5
Lists of top performances generate considerable, passionate debate amongst hockey fans. As every individual looks at this kind of question through their own lens, there is no right answer.
My normal lens is the contribution of individual player performances to team success. This means that I am interested in a comprehensive assessment of a player's impact on a team. To do this properly one must consider the various things a player does to contribute to a team's success and give them appropriate weight in an overall assessment. But it is no small assignment to sort out the things that matter and those that do not.
The tool I use for measuring individual player impact is a method I call 'Player Contribution' (or PC). Because it has been scaled to team success, PC is denominated in team points. A PC point is approximately 1/10th of a standings point and the PC points allocated to a team are therefore about 10 times point in the standings.
Below I will give you a better insight into the method. First I bring you a list of the top six individual contributions in the NHL during last season:
| Player | Team | Pos | PC |
| Tomas Vokoun | FLA | G | 283 |
| Martin Brodeur | NJD | G | 276 |
| Tim Thomas | BOS | G | 237 |
| J-S Giguere | ANA | G | 233 |
| Henrik Lundqvist | NYR | G | 222 |
| Roberto Luongo | VAN | G | 221 |
Even if you are slow you will notice that this list is comprised solely of goaltenders. In fact, 18 of the stop 20 PC scores from last season came from goaltenders. Determining the relative impact of goaltending on winning involves comparing team to team variation in goaltending to team to team variation in defence and offence. Goaltending is very impactful because the span of best to worst team performances is high compared to offence and defence. Just ask hockey fans in the State of Florida about that. Following goaltenders as they move around (for instance Luongo and Vokoun) verifies the magnitude of their impact.
To get to these scores I compare a goaltender's save percentage (adjusted for variations in shot quality) to a threshold level (for last season I used a save percentage of .894 as the save percentage of a 'marginal' goaltender) and then multiply the difference ('performance') by the number of shots faced ('exposure'). Finally the result (in essence 'goals saved' versus a marginal performance) is scaled so that the PC score is denominated in (10 times) team points in the standings. This involves an assessment of how each team translated goals into points (separately for the shootout and skating time). For an average team, during skating time, 2.72 goals were required to generate a point in the standings. This means that a PC point is, on average, equal to .272 goals saved.
You can see that each of these goaltenders contributed well over 20 points in the standings to their team's success. Each played a lot (Tim Thomas had the fewest games played at 57). A player cannot have impact if he does not play. He can have impact if he plays a great deal (exposure) and he will have impact if he also plays well (performance). Vokoun led this list on the basis of a great deal of exposure (a league leading 2213 shots faced) and a .919 save percentage (.921 when adjusted for shot quality) behind one of the NHL's worst defensive teams. But Brodeur was not far behind (2089 shots, .920 shot quality neutral save percentage). PC says that these players were each worth about 28 points to their team.
The shootout is material to team's point total and is a big part of our overall assessment of goaltenders. It is another reason why goalies are more valuable than skaters (goalies are involved in every shot but skaters are limited to one try per shootout). These six goalies averaged 42 PC points from the shootout.
The list you were expecting was probably the one below — the top six individual contributions by skaters:
| Player | Team | Pos | PC |
| Alexander Ovechkin | WAS | LW | 162 |
| Jarome Iginla | CAL | RW | 141 |
| Pavel Datsyuk | DET | C | 132 |
| Ilya Kovalchuk | ATL | LW | 124 |
| Nicklas Lidstrom | DET | D | 121 |
| Henrik Zetterberg | DET | LW | 121 |
