Grading every NHL team's left wing depth

Follow| Archive

The National Hockey League calendar goes eerily quiet every August. For many, it’s a brief respite in anticipation of another lengthy hockey season. At TSN, such a break is the perfect opportunity to spend some time dissecting rosters in finer detail.

Starting today, we will unveil a multi-piece series grading every team’s lineup across the positional groups in tiered fashion. We will analyze the depth charts across all positions and create talent tiers for all 32 franchises. For the opener, we will start at left wing. A few housekeeping notes before we get into the piece:

-The tiered approach is meant to bucket teams with similar talent profiles at a given position. -Position changes (intra-year and during off-seasons) are rather common in the NHL, and in one season, a left wing may see more minutes at centre or vice versa. We scraped the depth charts of two public databases (CBS and CapFriendly), reconciled them against positional usage in prior seasons, and in a handful of cases, made some forecast changes or educated guesses in anticipation of what coaching staffs may do in the upcoming year. Positional volatility only impacts the forward group, so we will manage through each carefully. -Player contributions will be measured in Goals Above Replacement, which isolates player performance into the following pertinent categories: value added offensively and defensively at even-strength, value added across special teams play (if applicable), and value added by way of drawing and taking penalties. Last year’s leaders, for your brief sanity check, include Johnny Gaudreau, Toronto’s Auston Matthews, and Edmonton’s Connor McDavid. -We will use a weighted system for 2022-23 expectations. Top-six wingers