The Smaller but Still Squiggly Line of Stardom (Stars Remain Human)

If most folks associated with hockey are in a realistic frame of mind (note, of course that there are no guarantees about this one), they expect the performance of young and developing players to mirror that of a quite squiggly line.   Within the same game, an inexperienced young talent can make a horrific, rookie mistake that shows how much he still has to learn while also showcasing precocious skill that shows just how much natural talent he has.     This pattern (precocious brilliance coupled with many “so much still to learn” moments) leads most great organization to set the goal for young players to be an “upward” curve, with the understanding that there are going to be many jagged edges along that road.   Such a chart might look like this:

DEVELOPMENTAL PLAYER CHART NHL GAMES 1-240

(For those who aren’t fans of charts, check out two video clips of a 21-year-old Kris Letang in his first two NHL seasons and note the precocious brilliance and the “WHAT WERE YOU doing, child?” moment at the 35 second mark.) 

Yet at some point in the careers of star players, (often around the fourth or fifth season), a few special players make the leap from “promising” young and developing talents to bona-fide NHL stars.    Their newfound status as star players brings with it a new expectation, one that was best described recently by the NHL’s ninth all-time leading scorer, Jaromir Jagr.

After Jagr, a once-promising teenage prospect, became the best player in the world, he described the years when he was amassing scoring titles as pressure-filled years.  He encapsulated the feelings of a star player well and thusly, “….When I was in position as ‘the guy’ ... if you feel good, everything is fine because you know you can make the difference. But there are times you don’t feel good and you still have to do it. That’s pressure. That’s when you struggle because you know you’re the guy and you know you don’t feel good but you still have to do it.” 

Like it was for Jagr, the newfound expectation for star players is that their games, if charted, should no longer reflect any squiggles.   That they have to be good all the time. 

Where once the squiggles were expected and normal, as in the first chart above, now the expectation becomes this straight line where the vertical axis is Points Per Game and the horizontal axis is a group of games in a season.   Note the expectation that the star player, in each series of games, will average around 1.25 points per game in all games:

STAR PLAYER EXPECTED PPG STRAIGHT LINE CHART

But it’s impossible to score 1.25 points per game.   It is impossible to average +1.3 on the night.   In an actual game, a player could score 1 or 2  or 3 points and be a +2 or a +1 or a -1, but he’ll never a -.5 anything.  Nor will he ever score half a point.

Star players have a higher average line than anyone else, and past precedent suggests that it’s right to hold the expectations for their line of play quite high.

But this is a better picture for the star player:

STAR PLAYER ACTUAL PPG AVERAGE SQUIGGLY CHART

And notice this truth about those PPG averages:

Note if this player ends up playing 82 games, he will score 102 points.  But he has a rough time period in games 51-60 and a really great month of November.   What you don’t see charted, but what could be seen in a scatterplot of game after game and season after season of actual Hall of Fame players, is that even future Hall-of-Famers have nights where they get held scoreless.    That even defensemen widely accepted as the best in the game have a few games a season where they’re on the ice when the opposing team scores a couple of goals.  

The price of stardom?    Whenever your straight line squiggles—not when it squiggles higher than your average of a point per game because, well, you’re good enough to have nights where you produce more than a mere point a game—but whenever that line dips, if there’s a play misread or just a night where a star player is fighting the puck and nothing is going his way—

A chorus of criticism is coming for that star player.   And Jagr’s quote lingers as true for any star player striving to maintain or increase his level of play.   Because of what he’s already shown he can do, there is screaming any time the star’s performance line is not straight as an arrow.

Hockey Consultant would like to offer a truth.  Even that “straight” line of performance for stars has some squiggles in it.   If the squiggles dip too low or become a pattern that results in a much lower line, that’s when a real problem has occurred.

But an otherwise stalwart player having a couple of bad games while fighting a cold or playing with a minor injury (not that anyone outside the team knows) or even a star player having a rough dozen games to start a season—

It’s not wise to press panic buttons or complete reset buttons.

Even for star players—albeit much to their chagrin given their usual tendencies toward harsh self-criticism and internally high expectations for their own play—that line, oh so high, is never going to be a pure straight line.   If it’s not a straight line for players who end up in the Hall of Fame (who usually still manage to put up at least a point in games when they’re otherwise terrible), it’s not going to be straight for mere star players, either.

Now look at the straight line.   If the average is here, that’s why the impatient organization or the average fan will start screaming when the squiggly dip to anything below that 1.25 PPG average occurs.

But look at the squiggly lines again and note what rationality has to say about how star players get to be as good as they are.   (It’s consistently high performance, but there are squiggly outliers here and there because they’re human.) 

A player at this level should expect to be challenged and critiqued every time his performance dips below that line.    That’s the price of being a star.

Guess what?

All fans and all organizations should wish to have such occasional “below-the-star-level” line performances to critique.  Championships are not won without players whose performance when chartered shows a consistently higher, less squiggly line than the performance lines of most other players. 

That high but not quite straight performance line of star players has smaller, fewer squiggles than the performance lines of most other players.    And the average line height is consistently higher than the line of most other players.

But there are still squiggles.   And as much as Jaromir Jagr hated that fact back in the days when he was averaging more than a point per game but not quite two points per game, and as much as every star player hates it when he believes he should be playing at his highest level every night, reality says players at this level—exasperating squiggles and all when you’ve seen them score at the 2 PPG clip for 10 games—are absolutely necessary pieces to the puzzle if your team is serious about winning a championship.