Having looked at an inordinate amount of advanced ‘sabermetric’ statistics, I think it’s unquestionable that they have their utility when analyzing the game of hockey. With that being said, their applicability in evaluating the worst draft busts since 1990 is heinous.
In an ESPN Insider article penned by Alvin Chang, he used Tom Awad’s Goals Versus Threshold (GVT) metric to evaluate the worst draft picks from 1990 to 2008.
If you’re unfamiliar with GVT, Awad describes it at Hockey Prospectus:
GVT is very similar to VORP in baseball: it is the value of a player, in goals, above what a replacement player would have contributed. The fact that GVT is measured in goals is crucial: statistics that divide up Win Shares, so that the ratings of a team’s players sum to that team’s number of wins, are very erratic and non-linear, since wins don’t increase or decrease linearly with team caliber. While hockey is ultimately about winning or losing, player’s contributions always come down ...
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