End-of-Season Report Cards: By the Numbers

Part 2 of the Round Table Wrap-up will be posted later today at 10:00 a.m. But for now, here are a few stats and charts from this season’s Report Cards voting.

The 2017-18 Report Cards series has wrapped up, as we’ve now gone through grading the forwards, defencemen, goalies, coaching and management. Below is a full breakdown of everybody’s grades, with the final result on the right representing the overall average.

With the voting revealed, let’s look to see how the ballots stack up. Who was most optimistic, and who was more harsh in their grading?

The chart below shows a line representing each voter. The horizontal axis represents the average player grade, while the vertical axis shows how different that grade was from the average. The line is there to represent a smoothed out version of how someone voted overall.

The one line that sticks out belongs to you, the readers! From the poll conducted prior to the series, the results gave significantly higher results than the Silver Seven writers, especially to players that ended up with an overall lower grade. The most prominent examples include Cody Ceci (C vs. D), Ben Harpur (C- vs. D-), Max McCormick (C+ vs. D+), Craig Anderson (D+ vs. F) and Zack Smith (C vs. D+).

The contrast is drastic compared to the overall evenness of the writer grades. Let’s zoom in to see some of the tendencies there.

• Ross wins the award of this season’s biggest optimist, as he was the only writer to average handing out a C+ instead of a C. Noted Pessimist Trevor is the runner-up.
• Spencer and myself tie for biggest pessimists, although I was more harsh with my grading of the lower-end players.
• Ary’s line is almost completely hidden by Beata’s line, as they were within a single grade of each other (i.e. B and B+) for over 85% of the players. They were also closest to the average.
• NKB was harshest when it came to grading the top-end players, although gave some slack to the lower-end./

Next up is looking at player agreements. Using a standard deviation of each grade, we can figure out which players were agreed upon the most, and who caused the most discord.

The following chart shows a point for each player, with the horizontal axis representing the average grade, and the vertical axis showing how much we agreed in the voting. Higher on the chart means that the grades were closer together, i.e. more agreement.

The most agreed upon players were the stars: Stone, Duchene and Hoffman. There was also some collective agreement on Magnus Paajarvi and Filip Chlapik, who we all graded slightly above average in the C+/B- range.

As we saw in the previous charts, it was the lower-end players where the disagreement kicked in, as not surprisingly, Cody Ceci was this season’s most divisive player. It’s also interesting to see Fredrik Claesson at the bottom, who was graded as high as a C and as low as a D-.

Then there’s Alex Burrows, who we all deemed to have a terrible season, with only two votes giving him anything above a failing grade.

That’s it from this season’s report cards! Thanks to everyone who submitted their grades.