What makes an MVP? Quantifying the PWHL’s Billie Jean King Award

The PWHL Awards for the 2024-25 regular season were handed out on Wednesday. For the second consecutive year, the Forward of the Year and the Billie Jean King MVP were one and the same. Natalie Spooner’s 20-goal outburst netted her both pieces of hardware last season. Marie-Philip Poulin’s 19 tallies did so this go-around, beating out fellow Forward of the Year finalist Hilary Knight and Defender of the Year winner Renata Fast. Given these results, questions that often arise around this time of year did so once more – what constitutes an MVP, and what differentiates the honour from other awards that are already handed out? If it’ll always be one of two trophies taken home by a player that night, how much of a purpose does it truly serve?

The PWHL Billie Jean King MVP award, as stated on the league’s website, is presented to the player considered most valuable to their team’s success throughout the regular season. While other awards not based purely on statistics are subjective in their own right, this one certainly takes the cake, as there are so many facets of a player’s game that can be given different weights in terms of value. What is the right way of going about quantifying something that can so heavily fluctuate?

One way of doing so, while flawed in its own right, is to consider every facet on a level playing field. I’ve identified six prominent measures to base an MVP case upon and given them each their own ballots, with finalists in every individual category gaining points towards an overall total (first place gets three, second place gets two, and third place gets one). The overall totals will make up my final ballot, which can then be compared to the actual results from Wednesday’s ceremony.

A final note before we get started: Only one player from each roster will be considered as an MVP candidate, since my interpretation of the award’s description is a disqualifier for anyone who isn’t deemed the most valuable to their own team. I also won’t be considering goaltenders on any of these ballots. The positional differences between forwards and defenders are difficult enough to compare, and while Ann-Renée Desbiens and Aerin Frankel both had arguments of varying quality for MVP, Desbiens’ teammate was the eventual winner of the award and Frankel’s teammate was a finalist in her own right.

1. Team Success

This argument is the most simple of the bunch; a player being valuable to their team’s success is predicated on their team having success at all. The Victoire and Sceptres cruising into the playoffs are boons to Poulin and Fast’s cases, respectively, while the Fleet missing out on the last day is a death knell for Knight’s. In fact, Knight drops off the ballot entirely here in favour of who I believe to be the next closest contender from the remaining playoff teams, that being the Frost’s Sophie Jaques.

Team Success Ballot

• Marie-Philip Poulin: +3 (3)
• Renata Fast: +2 (2)
• Sophie Jaques: +1 (1)

2. Individual Offensive Output

Points are the easiest metric to determine offensive success, but it does create a divide between forwards and defence in terms of role and opportunity. Both of the defenders up for consideration are lauded for their offensive prowess, so while they’ll still be graded on a curve, it isn’t like they’re out of their league here.

First, the forwards, and the first appearance of the Sirens’ Sarah Fillier. The slam-dunk Rookie of the Year tied with Knight for the scoring title, but Knight’s higher primary point total, a greater indicator of impact on a scoring play, leaves her out ahead. While Poulin bests them both, as well of the rest of the league in goals, she only ties Fillier in primary points and loses the tiebreaker on overall total.

For the defenders, Fast and Jaques are tied in points at 22, with the caveat that Jaques did so in five less games. She also blows Fast out of the water in primary points, with 17 to the Sceptre’s 11. Jaques’ offensive performance from the blueline is enough to warrant consideration for third place behind Knight and Fillier, but Poulin’s goal-scoring output makes it too difficult to justify removing her.

Individual Offensive Output Ballot

• Hilary Knight: +3 (3)
• Sarah Fillier: +2 (2)
• Marie-Philip Poulin: +1 (4)

3. Individual Game Score

Game Score is a statistic that attempts to do exactly what I’m trying to do here: quantify value. It assigns certain events in games individual values and adds them up to determine a player’s overall impact, similar to stats like Wins Above Replacement commonly found in baseball. Like WAR, though, Game Score often struggles to properly assess defensive play, so I’ll once again be grading on a curve. The Game Score numbers, and all statistics used going forward, are taken from Kyle Cushman’s Master Spreadsheet.

Knight leads the league in Game Score with an even 30, with Poulin right behind at 29.5. However, Poulin’s GS/60 is higher than Knight’s given her two minutes fewer of average ice time. Time on ice is a touchy subject when it comes to player evaluation since a high total indicates that one’s team relies heavily on them, but playing a lot of minutes does not imply playing well within those minutes. In this case, Poulin is more effective on average so she gets the edge here.

Neither Jaques nor Fast have the highest Game Scores on their respective teams, demonstrating the defenders’ disadvantages. However, Jaques is only one behind the Frost’s top forward while Fast is nearly eight back of the Sceptres’ highest, with two other forwards between them. Comparing the two, Jaques wins handily at 24.3 to Fast’s 18.5, again exacerbated by the former’s five fewer games, and the latter’s MVP case being largely built upon sheer time on ice. Fast’s score also gets tanked by her putting her team shorthanded on more occasions than any other player in the league. While I left Jaques off the previous ballot I cannot deny her any longer, even despite Fillier’s own solid total of 28.1.

Individual Game Score Ballot

• Marie-Philip Poulin: +3 (7)
• Hilary Knight: +2 (5)
• Sophie Jaques: +1 (2)

4. On-Ice Impact

To measure how positively a player affects their team through their presence on the ice, I’ll be using two statistics, one of them more passive in nature and the other more involved. The first is Goals For Percentage (GF%), or the percentage of goals scored by a player’s team when they’re on the ice at five-on-five. While this statistic doesn’t tell all (which is better demonstrated in my analysis of Mae Batherson’s rookie season), it is a strong indicator of a player contributing to team success. Jaques and Poulin shine here, both breaking the 68% barrier, while Knight and Fillier each have respectable marks of above 57% themselves. Fast, meanwhile, sits at an average 50%, having been on the ice for an equal number of goals for and against.

The second statistic is Involvement Percentage (INV%), or the share of a team’s goals in games a player participated in over the course of the season that said player recorded a point on. Excluding Jessica Kondas’ outlier game last December, Knight leads the PWHL in this statistic at 40% with Jaques and Fillier rounding out the podium at above 34% apiece. Poulin does slip a bit here, as not only does her 28.6% leave her in ninth, it isn’t even the highest mark in her own marriage, let alone her own team.

On-Ice Impact Ballot

• Sophie Jaques: +3 (5)
• Hilary Knight: +2 (7)
• Marie-Philip Poulin: +1 (8)

5. Next-Closest Teammate Comparison

An oft-cited qualifier for an MVP recipient is for them to have carried the team on their back with their performance, receiving comparatively little assistance in doing so. This comes with the consequence of two teammates’ successes hurting the other’s respective case for the award. To account for this, I’ll be going back to the earlier measures of points and Game Score, but using the difference between a player and their next-closest teammate as the point of evaluation.

This is the crux of the argument for Knight as MVP. Her 29 points were ten clear of Alina Müller’s 19 and her 30 Game Score comes concerningly close to doubling Susanna Tapani’s 16.9. The category is also a strength of Fillier’s, with her handily outpacing Jessie Eldridge in both measures. The real debate comes with determining third place.

Poulin clears Laura Stacey in points and Game Score, but not as convincingly as Fillier does Eldridge. Neither Jaques nor Fast lead their teams in either, but Jaques’ numbers in particular being attached to a defender grants her consideration next to Poulin. However, there has been one team that’s been conspicuously absent to this point: the Ottawa Charge.

The PWHL finalists primarily operated by committee, as seen by them not exactly having a standout candidate for the award. Tereza Vanišová’s lead in points over Emily Clark was identical to Poulin’s over Stacey, but her Game Score lead was narrower. Nonetheless, Vanišová led the entire league in individual scoring chances generated on the co-lowest scoring team in the regular season, and I want to give her her flowers for that.

Next-Closest Teammate Comparison Ballot

• Hilary Knight: +3 (10)
• Sarah Fillier: +2 (4)
• Tereza Vanišová: +1 (1)

6. Full Team Analysis

I’d like to account for the conundrum mentioned earlier of two teammates damaging each other’s MVP bids, which I exemplified by leaving Poulin off the last ballot. By shifting the point of comparison from the second-best player to the average, it accounts for the common scenario of a specific line or pairing being the drivers of a team’s success rather than an individual. Like in the On-Ice Impact section, I’ll be using two stats to make my conclusion, one being significantly less complicated than the other.

The first measure alluded to is relative GF%, which compares a player’s individual GF% to that of the entire team, and has a column of its own on the spreadsheet. Fillier ranks third with a 24.2% GF%Rel, with Poulin one spot behind at 23%. Jaques barely cracks the top ten, while Knight is a fair bit further down in 25th. Last, but certainly not least with a whopping 36.9%, we get to our Sceptres representative… Hannah Miller? Indeed, Miller only trails Ottawa’s Alexa Vasko in GF%Rel, but has nearly two-and-a-half times the sample size to work with. Meanwhile, Fast is all the way down at 4.9%, 44th place overall and one spot ahead of Zoe Boyd when considering just her positional peers.

Next, similarly to how the above stat was an extension of GF%, the final measure will be another extension of Game Score, this time calculating how many standard deviations from their team’s mean Game Score each player’s total is. Since it is a cumulative stat, I’ve set a cutoff of twenty games played for skaters, and ten for goalies in order to be considered in the Game Score average. I’ll also be including both Fast and Miller for Toronto.