Advanced Stats Take On Grit - RGI

The other night on twitter - I couldn't help but notice a few Flames fans retweeting a link to an intriguing thread on the forums at CalgaryPuck.com. Regular poster ricardodw had a suggestion - and it sure sounded interesting - a way to assess "grittiness" or lack thereof. I'll let him do the explaining:

"I thought that I could show that there are no successful teams that had as many soft players as the Flames and Oilers.

I came up with Ricardo’s Grit Index (RGI). I take the plays which require grit and physical sacrifice (hits, blocked shots and take-aways) and subtract give-aways to get a raw grit score.

I then do a simple grit / games played. This does not show how gritty a player is relative to his peers. Someone like Bouwmeester playing 25 minutes/game has over twice the opportunity to make gritty plays than Jackman. So I took the TOI and normalized it to regular games. A average forward should get 15 min/game of ice time (12 forwards dressed) and an average D-man should get 20 min/game of ice time. The Total TOI /15 for forwards and Total TOI/20 gives something I call regular games played.

I ended up with some surprising results."

- ricardodw, August 23rd, 1:28 PM MST

Surprising indeed. His theory paid dividends folks - it looks like we may finally have insight into how some players are allocated their ice time by NHL coaches. This may be of particular value when trying to assess the intentions and logic of the Leafs coaching staff - specifically Randy Carlyle.

Carlyle is considered a no-nonsense coach, who generally favours a rough and tumble type of game. He has often questioned the commitment of specific players to "go to the dirty areas of the ice", and this statistic does a decent job of showing us which players the score keepers think are going to the dirty areas of the ice - a lot.

So here are the results for the Leafs from this past 48 game season:

Now looking at the above table, a few things stand out. First, it sure seems like the Leafs are getting rid of some of their less gritty players (Grabovski and MacArthur) that are being played in traditionally gritty roles (i.e. 3rd/4th liners). Since Nikolai Kulemin is still with the team we can assume it's because he's scoring so high in the RGI rankings.

Jake Gardiner was also the least played Leafs Defender last year, and we all know Randy Carlyle said he had to work on his "defensive game" more - which is basically code for improving his "grittiness". This chart makes it fairly obvious why he wasn't playing. Also - Kostka wasn't re-signed after his rookie NHL season, and John-Michael Liles was relegated to the press-box for much of the season. Not enough grit in either case.

Basically any player scoring over a 2 is doing "ok" by this measure. Phaneuf seems to be at the low end for the Leafs Defenders though, and you'd think the leader of the club would need to be leading from in front as far as grit is concerned. What worries me is the fact that well known "softer" D man Cody Franson rates higher in the index than Gunnarsson or Phaneuf.

As a means of assessing the Leafs under Ron Wilson in these terms, I'm going to go back and look at the 2010-11 season (Wilson's last full year as head coach) so we can compare the team RGI value - Carlyle's 2012-13 team scored a total of 89.782.

The team total under Wilson was 77.009, so obviously Carlyle is making an impact on the team's gritty playing style. This is likely a result of players selection and pure coaching genius. It is interesting to note how some players have drastically improved their RGI scores under the tutelage of Carlyle as opposed to Wilson, while others have not. Most notable are the following:

Kulemin: +1.804

Kadri: +1.138

Gunnarsson: +0.623

Lupul: +0.582

Bozak: +0.198

Obviously these guys are all playing "grittier" for Carlyle than they did for Wilson. In fact, a direct link can be made (and probably should) between the smaller improvement for Grabovski of +0.125 in comparison to that for Bozak and Kadri. Obviously the latter two guys wanted the top 6 job more than Grabovski did and sacrificed their bodies more to get it.

When we start to think on who is on their way into Leaf land for the coming season, and who might be on their way out we should consider the following:

From the looks of things Clarkson's not as gritty as some people think, and Bolland is softer than Jake Gardiner. Hmmm... well I'm guessing that Carlyle's systems of play will enhance their grittiness like they did those other Leafs.

You may have noticed that Clarke MacArthur's RGI score actually decreased from Wilson to Carlyle, and that lack of buy in probably had something to do with him not being brought back. The only other two players to drop in RGI terms were Dion Phaneuf and Phil Kessel - which likely explains all the chatter about them being moved out before they get massive extensions.

Hopefully this metric is a step in the right direction to get more people that aren't so interested in advanced stats actually participating in the conversation. Obviously this is a very important step forward for the analytics community, one that will enhance our understanding of the true genius of coaches like Randy Carlyle and GMs like Dave Nonis. Thanks to Ricardo - we can all see some "logic" behind the numbers.