The mightiest assist men

There seems to be some general consensus regarding Sidney Crosby, Jaromir Jagr and Joe Thornton as the most influential assist men in the NHL this year. This is reflected in the daily assist leaders section on NHL.com.

However, if you take a closer look at it, and split the number of first assists (more goal-inducing) and second assists (often credited to a player by chance e.g "last one to touch the puck before the whoever who was given the first assist") by specific players, as a blogger named Forechecker did, you would arrive at some of the most refreshing solutions.

Here's his list of the Forechecker's mightiest assist men across the NHL this season:

The column of interest for our purposes is the one on the far right. According to Forechecker, the "Mod pts" stands for modified points you arrive at when the number of second assists is taken away from the player's total number of points scored to date. Pretty good, huh?

Here are some of my observations based on this spreadsheet:

1. The modified top five among the assist-producers is not necessarily the names you think of first. Selanne and Hossa are most glaring surprises here. I might be inclined to put Spezza here last year, but defeinitely not this year.

2. From the list at hand, the player that suffers the most from taking away the second assists is Pronger. He's a perennial scoring card presence, but it seems now more by default (on the power-play, especially) than by bona fide production. Second worst off is Crosby - the whole point of attempting this analysis.

3. Whitney is the sensational winner of the % of first assists. While Ovechkin and Thornton, second and third respectively, are locks, Whitney takes this category by storm, really. Caught me fully off-guard.

4. The most over-rated assist men are Pronger, Sakic and St. Louis, whose great majority of assists are second ones.

This analysis is not designed to look down on Crosby, rather - to find out to what extent the simple every-day stats most of the people are using reflect the true nature of the process of putting up non-unassisted goals :).

I like the spin on stats that Forechecker provides. I'll be lurking more frequently :).