Puck Prospectus: Understanding GVT

Tom Awad over at Puck Prospectus, who are insanely good with numbers, have developed a metric to help better analyze a player’s worth, called GVT (Goals Versus Threshold). This metric, much like sabremetrics that have taken a hold on baseball analysis, uses many different components, and is often very confusing. Before you ask “Who the hell is Tom Awad and what is Puck Prospectus?”, go over to ESPN and look at both their baseball and hockey sections, and you’ll see that ESPN references these guys left-and-right. They are the creme-de-la-creme of what they do, and understanding GVT will definitely help you in the long run, as metrics are sure to come to play in the NHL.

Some key points of GVT:

GVT is measured in goals. This makes it a convenient unit that hockey fans are already comfortable with.

GVT has built-in accounting. The sum of player GVTs on a team equals that team’s GVT plus the replacement level. This is essential, as player statistics often come with caveats. “Kovalchuk scored 43 goals, but he doesn’t play defense and his team isn’t good”. This makes it much easier to measure “how good would this team be replacing player A with player B?” It is also essential in that player success is correlated with team success, which after all is the entire point of the sport.

According to Tom, GVT is easily comparable to the VORP (Value Over Replacement Player) stat in baseball, which is an all-encompassing stat that simply states how many runs more per season a player is worth over the average replacement at that level.

Go over to Puck Prospectus and read the article. It is definitely worth your time.