Drawing penalties – Who is good at it on the Canucks?

This post is mostly related to two vilified wingers of past and future Vancouver Canucks teams, Mason Raymond and David Booth. Both of these players are pretty good at an overlooked part of hockey. At least Raymond was good before his injury sustained in the Finals, but I digress. I’ve covered Raymond pre-and-post injury enough, and the last thing this website needs is more people talking about how Booth is going to surpass measly expectations.

Powerplay percentages and penalty kill percentages are one thing, but what really matters is how many goals for and against you get in special teams situations. Last year, the Canucks were 8th in PK percentage but 10th in goals against while shorthanded. Why the small discrepancy? Because they took more penalties.

Minor hockey leagues have precious few stats, so when analysts feel the need to quantify the play of a defensive defenceman, they look at his penalty minutes. Only big, tough, defenders get penalties, anyway, and I guess it’s good to be big and tough? It’s fun information for poolies to play with as well.

But minor leagues count only penalties taken and not the player that draws the penalty. Take last night’s game, where Ryan Kesler, Andrew Alberts and Bo Horvat are all charged with minor penalties but Matthew Nieto, Tommy Wingels and Jason Demers don’t get any sort of credit for drawing the penalties beyond the boxscore. The NHL doesn’t officially record the data, but Behind the Net does. If you take a look at a list of league leaders in drawn penalties over the last three or four years you’ll find some very familiar names: players like Dustin Brown and Jeff Skinner and Darren Helm and Ryan Callahan. Eric T. at Broad Street Hockey has mentioned penalty differential as a “hidden talent”.

For our purposes, it would be fun to see how the Canucks stack up in this department. By using the data at Behind the Net for ice-times and penalties drawn and taken, I looked at qualified players and assigned a “replacement value” for penalty differential based on a player that is 70% as good at drawing penalties as the average player, and takes 130% more. I’ve seen “70% of average” thrown around on baseball forums as a quick means of calculating replacement-level, and the reason I’m not using the average is because I want to give an average player some value.

The table here is the player, position, penalties taken per 60, drawn per 60, overall differential per 60, and rate versus the replacement. A replacement forward gets a differential of -0.36 per 60 minutes and a defenceman is -0.61:

What should immediately stick out here is that David Booth is not just the best on the Canucks, but he’s in the top 40 in the NHL over the last three seasons, his contributions to the cause in Florida during the 2010-2011 season were probably worth about a point in the standings. It takes about seven or eight drawn penalties to have enough accrued that any powerplay could score a goal. Over three seasons, he’s drawn 45 calls and taken just 22 penalties. The overall difference, 23, divided by 8 is worth very close to three. According to hockey’s 3-1-1 rule (3 goals is worth a point in the standings and is worth one million dollars) on drawn penalties alone, Booth is worth close to $1-million.

If he stays healthy, of course.

The full list of Canucks is up there as well. Brad Richardson should do some spot duty while Mason Raymond, who would have been third on the list at 0.86 above replacement, is off the team. For all the abuse Keith Ballard took when kicking around Vancouver, he drew over one penalty per 60 minutes of play—1.03, while taking 0.89—meaning his differential is quite high when compared to a replacement and he’d have been the second highest defenceman, well-above Dan Hamhuis.

A difference of 0.4 on this list should be worth about a powerplay goal, assuming a player plays 72 games and 15 minutes a night (since these are per 60 rates, ice-time matters as well).

What may be concerning is that Henrik and Daniel Sedin score pretty poorly by this. They’re elite possession players and play-drivers, but don’t draw a lot of penalties. Alex Burrows, who takes a bundle of penalties and is perceived as having a target on his back, scores quite well considering he, and Ryan Kesler, draw more than they take.

Furthermore, if you look at the Canucks bottom pairing, I imagine that Andrew Alberts’ ability to take dumb penalties washes out most of Chris Tanev’s value, which is that he can play long stretches of games without taking a minor penalty. He doesn’t draw an awful lot, but he still comes out well ahead.

Here are some of the recently deposed Canucks. Raymond, Ballard, and Cody Hodgson (!!) do well by this metric. Manny Malhotra does somewhat, but you can take Max Lapierre. He was a pretty terrible diver compared to Kesler and Burrows: