Best One Man Team Ever?

Tonight I was sitting around wasting my life watching Futurama. I was watching the episode where they spoof Scooby Doo, and the Harlem Globetrotters make 5 clones of Larry Bird to practice against. It got me thinking what a similar team would look like in hockey. So I decided to take this upon myself and try to figure it out.

I wanted to include historical players, because a list like this has to include players like Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. Because of this I had to find a good way to compare all of the players. I decided on Point Share. Point Share is basically what portion of a teams points can be attributed to a certain player. (For more info on point share, click here.) I used Hockey-Reference to gather my stats.

Point share is divided into Offensive Point Share and Defensive Point Share. This is pretty self explanatory; Offensive Point Share, OPS, is the point share attributed to a players offensive contributions. Defensive Point Share, or DPS, is the point share attributed to a players defensive contributions. My plan for this was two fold, I would first take the average Point Share, or PS, for each player and see who has the highest average PS over their career. My second team would be made of the player with the highest single season OPS and DPS. I decided to allow for the best OPS and DPS to come from different seasons, to get an idea of the players best overall seasons.

Now onto the players. I wanted to get a wide variety of eras. I decided on ten players, mostly because I didn’t feel like gathering data for too many players. I compared Gordie Howe, Wayne Gretzky, Ray Bourque, Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr, Nikolas Lidstrom, Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin, and Patrick Kane.

Now that we know the players I’ll explain what I am trying to achieve a little better. My goal is to get the best team of the same player, so one player playing all 5 positions on the starting line. I excluded goalie because that is a complete different type of position. There are obviously a lot of flaws in my methods here, but I really don’t give a shit. It was fun so let me enjoy myself. Now onto the data.

I pulled the data for each player for each year they were in the NHL. I excluded any time spent in other leagues, so players like Jagr and Howe are missing a few years. But the purpose of this is to get the best starting player in the NHL, so I set it for just that league. The first chart below shows the best average PS over the career of each player.

Looks like we have Alex Ovechkin as the best player by PS from our set of players! I honestly would not have thought anyone could have beat Wayne Gretzky. They are very close in OPS, with Gretzky leading by .22 points. However Ovi pulls ahead in DPS, leading by .53 points. After looking at this I decided to graph out the year by year numbers for PS for both Ovi and Gretzky.

After looking at the graph I was a little weary of my previous results, Gretzky looks to have a sizable lead over Ovi in OPS and DSP isn’t a huge difference. So I decided to redo my research and only include the first 10 years of each players career.

Gretzky has a big lead now, which makes sense when you see the fall off he has in the later half of his career. So as expected, I’d say that a team of Wayne Gretzky’s would probably be the best single player team you could find.

Now the one interesting person in this study was Nikolas Lidstrom. He is the only person to actually increase his PS in the later half of his career.

So overall, if we are taking the full career into account, I would take Ovi. Taking the first 10 years is Gretzky. Now, Ovi may have a better end of his career than Gretzky did, so the margin may increase over time. But as we see with Nick Lidstrom, it’s not too often that a player increase his PS in the later half of his career as he gets older, especially with such high marks in the first ten years of his career. -JS

This has been a cross post from TheHockeyRecap.com