What If a Hockey Player Is Worth More Than His Statistics?

I've been thinking about a study from UBC Okanagan that looked at something hockey people don't usually put into a spreadsheet. Where a player comes from. The researchers found that NHL teams with more locally born players tend to draw more people to their home games and generate more revenue. That makes sense. But it also raises a much bigger question.

What if a hockey player is worth more than his statistics?

We spend an awful lot of time trying to determine exactly what a player is worth. Goals. Assists. Ice time. Possession numbers. Salary. Contract term. Expected goals. And, of course, trade value. But other things happen when a player puts on a jersey.

Arshdeep Bains, for example, is from Surrey, B.C. When he plays for the Vancouver Canucks, he's not just another NHL player to somebody watching in that community. He's one of their “local” guys. Maybe a kid in Surrey sees Bains and thinks about his own hockey dreams. Maybe a minor hockey coach feels a little more connected to the Canucks because one of the players came through the local system.

Maybe a family buys a ticket because they want to see someone who feels like he belongs to their community. Those things don't show up beside his name in the box score.

How might this relate to the recent Maple Leafs trade of Matthew Knies?

And that brings me back to something I've been thinking about with the Maple Leafs and Matthew Knies. Knies wasn't from Toronto, so this isn't exactly the same thing. But something else there doesn't fit neatly into a statistical model. He was becoming part of the community.

He liked being a Maple Leaf. His teammates liked him. Fans liked him. He felt like he belonged there. Then he was traded.

And I'm not arguing that Toronto should have kept him because people liked him. NHL teams can't operate that way. But I wonder if we sometimes make the opposite mistake. We get so good at measuring players that we forget that people are part of teams, too.

A player can bring confidence. Belonging. Personality. History. Connection. And sometimes those things may actually help a team win.

The UBC research tried to measure the value of local connection through team income and attendance.

The UBC study gives us one way of measuring the value of local connection. But it also makes me wonder about all the other things we haven't figured out how to measure yet. Maybe the real question isn't whether a player is worth more than his statistics.

Maybe it's whether we've been measuring the right things all along. That's where an old researcher like me gets interested.