Sportsnet's Grit Chart Measures The Importance Of Grit & Winning

In his quest to find the ideal grit measurement, C&B regular curcro took another regular's definition, cavalierrogue's, and ran with it:

Returning to an earlier point, the original argument is not that enforcers’ fighting wins games, but "team toughness" wins games. So not number of fights, but who is doing the fighting. QUALGRIT, then should be a measure of how well distributed roughing and fighting penalties are distributed across the roster.

From that, he developed QUALGRIT, a team-level measurement of gritty play. Using QUALGRIT, he measured how the impact of fighting on winning and found it to be nearly non-existent.

But curcro wasn't the first into the ring. The screencap above, courtesy of @bookofloob, shows the brand-spankin'-new-for-2013 grit metric (What is Grit?) used by Sportsnet to explain which NHL teams are the grittiest. Grit is comprised of four measurements (stats!): Penalty Minutes, Fights, Hits, and Blocked Shots*. I combined the four into a single metric, weighted equally, and ranked the NHL by Sportsnet's grit metric below:

Sportsnet defines grit, but doesn't tell us how grit correlates to winning. With good reason. The R^2 value of grit score to points is .068, low enough to be meaningless. The R^2 value of population to points is .188, meaning metropolitan population correlates to winning more far more closely than grit as defined by Sportsnet.

*If I were creating the index, I'd realize that fights make up ~20% of penalty minutes and use a smaller sample of penalty minutes, perhaps those aggressive in nature, but that's neither here nor there, this is Sportsnet's dog and pony show.

Chopstyx brought up a good point:

Grit is defined as "courage and resolve; strength of character".

Perhaps Sportsnet should first prove penalty minutes, fights, hits, and blocked shots are correlated with or actually require grit in the first place.

The best five consecutive teams in the grit chart rank #23-#27. Grit is so important to winning, in fact, that the top ten teams on the list average 1.05 points per game, or 87 points in a full season. The second ten teams average 1.13 points per game, or 93 points in a full season. The bottom ten teams average 1.11 points per game, or 91 points in a full season.

The worst ten grit teams are better than the best ten grit teams and the middle ten are better than both.