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Introducing the Tanner Glass to Sidney Crosby Scale of Player Evaluation
July 30, 2015, 11:31 AM ET [271 Comments]
Ryan Wilson
Pittsburgh Penguins Blogger • RSS • Archive • CONTACT
Twitter is such a great vehicle to use when trying to collect information on a specific subject. Everyday hockey Twitter produces interesting information.

Yesterday Domenic Galamini, the creator of the HERO charts, highlighted Sidney Crosby in his most recent work.




Domenic explains his work through the following link




Here is the introduction to the article and what he is trying to accomplish with rGF%:

A common goal in modern hockey statistics is to find repeating patterns that best predict future results. In other words, you want two things: repeatability and predictive ability. Understanding the importance of these two concepts has led to the popularization of shot attempt based measures like Corsi and Fenwick. Consequently, on-ice percentages have often times been deemed useless at the player level due to their lack of repeatability. Therein lies the inefficiency. Just because a metric is susceptible to high levels of variance doesn’t necessarily warrant its complete dismissal. In the case of shooting percentage and save percentage, it comes down to regressing and extracting whatever useful information we can. The question is, how far do we regress? The point of this piece is to answer that exact question and show how we can regress percentages to markedly improve on the predictive ability of Corsi at the player level.


Sidney Crosby being by himself in the upper right hand corner speaks to his amazing talents as a hockey player. The higher up and further right on the chart the better. The lower and more left you go the worse it is.

So who is that lonesome player in the lower left corner? One of the worst Pittsburgh Penguins in recent memory and currently a problem of the New York Rangers, Tanner Glass.

In fact Dominic uses the hashtag #GlasstoCrosbyScale as a moniker for this new chart.

After Jordan Staal's departure Pittsburgh struggled with bottom six depth for a few years. There was a massive shift away from being a top possession team and the team's possession numbers took a nosedive. The above chart sums up the 2012-14 Penguins perfectly as they employed both the best player in the world as well as the worst player in the world. The highs were high and the lows were low.

Domenic started getting requests from people on Twitter to show where certain players were falling on his chart so he created some scales that compared specific players. Some of these requests were Penguins-related including this very topical example:




Just more evidence that Pittsburgh got better at a cheaper price in the Sutter/Bonino trade.




Phil Kessel played on bad teams but he had a positive impact.

Evgeni Malkin is in some very good company, should come as no surprise.




It remains to be seen if Domenic will create a Tableau Visual template to use on his Ownthepuck.comwebsite like he did with the HERO charts but hopefully he will. I find that he is one of the best at taking complex statistical formulas and creating an easy to understand template so that fans of all backgrounds can enjoy his work.

Sidney Crosby is still the best and Pittsburgh is starting to collect useful depth players for the first time since 2012. There is a lot to like in the Steel City these days on the hockey front.

Thanks for reading!

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