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Now that the NHL Season has reached the half-way point, it's time to look in on the silliness that is the Grit Chart, courtesy of Sportsnet. As I said when I first looked at their "metric":
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:
Team | Points/G | What is Grit? Rank |
Toronto Maple Leafs | 1.10 | 1 |
Philadelphia Flyers | 1.10 | 2 |
Columbus Blue Jackets | 0.95 | 3 |
Washington Capitals | 1.13 | 4 |
Colorado Avalanche | 1.33 | 5 |
Montréal Canadiens | 1.22 | 5 |
Buffalo Sabres | 0.65 | 7 |
St. Louis Blues | 1.51 | 8 |
Boston Bruins | 1.35 | 9 |
Ottawa Senators | 0.98 | 10 |
New York Islanders | 0.80 | 11 |
Winnipeg Jets | 1.02 | 11 |
Pittsburgh Penguins | 1.40 | 13 |
Los Angeles Kings | 1.32 | 13 |
Edmonton Oilers | 0.74 | 15 |
Calgary Flames | 0.85 | 16 |
Nashville Predators | 1.00 | 17 |
Vancouver Canucks | 1.29 | 18 |
Dallas Stars | 1.21 | 19 |
New York Rangers | 1.02 | 20 |
Phoenix Coyotes | 1.26 | 21 |
Anaheim Ducks | 1.50 | 22 |
Florida Panthers | 0.88 | 23 |
San Jose Sharks | 1.40 | 24 |
Tampa Bay Lightning | 1.28 | 24 |
Carolina Hurricanes | 0.98 | 26 |
Minnesota Wild | 1.07 | 27 |
Detroit Red Wings | 1.10 | 28 |
Chicago Blackhawks | 1.50 | 29 |
New Jersey Devils | 1.02 | 30 |
Except for the Blues, the best teams in the league 18th or worse in the grit standings.
The R^2 value of grit score to points is .13, low enough to be meaningless. The R^2 value of population to points is .15, meaning metropolitan population correlates to winning more closely than grit as defined by Sportsnet.