Peer value

Why role-relative

Ranking every skater on one list buries a shutdown third-pair defenseman beneath a first-line scorer, even when the defenseman is excellent at his job. A depth forward will never out-produce a franchise center, and holding him to that bar tells you nothing about how well he plays his actual role. Peer value fixes the comparison: each player is ranked and percentile-scored only against others in the same season who play the same role. The result answers a cleaner question - not 'is this the best player in the league?' but 'is this the best player at this job?'

How the peer group is drawn

A peer group is a position group crossed with a usage tier, cut fresh each season. Skaters are split into forwards and defensemen, then into thirds by season-long ice time within that position: Top-6, Middle-6, and Bottom-6 forwards, and Top-4, Pairing, and Third-pair defensemen. Goalies split into Starters and Backups by workload. That yields eight self-contained cohorts, each ranked from best to worst on its own scale. Within a cohort, skaters are ordered by their per-season all-in-one value (GAR) and goalies by their shot-quality-adjusted goaltending (GSAx), and the percentile runs 0 to 100 with 100 the best in the group.

How it stays honest

Two guardrails do the work. First, an eligibility gate: only players with at least 20 games in a season (20 starts for goalies) are ranked, so a hot handful of games can't manufacture a peer-group crown. Second, every cohort is genuinely self-contained - a player's rank runs 1 through N inside their own tier and nowhere else, and the reported group size is exactly the number of players ranked against them. There is no bleed between tiers and no cross-season leakage: the comparison set is fixed to same-season, same-role peers before anyone is scored.

What the cohorts actually look like

Because this is a ranking rather than a prediction, its integrity is a matter of sampling discipline, so it's worth showing exactly how the cohorts sit. Across the 2020-21 through 2024-25 seasons the tier sizes are stable and sensible - roughly 150-plus qualified forwards, about 80 defensemen, and two-to-three dozen goalies per tier per season - and the eligibility gate holds with zero exceptions.

As a concrete example, in 2023-24 each of the three forward tiers held exactly 156 players, each defense tier held 84, and there were 31 Starters and 31 Backups - and within every one of those tiers the rank ran cleanly from 1 to the tier's size, with no player slipping the 20-game floor.