Sports Reference Blog

Your 2015-16 Expected +/- Leader: Joe Thornton

Posted by Mike Lynch on April 11, 2016

At the beginning of the season, we introduced a new metric called Expected +/-. This statistic shows what we'd expect a player's +/- to be, based on where his team's and his opponent's shots came from while he was on the ice in even-strength situations. The expected value of these shots is based upon league-wide shooting percentages from various locations on the ice. The 2014-15 leader was Patrice Bergeron, at +21.5. With the 2015-16 regular season now completed, we're happy to announce that Joe Thornton is the 2015-16 leader at +21.7.

Since this metric considers the quality of shots (or at least their point of origin), it has an advantage over blunter instruments, like Corsi, which consider quantity, but not quality. However, unlike Corsi, Expected +/- does not include info on shots that weren't on goal, that were blocked, etc. So we see the stats as good complements for each other.

Check out the players with Expected +/- above 10 for the 2015-16 season here:

Rk Player Age Tm Pos GP E+/- ?
1 Joe Thornton 36 SJS C 82 21.7
2 Patric Hornqvist 29 PIT RW 82 20.3
3 Tomas Hertl 22 SJS C 81 19.2
4 Brian Dumoulin 24 PIT D 79 19.0
5 Joe Pavelski 31 SJS C 82 18.5
6 Justin Braun 28 SJS D 80 17.1
7 Carl Hagelin 27 TOT LW 80 17.1
8 Kris Letang 28 PIT D 71 16.7
9 Marc-Edouard Vlasic 28 SJS D 67 16.5
10 Ryan Getzlaf 30 ANA C 77 16.4
11 Brad Marchand 27 BOS LW 77 16.2
12 Hampus Lindholm 22 ANA D 80 15.2
13 Ryan Ellis 25 NSH D 79 14.7
14 Patrice Bergeron 30 BOS C 80 14.5
15 Drew Doughty 26 LAK D 82 14.5
16 John Klingberg 23 DAL D 76 14.2
17 Kris Versteeg 29 TOT RW 77 14.2
18 Anze Kopitar 28 LAK C 81 14.1
19 Colton Parayko 22 STL D 79 13.8
20 Shea Weber 30 NSH D 78 13.7
21 Jakob Silfverberg 25 ANA RW 82 13.6
22 Joonas Donskoi 23 SJS RW 76 13.5
23 Jake Muzzin 26 LAK D 82 13.5
24 Kris Versteeg 29 CAR RW 63 13.5
25 Tyler Toffoli 23 LAK C 82 13.4
26 Pavel Datsyuk 37 DET C 66 13.2
27 Trevor Daley 32 TOT D 82 13.1
28 Mikael Backlund 26 CGY C 82 13.0
29 Eric Staal 31 CAR C 63 12.9
30 Ryan Suter 31 MIN D 82 12.7
31 Jacob Trouba 21 WPG D 81 12.6
32 Carl Hagelin 27 PIT LW 37 12.4
33 Chris Kunitz 36 PIT LW 80 12.4
34 Alex Ovechkin 30 WSH LW 79 12.4
35 Mike Ribeiro 35 NSH C 81 12.3
36 Milan Lucic 27 LAK LW 81 12.2
37 Josh Manson 24 ANA D 71 12.1
38 Eric Staal 31 TOT C 83 12.1
39 Filip Forsberg 21 NSH LW 82 12.0
40 Jared Spurgeon 26 MIN D 77 11.8
41 Mattias Ekholm 25 NSH D 82 11.6
42 Tyler Seguin 24 DAL C 72 11.4
43 Dustin Byfuglien 30 WPG D 81 11.2
44 Craig Smith 26 NSH RW 82 11.2
45 Trevor Daley 32 PIT D 53 11.1
46 Marian Hossa 37 CHI RW 64 11.1
47 Phil Kessel 28 PIT RW 82 11.0
48 Victor Hedman 25 TBL D 78 10.9
49 Roman Josi 25 NSH D 81 10.9
50 Evgeny Kuznetsov 23 WSH C 82 10.9
51 Sidney Crosby 28 PIT C 80 10.7
52 David Perron 27 TOT LW 71 10.4
53 Joel Ward 35 SJS RW 79 10.4
54 Evgeni Malkin 29 PIT C 57 10.3
55 Marian Gaborik 33 LAK RW 54 10.2
56 Jeff Carter 31 LAK C 77 10.0
57 Jussi Jokinen 32 FLA LW 81 10.0
58 Justin Williams 34 WSH RW 82 10.0
Provided by Hockey-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 4/11/2016.

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  3. PFR Celebrates the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2015
  4. Features: Expected Points
  5. Introducing NHL Expected +/-

This entry was posted on Monday, April 11th, 2016 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Advanced Stats, Announcement, Data, Hockey-Reference.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Your 2015-16 Expected +/- Leader: Joe Thornton”

  1. Joe C. Says: April 15th, 2016 at 5:49 pm

    So basically, what this chart is saying is that the Sharks top O and D lines were really good this year.