad team on your ability to get defensive stats.

Last but not least, we go for the most idiot-proof way of evaluating a player's offense; their points total. This is about as basic as it gets, but it also demonstrates the raw offensive impact of each of these players, so without further ado, here we go:

Points
1 Andreas Kvalheim - 60
2 Lil Manius - 58
3 Hippo Passamus - 54
4 Ethan Ross - 45
5 Dick Clapper - 44


And this is where Kvalheim's level of play is clear for all to see; 60 points along with the other statistics we have seen truly speaks to the level of performance he showed on the season. He is a small margin ahead of Manius, who finished with 58 points, and 6 ahead of Passamus. All three finished at a pace better than a point per game and therefore obviously excelled as offensive forces to go along with their strong two way play. Ethan Ross and Dick Clapper also gave strong performances, finishing with 45 and 44 points respectively.

Now that we have collected this data, in order to confirm what I thought I assigned a rank from 5 to 1 based on the inverse position of where a player finished in each of the categories (1st place giving 5 points, 2nd place giving 4 points etc.) and formed a list that shows how each player performed across the range of categories. For full disclosure, as the CF% Rel and FF% Rel lists were exactly the same and are very similar in nature, I included the list once rather than for both categories (even though doing so for both would give Kvalheim more points). So here is the list I have made that ranks the Dar candidates across all the different categories.

Andreas Kvalheim 17
Tom Fiddler 12
Lil' Manius 12
Collin Gibbles 11
Hippo Passamus 9
Dick Clapper 6
Noah Gallagher 5
Atlas Rush 5
James Ronlain 4
Ethan Ross 4
Ricky Bobby 3
Boruvka Banananak 2


Obviously this list is highly imperfect as it doesn't weigh up anything, doesn't really take into consideration that while some players did really well in some categories they were very bad in others (Tom Fiddler putting up 11 points in the season and being a -80 but finishing tied second is an example of this, no offence Fiddler), and could have a lot more thought gone into it, but it's more intended as a representation of their performance across the different categories. That being said, it demonstrates my point about Kvalheim's season and it's success. I think he performed so well in so many different relative categories, especially given the fact that he was on a team that performed fairly well and so wouldn't have had the number of chances some other players would to pile up defensive statistics. Based on everything we've looked at, I really do think that Kvalheim should be the clear and obvious choice to take home the Jeff Dar Trophy, and hope that our franchise forward and team captain is able to take home his first award at this season's ceremony. Either way, it's been one hell of a season from Kvalheim and I can't wait to see what he does next time around.

(This is the first statistical analysis article I've ever done so apologies if it's really shit)

Code:
2,513 words, some statistical analysis

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#2

He's a beast regardless

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#3

oh wow

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#4

Bobby Sharp not even mentioned once Dan wts

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#5

07-10-2020, 01:51 PMWannabeFinn Wrote: Bobby Sharp not even mentioned once Dan wts




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#6

Good article Dan! Would be nice to see even strength point totals being considered as well - Hippo only had 8 PP points for example, further showing he was more of a force at even strength




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#7

Yeah WTS Dank, why didn't you mention a player who didn't finish top 5 in the stats you covered.

Geez man.

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#8

07-10-2020, 03:04 PMRabidsponge21 Wrote: Yeah WTS Dank, why didn't you mention a player who didn't finish top 5 in the stats you covered.

Geez man.
Did you bother to look at Sharp’s stats or are you memeing bc Sharp is absolutely a top 5 defensive forward

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#9

07-10-2020, 03:09 PMWannabeFinn Wrote:
07-10-2020, 03:04 PMRabidsponge21 Wrote: Yeah WTS Dank, why didn't you mention a player who didn't finish top 5 in the stats you covered.

Geez man.
Did you bother to look at Sharp’s stats or are you memeing bc Sharp is absolutely a top 5 defensive forward
Tbf I did say in the article that I was going to make a pool out of the players who were top 5 in any of the first 3 stats. Sharp wasn’t which is why he didn’t get mentioned

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#10

07-10-2020, 03:13 PMdankoa Wrote:
07-10-2020, 03:09 PMWannabeFinn Wrote: Did you bother to look at Sharp’s stats or are you memeing bc Sharp is absolutely a top 5 defensive forward
Tbf I did say in the article that I was going to make a pool out of the players who were top 5 in any of the first 3 stats. Sharp wasn’t which is why he didn’t get mentioned
Dan listen here buddy I don’t care for your EXCUSES

You will rue the day

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#11
(This post was last modified: 07-10-2020, 08:14 PM by Thelastheraclid.)

Maybe there is a way to standardize the data in regards to the blocks to be more comparable between high possession and low possession teams?

Excellent write up regardless

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#12

Fiddler ??

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#13

Fuck i forgot emojis dont work pretend those are heart eyes

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#14

Definitely going to be interesting to see how the award goes. There are plenty of different ways to look at the Dar Award. Personally as we have started to settle into the FHM era, I would like to see the award split into something akin best defensive forward and best power forward to give some more separation/appreciation to different parts of the game. I know with my player if Hits continue to be an integral part of the Dar criteria as in past seasons, he will never win since he is not a hitter in the slightest.

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