And Now For Something Completely Different (TOPHS) on Free Agent Centers

John has provided a large number of posts focusing on the different aspects of the available Free Agent Centers. This is sort of a corollary to his face-off discussion found here. Face-off wins help the team *get* the puck. But how about *keeping* the puck? The NFL tracks turnover ratios. That stat may exist somewhere for the NHL, but I've never seen it. I wanted to see what the FA Centers looked like with respect to their turnover ratios. For comparison's sake, I included Kovalchuk and Clarkson in the mix, since the Devils would obviously be interested in signing either of them. Details after the jump. Oh yeah, viewing wide will probably work better.

Unfortunately, part of the problem with looking at turnover ratios is that the players who handle the puck a lot would tend to turn over the puck a lot. One of the stats nhl.com tracks is total number of shifts. Now, I know players' shift lengths are quite varied, but I felt normalizing their turnover ratios per shift (well, actually one hundred shifts to make the numbers seem more reasonable) would be reasonable.

So what I did was rank the free agent centers that John compared based on their Takeaways minus their number of Giveaways, then divided that by their total number of shifts and multiplied it all by 100. Viola, TurnOvers Per Hundred Shifts (TOPHS). What this stat really measures though is their net turnover ratio for every hundred shifts, i.e every 100 shifts the player would have netted X number of turnovers. Positive numbers mean the player would have taken the puck away this many more times than given it away. Negative numbers mean the player would have given the puck away this many more times than taken it away. Finally, for some comparison against thee best and worst, I included the top 10 forwards and bottom ten. Players had to have played in 20 games to be counted. I figured since it was normalized based on number of shifts, Time On Ice limits wouldn't matter. So without further ado:

I included face-off data in the table to see that data side-by-side. A couple "no, duhs" in the data, like Pavel Datsyuk being near the top and Andrew Peters near the bottom. But also a couple surprises. Even based on an equal hundred shifts, the top TOI players are *mostly* near the bottom of the list. Vinny Prospal is the top ranked high TOI center. Richard Park the highest second level and Jim Slater the top third tier center. Not to mention Ilya Kovalchuk near the bottom of the list (and he IS dead last in un-normalized overall turnover ratio, TAR in my table). My data in Excel had similar colored highlights as John's, but for whatever reason I couldn't copy that info in here. Does this change anybody's perspective on any player(s)? I'll be looking at the most commonly mentioned Free Agent Defensemen in the next day or so. Enjoy.