Sometime earlier this week I posted during clips some data I organized into a system to determine how clutch goal scorers are. Now I'm back with a full spreadsheet (see link below) covering 9 caps forwards with a broader grading range and varied point value.

So here’s the skinny. This system takes every goal and weights how many points it is worth by how many categories it fits into. The categories are weighted according to how much I, me, my opinion, value those situations. The point categories are: Game Winning Goals, Game Tie-ing Goals, Come Back Goals, Power Play Goals, Shorthanded goals, goals that give a +2 lead when scored, goals that give a +1 lead when scored, empty net goals, being the first player in the game to score, an even strength goal (5v5 category), overtime goal, shoot out goal, penalty shot goal, multi-goal game including both 2 and 3 goal games. Each of those categories is then weighted between .333 and 1.2. 

1 Point Categories include: GWG, GTG, Come back goals, power play goals, first to score, and multi-goal games. These are categories I thought were pretty solid in how important they are in a game to the outcome of winning. 

1.2 Point categories include: Penalty Shot goal, Shootout goal, Overtime Goal, and Shorthanded goals. These goals to me are extremely important because most of them directly determine what the outcome of the game will be. 

Other Category points. +1 and +2 lead goals are respectively 0.666 and 0.333 points each. I feel that they are important but might not necessarily be the back-breaking clutch goals other categories are. Leads can shift many times in a game. Empty net goals are valued at 0.75 points per goal. While they usually seal the deal on the game, bear in mind there is no goalie to stop the shot. Even Strength goals (5v5), are valued at 0.5 points per goal. Even strength goals are important to winning but not all goals scored at ES are back breakers.

All goals can fall into multiple categories! So each goal can be either very few points or a whole lot of points. Examples being: Brooks Laich scores a goal at even strength, putting the game score to 5 v 2 in the Caps favor. This goal would only fall into the 5v5 category and be worth 0.5 points. A different game Eric Fehr scores on the power play in overtime to end the game. That’s a really clutch goal and falls into: gwg, otg, +1, ppg. All that would make his one goal worth 3.866 points. This system is designed to reward goals scored in important situations much higher than goals scored that do not have a lot of bearing on the result of the game and goals scored when the team is leading by a large enough degree. 

Spreadsheet link: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ajrf5QPUxmPAdF9vTDBJdHBzS3Y5NU9Zb3h0cnF5VWc&hl=en

And also

https://public.sheet.zoho.com/public/breaklance/clutch-scoring-system

Exclaimer: I am one person and have other things going on; there may be mistakes in the data entry. This is why I included all the dates of games in which the player scored.

Results: After tallying all the goals from Alex Ovechkin, Alex Semin, Nicholas Backstrom, Mike Knuble, Brooks Laich, Tomas Fleischmann, Eric Fehr, Brendan Morrison, and Matt Bradley the results vary except in proving that Alex Ovechkin is still the best player on the team by a good margin. 

The general order here isn’t too surprising to me. It generally follows the more goals you score the more points you get. It is surprising to see Knuble 2 spots lower than his goals would indicate (he is the 4rth highest goal scorer on the team). Next we move to Points per Goal statistic, basically how many pts each goal is worth on average.

Pts per Goal

Here we start seeing some surprises. Closely following Ovechkin is not Semin but Flash. Note that this stat is an average but will generally indicate how clutch each goal the player has scored this season was. And its saying Flash has been really clutch with his goals this year. Fehr and Laich are quite close as well, but it really surprises me to see Knuble so low, and for Bradley to be more clutch with his goals that BMo is.  Continuing is the points earned per game, how often they score an important goal more or less.

The world is right with this set of data. It would generally follow how many goals per game the player scores. Except for Laich being low again. It would offer to say his former ironman streak deflated his score somewhat, and it did for everyone except Backstrom rated above him have played in less than 70 games this season. Backstrom, Laich, and Knuble have at least played in 72 games this season, Bradley has played in 70. But keeping that stuff in mind, Ovechkin dominates this category as he does the league with his goals per game average, but everyone except Bmo and Bradley average more than have a point per game. Now consider that points are only earned on goals and not assists, and you get most players averaging around an important goal every other game up to once per game, Semin and Ovechkin. Finally are the points per 60 minute stat. Generally if the player played a full 60 minute game without tire-ing he would earn this amount of points per game. Kind of the basic explanation.

Ovechkin, Semin, and Backstrom have the highest time on ice and they all do a lot with it, well Ovie and Semin do a lot more than Backstrom with it. Fehr however does an extraordinary amount in the little time he’s given apparently, he has the 2nd lowest TOI/g of the group, lowest being Matt Bradley.  Flash and Knuble are very close in their efficiency except that Knuble gets more PP time and plays on the top line while flash plays between 2nd and 3rd, but mostly 3rd. Without comparing to another team however, I’d say that having all of our 20+ goal scorers at the most 0.12 points out of 2 “clutch” points per game is pretty astounding.

Conclusion: From all the data I’d say the most clutch players in order are: Ovechkin, Semin, Flash, Backstrom, Fehr, Laich, Knuble, Bradley, and Morrison. That’s my opinion from my own conclusions I drew from the data. Objectively I’d say that Ovechkin is easily the #1 still, Semin most probably #2, then it appears to me that the data bunches on the remaining players so…your opinion could easily be as good as mine! Hope you enjoyed the read, and data.