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I'm on family vacation this week and the next 7 days will be pre-written material that I will be posting every day.
Over the course of the next week I am going to take a look at the past seven years of the Hart Trophy. The Hart Trophy is voted on by the Professional Hockey Writers Association.
Given the increased awareness of analytics in the past year or so I wanted to go back and see how things look in hindsight and if there are perhaps some years in which the best man did not win.
As we glance back I wanted to look at each player's offensive contributions, their Fenclose percentages, and the kind of role they played on their own team. Combining all three of these variables should paint a clearer picture of each player's value to their team.
In this exercise I will be analyzing the finalists for the Hart Trophy. The first year up is 2008.
In 2008 Alexander Ovechkin won the Hart Trophy in a landslide, the voting was as follows:
1. Alex Ovechkin, WSH 1313 (128-4-1-0-0)
2. Evgeni Malkin, PIT 659 (1-66-27-13-13)
3. Jarome Iginla, CGY 565 (2-41-33-26-15)
Let's take a look at the offensive contributions of each player from this season:
The Great 8 had the most goals (65) as well as the most points (112). The other two players had great offensive campaigns but they weren't quite at the same caliber as Ovechkin.
To find out what kind of role each player played I used their relative quality of competition as well as their relative Corsi in the player usage charts. Let's see how each player was used in the 2007-08 season:
Evgeni Malkin appears to have played in the most defensive role for this season. He faced the hardest relative QoC as well as the least generous zone starts. Alex Ovechkin faced the 2nd hardest relative QoC but with favorable offensive zone starts, and Jarome Iginla faced by far the weakest relative competition. Each player appears to have similar success possession wise when compared to their teammates as indicated by the similarly sized blue bubbles.
Finally let's take a look at their possession numbers on the year:
Alex Ovechkin comes in with spectacular possession numbers, he is a shade over 56%. Evgeni Malkin finds himself under the 50% barrier as a result of his tougher defensive role. Jarome Iginla comes in impressively around the 54% mark.
Conclusion
I believe the voters got this one right. Ovechkin had mammoth offensive statistics and he absolutely killed it on the possession front. I can't find anything here that would make me vote for either of the other two players over Ovechkin.
Alex Ovechkin was a worthy winner of his first Hart Trophy.
Tomorrow we take a look at the 2009 Hart Trophy.
Thanks for reading!
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