ELLENTHAL: SHL players most involved in their team's offense

Det är premiär för en ny bloggare att ta plats hos hockeysverige.se. Och för första gången i sajtens historia kommer det att vara någon som skriver på engelska. Vi hälsar härmed Zach Ellenthal välkommen till oss. Här kommer han att göra djuplodande analyser av SHL med hjälp av underliggande siffror.

Last week while I watched Leksand’s well-documented top line of Marek Hrivík, Peter Cehlárik, and Carter Camper put up another productive night, I wondered what percent of the team’s offense they each represented and how that compared to other players and teams around the league.

Put another way, I was curious to see which players have been most involved in their team’s offense this season.

I honed in on two data points to answer this:

The percentage of team goals a player is on the ice for. For example, in the 27 games Marek Hrivík has played this year, Leksand has scored 41 goals during 5v5 play. Hrivík has been on for 20 of them, or 48.8 percent.
The percentage of a player’s on-ice goals he recorded a primary point on. In the Hrivík example, he has a primary point on 11 of those 20 5v5 goals, or 55 percent. (Primary points is the sum of goals + primary assists. Secondary assists are removed.)

While there are without a doubt additional factors that would be helpful to include, I figured this was a good starting point to understand if a player is helping to drive goal scoring and how important they are to those goals.

I split this out separately for forwards and defensemen, and also by the two most significant game situations — 5v5 and the power play. This adds helpful context and allows for fairer comparisons across players and teams.

5v5 Offense

Starting with 5v5 play, here are the 15 forwards and defensemen who have been on the ice for the highest percentage of their team's goals (x axis), along with their individual primary point percentage (y axis).

Overall, it appears the top forwards are on for about 35 to 40 percent of their team's goals, with top defensemen in the 40 to 45 percent range. And while defensemen are naturally on the ice more than forwards, Marek Hrivík actually edges out Éric Gélinas for the top spot in the league (48.8 percent vs. 48.4 percent).

From an individual point production standpoint, Victor Ejdsell and Carter Camper lead the way on the forwards side as the only players in this group scoring a primary point on over 60 percent of their on-ice goals. On the defensemen side, Jonas Ahnelöv, Bobby Nardella, and Eric Gelinas clear the 40 percent mark.

As expected, the entire Leksand forward trio shows up in this group. But they are not the only team with three names, as Emil Pettersson, Andrew Calof, andRobert Rosén all make the top 15 for Växjö (despite that those three are usually split across two different lines). Somewhat improbably, Rögle also has three names, but on the defensemen side with Gelinas, Niklas Hansson, and Moritz Seider.

PP Offense

Next up is the same idea, but on the power play.

Unsurprisingly, the scale is different here. The forwards are clustered in the 70 to 80 percent range for on-ice goals, with most of the defensemen in the 50 to 70 percent range.

The Leksand trio once again shows up prominently here, with the three of them leading the way having been on for over 90 percent of Leksand's power play goals. Even Patrik Zackrisson shows up to give Leksand a fourth forward, albeit at a much lower points percentage.

Individual point production is much more widely distributed than at 5v5, and even defenseman Helge Grans is the most involved in his team's power play goals of anybody in the league. Grans, Jonatan Berggren, and Jesse Virtanen lead the way at above the 60 percent mark.

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Eight forwards show up in both the 5v5 and power play group: Marek Hrivík, Peter Cehlárik, Carter Camper, Dennis Everberg, Jonatan Berggren, Andrew Calof, Ponthus Westerholm, and Linus Fröberg.

Seven defensemen do as well: Nolan Zajac, Nils Lundkvist, Erik Gustafsson, Moritz Seider, Eric Martinsson, Bobby Nardella, and Johannes Kinnvall.

Being in this group doesn't necessarily make them the best players, nor does it take into account underlying numbers to determine how sustainable their production has been, but it does make them the players who have been most involved in their team's goal scoring this season.

Who is Zach Ellenthal?

I am a hockey fan from the United States, who after studying abroad in Sweden in 2014, fell in love with all things related to Swedish hockey. I've even been fortunate to make a couple trips back to Sweden in the last few years to travel around to different cities and games, including a seven game trip across the country right before the pandemic. I enjoy watching, reading about, and blogging about Swedish hockey, and as a quarantine project last year created a stats website called Svengelska Hockey. I've been reading hockeysverige.se content for seven years, and now look forward to contributing some of my own.