Introducing Burgundy Rainbow Analysis Metric: Player Impact Points (PIPs)

With all of these advanced stats running around, it is hard to keep track of what each one means and how they all fit together.

Introducing a new tool developed by Burgundy Rainbow, the Player Impact Points (PIPs). PIPs is a metric that is used to analyze how much impact a player had on any given game or season. It uses a combination of points, Corsi, shot suppression, shot generation, individual performance, scoring chances, and time on ice to determine how valuable a player was to the outcome of the game.

This also does not lean towards offensively inclined players and does not discriminate since it takes into account defensive prowess as well. For example:

Player A is a defensive defenseman and tends to play a lot on the PK and against other teams top line players. Player A’s Corsi percentage will not be very good, especially if the power play of the opposing team is very good. Player A’s PIP will not be bad just because he had less Corsi than other players. If he did his job and suppressed shots, generated a little bit, and prevented scoring chances, then his PIPs will reflect that.

Player B is an offensive forward. Player B tends to play mostly in the offensive zone and is sheltered. He shots a lot of pucks but nothing tends to happen. His Corsi may be high, but he didn’t have much of an impact on the game. PIPs take into account plays like this and they would get fewer PIPs than someone who had a lower Corsi but helped the team a lot more.

Player C is a 2-way defenseman who plays top minutes against all competition. He generates a lot of offense and does a lot on the defensive end as well. This player is one of the most valuable players in hockey for their usefulness and impact to all points of the game. This player tends to get the most PIPs because they are important pieces to the team’s success.

PIPs themselves are an attempt to simplify all the advanced stats and put them all into a concise and easy to understand chart or table. This does not necessarily indicate how well a player plays, especially because stats do not always tell the whole story of how a player plays.
PIPs/60 is a way to use PIPs to indicate how well a player played in a particular game or season. PIPs/60 is PIPs time (60/TOI). This shows the data as if every player played 60 minutes at the same rate of play they did throughout the game and aims to show how well a player did in their given role.

Here are the PIP charts for the Avs game vs the Canucks on February 26, 2018:

The data for the Avs vs Canucks game on 2-26-18 can be found can be found here.

As you can see above MacKinnon had a total of 1567 PIPs. This is the sum of all the other stats multiplied their weights and added together. Points are given more weight than scoring chances, shot suppression and generation given a bigger weight than shots on goal, and so on. The better a player’s corsi, shot suppression, shot generation, point totals, etc.; the higher the PIP number. Higher PIPs are good and lower PIPs are bad.

If you are interested in PIPs of other players around the league for the whole season, PIPs for all of the NHL for this season as of February 28th, 2018 can be found here.