Ottawa Senators Player Grades: By The Numbers

With the 2018-19 report cards series wrapped up, it’s time to reveal the ballots! Here’s a breakdown of everybody’s grades, with the final result on the right representing the average.

Staying true to the Silver Seven brand, below are are some charts and numbers to see if we can find any more information from this year’s voting.

Who was the most optimistic or pessimistic? The first chart below shows just that, as the horizontal axis represents the player’s overall grade, while the vertical axis shows each voter’s distance from the final grade. Higher than zero means that the grades were relatively more optimistic, while below zero is pessimistic.

• As always, you, the readers, are the eternal optimists. Especially when it comes to the players that received lower grades overall, there were some big differences. Pierre Dorion, Cody Ceci and Ben Harpur were each a full letter grade higher.
• Brandon was a close runner-up, though, giving an A- or higher to seven players.
• I ran away with this year’s award for biggest pessimist, as the only one to give an average grade of C.
• Most Agreeable award goes to Spencer, who on average was +-0.8 letter grades from the final result./

Next up is looking at agreements. Which players were the most/least divisive? We can use standard deviations to find out.

The following chart shows the player’s grade on the horizontal axis (right = better grade), and the vertical axis shows the level of agreement between the votes (up = more agreement).

• Marc Crawford, and more surprisingly Christian Jaros, were the two most divisive people to grade this year. Votes for Crawford ranged from a D to B, with Jaros from D to B+.
• The most agreeable player was Thomas Chabot, who we all decided had an excellent season. Duclair, Wolanin and Tkachuk are in a similar realm.
• Brian Gibbons also stands out as someone who we thought was good overall, but we couldn’t come to an agreement on how good./

Just looking at the reader poll, Pierre Dorion was far and away the most divisive, followed by Cody Ceci and Marc Crawford. The most agreeable player was Brady Tkachuk, with the runner-ups being Chabot and Duclair. We received a total 219 responses this year — thank you to everyone who took the time to vote!

One final note on this year’s results is that the average grade wound up being a C+, compared to a C last year. Despite the Sens having a worse year in 2018-19 than 2017-18, we were all slightly more optimistic. Maybe it’s because we had lower expectations coming into the year? Would love to hear your thoughts.

That wraps it up for this season’s player grades! Thanks for following along with our annual series.