09-19-2020, 02:38 AMSegi Wrote:

09-18-2020, 10:19 PMRomanesEuntDomus Wrote: Interesting, but as I just laid out in my previous post this pattern doesn't hold up when looking at individual numbers.

And all the other stats are extremely inflated for players on good teams. Especially shots, points and Corsi. Excluding players on half of the teams just because they're teams aren't good feels really shitty. There should at least be the possibility to win something if your teams isn't all that competitive.
Also, I don't get how a player with more than 1 point per game can be considered for a defensive defenseman award. Why are clearly offensively minded defensemen even considered for the Bojo?

Well I for one (and I'm sure most other voters as well) didn't discount any players merely for being on a bad team, and we certainly don't exclude people for not making the playoffs. But when looking at someones stats I try to ask myself what they mean in context of their teams situation and to me its quite an obvious pattern that many people near the top of the Hits or SB lists at least partially seem to be there because their team doesn't have the puck a lot, so they get shelled with shots that they can then block or have a lot of opportunities to hit. Like, the Top-5 Blockers come from MIN, BAP and TBB, all of them with +/- of -25 or worse, the three on TBB even with worse than -50. Only one player in the Top-10 of that category has a positive plus-minus, in fact he is the only one better than -15.

Now +/- isn't a very useful stat, but here it shows you that the leaderboard for this specific category (SB) is full with players that got scored on a lot. The same goes for peoples Corsi which is bad for most players I just mentioned, although the picture is a bit more mixed here. So yeah, a guy with a -32, a Corsi below 30 (and rel Corsi that is just slightly positive) is not what I'm looking for in a top-defensive defenseman, just because he has a lot of blocks and good takeaways. Ice-time is also a factor here, at 28 minutes a night Seger played significantly more than his competition, although this stat does work both ways, inflating his stats in general but also making some aspects of his performance a bit more impressive, I grant you that.

You have a point too that being on a good team does not work against players as much as being on a bad team. This might be something we need to factor in a bit in the future as it becomes clear that in the FHM-era, your teams situation impacts your numbers much more than in the STHS era when scoring titles would relatively regularly go to players on mediocre teams. This isn't the case anymore so I do think we need to take a look not just at players raw numbers but at how impressive they are compared to their teammates. It's something that I've seen happen quite a bit with Awards but especially All-Star-Teams that has annoyed me as well, where spots can go to players with impressive raw scoring numbers who are just third in their teams scoring, over a guy with 5 fewer points total but who carried his entire team because the next player on his squad has like 15 points less, which happened for players even on good teams. That is definitely something that needs to be factored in more in the future which I already try to do, but regularly miss as well. I would also argue however that having a certain tilt towards the good teams in an Awards process is good and normal. We do after all want to honor the very best players in the league in a season, and helping your team be one of the better squads in the league is an important factor in this equation.

And to your last point: I for one only use points as a cut-off criteria, I exclude people with very few points to shorten my list a bit but after that I don't look at points at all for the Bojo. Whether a player has a lot of points or not doesn't matter and I certainly won't hold it against someone if he managed to rack up some points as well as a side product of his strong performance in his own end that gives his team a lot of possession, as happened this year and seems to be more prevalent in FHM than it was in STHS.

And lastly: I for one would be open to releasing the full nomination lists again as we have sometimes done in the past, I think it always makes for some good discussion and helps make the Awards Committees thought processes clearer, especially when you see that some people werent completely snubbed by everyone but just narrowly missed out by a vote or two. Especially the Bojo and the Dar are among the most complicated Awards too where there is the biggest variation in peoples ballots and some of my colleagues on the committee have decidedly different criteria there than I do and voted for very different people. For example, for the Dar Trophy for best two-way-forward only one of my nominees made it, and three people on my ballot didn't even get a vote from anyone else.