Using analytics to maximize your fantasy hockey league’s scoring system

While often overlooked, sometimes the scoring system in a fantasy hockey league can make or break the league.

I should know. After all, it was only last year where I found myself up by around 30 points on Sunday night in the first round of the playoffs, only to blow that lead because St. Louis Blues defenseman Torey Krug (a waiver wire pickup I made that day to maximize my games played) decided to lose his mind and rack up 26 penalty minutes against the Winnipeg Jets. With my league scoring penalty minutes as -1 point per minute, it cost me the series.

Sometimes it’s important to really nail down the value of each stat in fantasy hockey, because overvaluing or undervaluing certain stats can create a chaotic league that you probably don’t want. While the value of every player on the ice will never truly translate to fantasy hockey (barring an overhaul in what is available to the average hockey fan), you want to try and capture the feel of the game as best as you can in your league.

Well, what if I told you that there was a way to do that. Years ago, Eric Tulsky (yes, the Eric Tulsky who is currently the general manager for the Carolina Hurricanes) wrote a piece on Broad Street Hockey about how you can calculate how important a stat is to winning. Normally, I’d link the article to do the explaining for me, but with a majority of the SB Nation sites, including Broad Street Hockey, now shut down, I’ll have to try to do it myself to the best of my ability.

Basically, it just requires a simple mathematical concept that most of us learned in school: plotting data on the graph, and then calculating the slope of the average line of that data. By using every teams total wins and another stat over a set period of time (which in this case will be the last three seasons), we can create 32 plot points to give us the slope of our average line, which gives us the value by telling us how much of one stat is needed on average to be worth a win.

So with this concept, I want to try and create a fantasy league scoring system that closely reflects wins. I won’t be including the more outdated stats like plus-minus, or average/percentage stats that are more applicable to category leagues in this one, just the stats you would often find in a general stats league. Which stat acts as the y-axis will change depending on the stat and the result, otherwise goals would be worth 0.6 points and faceoff wins would be worth 5.7. And just to establish a baseline now, a win will be worth 1 point.

So let’s start with goals, since it’s the most important one, and will also serve as the baseline for several other stats. By calculating the correlation between wins and goals and using wins as the y-axis, goals came out to be worth 1.3 points.

Going off of that, I will be using half of that for assists, so 0.65 points. I’m sure the people that think assists are super important will be mad at that, but my logic behind that is that there are usually two assists for every goal, so in theory, an assist should be worth half of a goal.

Then, we use the same practice for how valuable power play and shorthanded points are to wins. Using wins for the y-axis for both, power play goals came up as 0.9 points and then shorthanded points are only 0.1 points. It makes a bit of sense why one is worth more than the other, because usually teams with good power plays find more ways to win, while shorthanded goals are a bit more random and don’t correlate with winning nearly as much. And of course, power play assists are worth 0.45 points and shorthanded assists are worth 0.05 points.

Now, some people like to give more value to shorthanded points than power play points due to the difficulty of each game state for the players, and even make power play points worse than even strength points for the same reason. If you want to do that here, I recommend making power play points a negative value. Why? Because regardless of the game state, goals will be worth 1.3 points, so making a power play goal negative doesn’t make it a negative value overall, it just makes it a lesser value than even strength points, in this case being 0.4 points.

Of course, then you also have shots, which when using that stat as the y-axis to wins, comes out as 0.13 points. Compared to goals, that makes sense since 0.13 is about 10% of 1.3, our point total for goals, which is roughly the average shooting percentage of higher end NHL players that will be acquired in fantasy.

And then you have the fantasy stats less associated with scoring, but still often used in fantasy leagues. Faceoff wins and hits don’t provide much value at 0.1 and 0.01, which is fitting for the state of the league because neither stat is not nearly as important to winning as many beleive.

But more interesting is penalty minutes and blocked shots, that come in at a negative value of -1.7 and -0.1. Negative penalty minutes is common in fantasy leagues (as seen with my story at the beginning), but negative value for shot blocks is almost unheard of. It makes sense from an analytical standpoint, as blocked shots mean the other team has the puck, but it’s just not seen in fantasy hockey.

Now we get to goaltending. I won’t be doing shutouts because they obviously have a strong correlation to winning and we won’t get an authentic number using this method. Instead, I will just be focusing on wins, saves and goals against.

Goals against is the easiest because we basically just need to make it the negative of goals, so it’s worth -1.3 points. I’ve generally kept the point system to one decimal outside of halves of other stats, but for saves, it’s super important to keep it at 0.13. That means that if a goalie stops nine of ten shots for a .900 save percentage, the points gained from saves and lost from the goal against will keep the total points at 0. That way, any goalie performance that has a save percentage above .900% will get more points, while any performance below .900% will be detracted, which seems fair based on the current state of goaltending.

As for goalie wins, I’ve decided to break my own rule that I set at the very start and make it 2 points. Why? Well, only one point feels like it will make goaltending more or less unimportant from a fantasy perspective, considering how harsh the goals against and save stats are already. On top of that, goalies generally only play half of their team’s games in a season, so it felt like it made sense to make the wins worth twice as much to compensate for it (feel free to do this for saves and goals against as well if you want). Admittedly this is where I’m breaking away from sticking to stats, so feel free to be suspicious of me on this one.

So, to summarize, this is what the point system would look like:

Goals: 1.3 points
Assists: 0.65
Power Play Goals: 0.9
Power Play Assists: 0.45
Shorthanded Goals: 0.1
Shorthanded Assists: 0.05
Shots: 0.13
Faceoff Win: 0.1
Hits: 0.01
Penalty Minutes: -1.7
Blocks: -0.1
Goalie Win: 2
Save: 0.13
Goal Against: -1.3

At the end of the day, this was more just a fun experiment to see what the results would look like. I think a league based on this point system would still be a solid one, and it probably wouldn’t be a bad one to use if you’re running a league for the first time and don’t know what to do for a point system. That said, it definitely has it’s hiccups, so proceed with caution.