The rage in baseball for the last couple years has been for general managers to try to find players who might be undervalued. Actualy that’s always the goal, but recently they’ve been relying on statistics a bit more. You might be familiar with the “Moneyball” thing, with Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s and their system.

Dean Lombardi is very interested in this. I talked to him a lot about it before the season but he didn’t want to go into too many details. As he said, half joking, “I’ve had too many of my ideas stolen over the years.” But Dean does believe that the “Moneyball” ideas translate to hockey, in some form.

Along those lines, I stumbled across this on the www.hockeyanalysis.com website. The operators of that site have used stats to analyze the offensive and defensive production of NHL players. Their system is complicated and based, it seems, on how many goals a player is responsible for, as compared to the league average. It’s kind of like a more in-depth plus-minus rating. Read more about it here.

Take it for what it’s worth, but I thought fans might be interested to see how the Kings stack up. The “average” player is supposed to have a 1.00 rating, and only players with at least 350 minutes of ice time this season are included. These numbers are through March 13. Players have their FULL seasons analyzed, not just their time with the Kings (Modry, Heward, Lundmark, etc.)

OFFENSE
Cammalleri 1.42
Visnovsky 1.38
Armstrong 1.34
Frolov 1.30
Heward 1.26
Kopitar 1.22
Kostopolous 1.05
Modry 1.00
Blake 0.99
Brown 0.97
Willsie 0.96
Dallman 0.93
Thornton 0.89
Miller 0.89
Lundmark 0.74

DEFENSE
Modry 1.37
Armstrong 1.10
Kostopoulos 1.09
Lundmark 1.05
Heward 1.03
Cammalleri 0.99
Miller 0.93
Visnovsky 0.92
Frolov 0.90
Blake 0.89
Kopitar 0.89
Brown 0.81
Dallman 0.80
Willsie 0.79
Thornton 0.76