Quality over Quantity

A total of 791 players have played for an NHL team so far this season. Weather it be one game, or all 40+ games. This number does not include goalies (of which 76 have played so far). The question I ask is, how far above the rest, are the star players in the NHL performing? So I decided to distribute each player into classes based on their current point totals. Now I did cut down the number of players based on how many games they played, any player under 10 games was cut. So here are the results.

# of Points	# of Players	% of League
0-8	106	19.96
8-16	182	34.27
16-24	109	20.53
24-32	73	13.75
32-40	39	7.34
40-48	17	3.20
48-56	4	.75
56-64	1	.19

As you can see the largest chunk of the players have scored between 8 to 32 points so far this year. As the point totals get higher, the more the players fall off. As you can see only one player is in the range of 56-64 points, that being Evgeni Malkin. So with this said we have found that the average NHL player has scored between 8 to 32 points. Anyone above the mark of 40 points should technically be considered an above average NHL player. The one extra thing I will say is that any player in the range of 40-64 points is an All Star player (being that they would be most likely a point-per-game player or better). Any player below the mark of 8-16 points should be considered a “below average NHL player”. What we are left with is a group of scorers in the 32-40 point range, these players are most likely either rising or fading stars.

For the 56-64 point range we have only Evgeni Malkin. For the range of 48-56 we have Alex Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby, Marc Savard, and Ryan Getzlaf. For the range of 40-48 points we have players like Patrick Kane, Ilya Kovalchuk, Mike Richards, Jeff Carter, Zach Parise, and Pavel Datsyuk. In the 32-40 point range we have our rising stars: Devin Setoguchi, Henrik Zetterberg, Nikolai Zherdev, and Alex Semin. We also have some fading stars: Daymond Langkow, Martin St Louis, Ray Whitney, Brian Gionta, and Brad Richards. (oh and Steve, Ales Hemsky falls into this category). The mid range of 8-32 points is made up of a jumble of players such as: Robert Lang, Milan Hejduk, Olli Jokinen, Shawn Horcoff, Markus Naslund, Chris Pronger, Keith Tkachuk, David Booth, Dion Phanuef, Jason Arnott, and Jay Bouwmeester.

The one thing I left out was the fact defensemen normally score less points then forwards but I thought I would include them anyway. So take from this what you will.