Hockey fans have a long-standing love-hate relationship with single number stats to summarize the value of a player.



Single-number summary stats always suffer similar detractions:



How can one number tell the whole story?



What about defence vs offence?



What about intangibles?



<Insert favourite player’s name> should be ranked way higher! This metric stinks.



Despite the potential worries, other sports have forged ahead in the development of single statistics to facilitate comparisons between players. Baseball has long boasted WAR (wins above replacement) as a measure for comparing players with a single number. The idea is that all players contribute to some extent to winning and this measure can represent that.



In hockey stats, the now defunct War-on-Ice offered a “goals above replacement” stat before the site creators joined NHL teams and the website went dark.



While other attempts at the...