Montreal Canadiens Report Cards: Introduction

I realized that I never really had a full post about the Montreal Canadiens being eliminated from the playoffs. It was probably a mix of disbelief of the run actually being over, plus the hockey fatigue I was going through.

However, now that some time has passed, it’s time to look at the past season that took everyone by surprise and went longer than most people thought possible and somehow still wasn’t long enough.

I will be going in reverse order of Hockey Reference’s Point Share system.

What is the Point Share system? It was developed by HR’s Justin Kubatko. Here is some explanation directly from HockeyReference.com.

"I. IntroductionIn 2002, Bill James introduced the Win Shares system to the world of baseball. The goal of the system was to estimate the number of wins (actually, win shares) “created” by each player.Three years later, I used James’ work as the foundation for a similar system for basketball.Since the system seems to work well in both baseball and basketball, I decided to apply the idea to hockey. Some of the ideas I came up with were motivated by research done by hockey analysts Tom Awad, Iain Fyffe, and Alan Ryder, among others.II. What is a Point Share?Bill James developed his system such that one win is equivalent to three Win Shares. My system deviates from James’ in three key ways:In James’ system, one win is equivalent to three Win Shares. In my system for hockey, one point is equivalent to one Point Share.James made team Win Shares directly proportional to team wins. In his system, a baseball team that wins 80 games will have exactly 240 Win Shares, a baseball team that wins 90 games will have exactly 270 Win Shares, etc. In my system for hockey, a team with 100 points will have about 100 Point Shares, give or take.James did not allow for the possibility of negative Win Shares. In his system, the fewest number of Win Shares a player can have is zero. In my system, a player can have negative Point Shares. I justify this by thinking about it in the following way: a player with negative Point Shares was so poor that he essentially took away points that his teammates had generated."

This is not necessarily an endorsement of the statistic, but just a way to rank the players that isn’t points or games played. Players who have appeared in at least 10 regular season games or one playoff game (here’s looking at you, Dustin Tokarski) will be featured.

There will be two players per day which will take us to just before the draft and free agency, when we will look towards next season.

The report cards will be split as followed:

REPORT/GRADE: This will be a brief recap of the player’s season as well as a letter grade. This will be somewhat skewed towards what was expected of the player before the season started.

FUTURE: Is the player a free agent? What’s his cap hit next year? What are the chances they will be back? Here, we look at what we can expect this off-season for the player.

So sit back, get ready. It will all start later today with George Parros. It will all wrap up, unsurprisingly with Carey Price.