Rating the Potential GMs of the All-Star Game

Granted, I'm a few days late on this, however I had trouble finding some stats I wanted to use.

Certainly the All-Star game and draft aren't perfect and not everybody loves them, but as I enthused in the open-thread on Thursday, I'm enthralled with them, particularly now that players have to be mini-GMs of a sort. From picking teams to deciding on lines and participants in the Skills Competitions, it's fascinating to see who has a better understanding of the players available.

Of course, looking at the winner of a single game is hardly indicative of who did a better job. If the Stanley Cup playoffs were only one game per series, history would be entirely different. So given the nature of the All-Star Game (all offense, zero defense) who could we reasonably expect to win an All-Star game series?

While GVT is hardly a perfect metric, it’s a perfectly workable one for this case: defensive defensemen, who do very little of their specialty in the ASG show up lower than high octane players like Evgeni Malkin and Claude Giroux. And while goalies might not do as much, it’s a value type look. How much more valuable is Tim Thomas over Carey Price in the game? (Significantly)

As you can see, the losers of the ASG, Team Alfredsson, would have a higher GVT at 237.6, thanks mostly to the fact that Carey Price is terrible. That doesn’t really create a good picture though, given that NHL teams only carry two goalies at a time (except sometimes the Islanders). So I also ran the same report eliminating the ostensible “third goalies”- Carey Price and Brian Elliott, who in this fantasy scenario have been sent to the All-Star Game minors.

At that point the two teams come out a lot closer, with Team Chara edging out Team Alfredsson at 225.8 vs. 223.1. Neither was particularly more significant than the other to begin with, but this pretty much shows that both teams were neck and neck in quality.

That said, I decided to look at GVT per cap hit and see who would succeed better in a salary cap world, then I realized Capgeek changed its cap calculator and it would be entirely too much effort.

by Arik Knapp