Marketing Tool or Just Tool?

Sean Avery doing what he does best

Jet-setting around the world. Cameo appearances in movies and television shows. Featured as one of the “Sexiest Men Alive”. Dating stars Elisha Cuthbert and Rachel Hunter. Summering at Vogue. While this may sound like the resume of one of the stars of The Hills, it is in fact that of the NHL’s always loveable Sean Avery. What, however, was left off that list is the fact that he is the most hated hockey player in the NHL. After the recent game with Calgary facing Dion Phanuef, who Avery criticized last year, came and went, with little fanfare, we can only rehash last year’s Avery blow-up to fill headlines. With that being said, here is my attempt to do just that.

Going back to last year and into the start of this season, many involved in the sport were glad to see Sean Avery essentially muzzled, with Gary Bettman leading the charge. The mentality is if a player doesn’t fit the NHL’s mould, he is considered an outcast. This, unfortunately, is at the crux of the problem with the NHL. Over the years, rather than developing and marketing its talent, the league has made changes to the game ranging from the “skate in the crease” rule to adding the shootout. Compared to the other major sports leagues, NFL, NBA and the MLB, there is no other league that has changed their rules at the pace of the NHL. As evidenced by the NHL’s declining market share and interest in the United States, this strategy of altering the game has obviously not worked.

Fall Classic

Joe Carter's World Series Winning Home Run

1950 World Series Champions

Blue Moon Odom - Oakland A's 1972

Statistical Manipulation: Points per Minute

Atlanta Thrasher's Rich Peverley

There is one thing as Canadians that unites us all, some may say it’s our love for Tim Horton’s, some may say our free health care, but I say it has to be fantasy hockey, plain and simple. Everyone loves to be the armchair quarterback – make that the armchair GM. We all have an opinion about how much ice-time our players should get and how they should be played. With that in mind I started thinking about the age-old adage that plagues NHL coaches; how do I split playing time up to maximize player potential?

With that question in mind I went to work on trying to figure that out. What I came up with is the concept of points per minute. The concept is simple and calculates a percentage based on the number of points a player scores per minute. Essentially the percentage can tell us which player utilizes his ice-time the best as well as the average Time on Ice that the player spends between scoring points.

With that being said, the results are quite interesting. For example, over the past 3 years Martin St. Louis’s point/minute ratio has ranked him lower than his actual Point total has. In 2006, St. Louis ranked 5^th in total points but ranked 28^th in Pts/Min. Essentially what this means is that while St. Louis scored the 5^th most points, he ranked 28^th in the average amount of time on ice between points scored. For St. Louis this trend continued for 2007 and 2008, where he once again ranked higher point wise than his point per minute ratio.