I’ve spent the last month or so working on a new way to measure hockey players. I call it the Heavy Lifter Index (HLI). I didn’t invent the term heavy lifter for hockey players, I just added the index part. I’m pretty sure my contribution to the name is much more important than the rest.
For those that don’t read a lot of hockey stat blogs, I’ll elaborate. A Heavy Lifter is a player who not only faces the opposition’s best players, but frequently has to start shifts in the defensive zone. Yet he stilll outplays everyone he faces.
HLI measures the difficulty of the player’s icetime by defining the level of competition and starting shift position the using existing stats QualComp, Corsi Rel QoC, and Zone Start percentage. The only difference is we compare the players rating, to the league rating to see what the magnitude of difficulty of their icetime is.
As for outplaying the competition, HLI uses three stats again. I measure how much they outscore their competition, how much they outshoot their competition and whether they draw more penalties than they take. Again these stats are all readily available on BehindTheNet.ca but I use a method to measure magnitude compared to the league.
My work is posted on Hockey Prospectus. My first post explaining the inner workings of HLI can be found here, while the evaluation of every forward in the NHL over the last 3 seasons can be found here.
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