In July of 2016, Dom Luszczyszyn released a metric called Game Score. Based on the baseball stat created by Bill James (and ported to basketball by John Hollinger) the objective of game score is to measure single game player productivity.
While it’s often easy to compare players across larger sample sizes, comparing two different players’ performance on a given night can be difficult. If player A has a goal, two shots, and took a penalty, did that player outperform player B who had two assists and one shot? Game score attempts to answer that question by weighting each of the actions of each player to give us a single number representing their overall performance in that game.
Unlike Dom, whose main goal was to create a better way to evaluate single game performance, mine was to create a better statistic to evaluate the total contributions of players. There are no advanced metrics, like Corsi For percentage, or even Goals For percentage, available at this time in the NWHL. Because of this, points are the best way to evaluate players, even though other box score stats are available.
Hockey Graphs 