Top player contribution list

ALAN RYDER, Globe and Mail, Sept. 26, 2008

Lists of top performances generate considerable, passionate debate amongst hockey fans. As every individual looks at this kind of question through their own lens, there is no right answer.

My normal lens is the contribution of individual player performances to team success. This means that I am interested in a comprehensive assessment of a player's impact on a team. To do this properly one must consider the various things a player does to contribute to a team's success and give them appropriate weight in an overall assessment. But it is no small assignment to sort out the things that matter and those that do not.

The tool I use for measuring individual player impact is a method I call 'Player Contribution' (or PC). Because it has been scaled to team success, PC is denominated in team points. A PC point is approximately 1/10th of a standings point and the PC points allocated to a team are therefore about 10 times point in the standings.

The list you were expecting was probably the one below — the top six individual contributions by skaters:

   Player              Team Pos PC
1. Alexander Ovechkin  WAS  LW  162
2. Jarome Iginla       CAL  RW  141
3. Pavel Datsyuk       DET  C   132
4. Ilya Kovalchuk      ATL  LW  124
5. Nicklas Lidstrom    DET  D   121
6. Henrik Zetterberg   DET  LW  121

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