The Swiss National League final is about to start, so now is as good a time as any to write a post celebrating everyone’s favourite money burning machine.
MVP
I think it’s very obvious who is the MVP of this past NL season. It’s everyone’s favourite German, Dominik Kahun.
With Kahun on the ice, Bern played like roughly a an 82 Point team (usually good for about 6th in the standings). Without Kahun, Bern played more like a 57 point team, which usually gets you right around 11th place. So he’s worth, like, 25 points in the standings, right? (that’s not how that works)
I remember watching Germany at the IIHF Worlds (before they started playing more fun, active hockey) and thinking “Kahun is the only fun thing about this team”. Seems like SCB fans now know what that feels like.
Obviously I’m just kidding, his team didn’t make the playoffs, so he can’t win the MVP.
Defenders
This leads us to the actual clear-cut MVP of the NL season. You don’t really need me to tell you, but it’s Henrik Tömmernes.
There isn’t really all that much to say about this. Tömmernes is elite in pretty much every category:
Puts up points, massive on the PP, defensive impact, it’s all there.
The 2+ hours he played with Sami Vatanen were also some of the most efficient by a defence pairing in the entire league. There were 4 defence pairings that played more than 2 hours together and cracked 60% xGF:
Geering - Weber (ZSC, 64.8% xGF)
Gernát - Glauser (Lausanne, 63.5%)
Tömmernes - Vatanen (Genève, 63.5%)
Müller - Loeffel (Lugano, 62.1%)
Similar to his teammate, Vatanen has above average impacts offensively and defensively at even strength:
Together, these two are so good they can even make a 3F2D-Powerplay work…
After Yannick Weber, the highest Even Strength impact in the NL can be credited to Hockey Twitter favourite Christian Djoos.
It’s mostly offensive impact, but putting together a +0.51 xG Difference per 60 mins of Even Strength1 is quite something2.
Djoos and Hansson are definitely making it easier for Zug to forget about losing both Diaz and Alatalo in the same offseason last year. While not quite as dominant at 5v5 as in past seasons (now merely very good instead of dominant pushing play the right way), Alatalo made up for it with quite a bit of PP value which helped him secure a spot in the top 10.
Rafael Diaz only barely missed out on the top 10, placing 16th among defenders in total GAR with 7.5 and 4th in even strength GAR with 6.4, putting up the 3rd highest RAPM impact. He even put up great numbers in the 63 minutes with Philippe Furrer, partying like it’s 2013.
So while he certainly hasn’t made Fribourg regret it so far, I still don’t think it was a particularly wise decision to sign someone to his age 35 through age 38 seasons one year in advance, but more on silly swiss contract decisions in a bit.
Notably, three Lausanne defenceman made it into the Top 10, with Frick, Gernat and Glauser having excellent seasons. Overall, Lausanne’s assembled a great defensive unit, even after Barberio left, with 5 players being solidly above average. They’re locked up for quite a while, too. Gernát is signed until 2024, Frick, Glauser, Genazzi and Heldner are signed until 2025 (Barberio is signed for next season).
But then again, they also gave Marti a contract until 2025, so there’s still room for some improvement in the roster construction process. Although Lausanne is certainly not the only team that deserves to have some serious questions asked about its roster construction. Both the league-worst defender as well as the league-worst forward in 21/22 by Total WAR are signed for two more years.
In fact, there are 10 players with below replacement level seasons who have contracts that run at least two more years. Some of them can be expected to bounce back, like Vincent Praplan, who was in the upper tiers of NL forwards in EV WAR from 2019 to 2021.
But most of the other players on that list don’t seem like the “turn it around” types. A couple of surprising names on the below replacement level season signed long term® list:
My WAR model hasn’t been impressed by Vermin’s (4 year deal with Bern until 2026) performance the last few years. The points are there, but even the ok-ish on-ice metrics seem to mostly be driven by the quality of Vermin’s linemates. There is some disagreement to be had, his microstats (see NL Ice Data for more) don’t look nearly as dire, but if I were an SCB-fan I’d be very skeptical if he can turn things around fully in his age 30-33 seasons.
The same can be said for Bertaggia (5 year deal with Genève until 2027), he has reasonable Zone Entry and Shot Assist metrics, but it doesn’t appear to amount to all that much.
Now both of them get regular chances to play for the swiss national team, so there is some reason to believe there’s more to these two than is visible through the lens of my WAR model. On the other hand there seems to be a reason both of these players get outscored and outchanced more than the rest of their teams. And I’m not sure I’d place bets as high as 4- and 5-year-contracts on that improving with new teams.
I’m sure there’s a snappy comment about markets working it all out in there somewhere, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Forwards
Riiiight. I wanted to keep these positive. How about the best forwards?
Top of the list is Roman Cervenka, mostly because of his … squints … defensive impact?
Now, obviously he scored a bunch and provided a ton of offensive value, that’s undeniable. But everyone knows about that. Far more interesting, at least to me, is the fact that his defensive value is also elite. If we pull up a list of the most defensively efficient forwards (both at even strength and overall), he’s in the top 10:
There are a couple of players in that list that’ll get a mention later, so let’s get back to the top overall forwards.
Number two on the list, Toni Rajala, who is trying to do his best lefty Alex Ovechkin impression, except he’s also good defensively letting off an impressive 22.7 shot attempts per 60 at 5v5 and adding even more on the Powerplay (~ 37 per 60 mins of 5v4).
Alex Grenier surprised me, being able to seamlessly transfer from the DEL to the NL. Now, I wouldn’t expect him to repeat this kind of performance with his main line partner, Jesper Olofsson, probably cooling off a bit.
The interesting thing about WAR (at least the way my model’s results appear to be working out) is that most of the time, the results are hardly surprising. If you regularly watch games or look through some more basic stats like Corsi, xG, etc. the way most of the names line up in the WAR lists likely won’t shock you. But every now and again there are some names in there that will.
Nico Dünner belongs firmly in the latter category. He’s been excellent the last two years and I don’t think I’ve heard his name praised much at all. My guess is that is mostly due to
his value mostly being derived by driving play in the right direction and not straight up scoring tons of points
not being given lots of PP time (he’s 12th in PP TOI per game among Rapperswil players), which also reduces the number of points he can easily grab
But the ability to effectively push play the right way goes a long way. He’s 12th among NL forwards in WAR per 60 this season. The only players with higher RAPM Impacts at 5v5: Jan Kovar and Marcus Krüger. Fair enough, one of those may play second tier swedish hockey next season, but it’s still some good company to be in. And as you’ve seen above: one of the most efficient defensive forwards in the league.
Seems to me that this is the kind of guy NL teams ought to be throwing money and term at but whatever.
Apparently Gaëtan Haas has been getting criticised this year, largely based on the fact that he’s “not scoring that much”. Among forwards with 20+ games in 2021/22, he is…
24th in Total GAR with 6.0
23rd in EV GAR with 4.9
7th in EV GAR per 60 mins with 0.6
Which means he’s solidly a first line forward. If anything’s wrong with Biel, it feels hard to argue that it’s due to him. Sure, he’s not putting up that many points himself, but he’s more than making up for it in all other ways a forward can provide value.
Davos’ Top Line
Looking through the top forward lines by xG, I was surprised not to find Davos’ top line of Bromé - Rasmussen - Stransky near the top. While they did outscore opponents quite handily (27 - 13), that seems to have largely come from being better at converting their chances than their opponents (50% xGF, 50% CF). Obviously, if we’re looking for a line to outscore their xG, a line with some of the more talented foreign players seems like the one to do it.
The performance of that line seems to have been mostly driven by Bromé and Stransky:
Bromé: 5.8 GAR (EV: 4.3), per 60: 88th Percentile (EV: 87)
Stransky: 6.8 GAR (EV: 5.3), per 60: 87th Percentile (EV: 89)
Rasmussen: 2.4 GAR (EV: 2.1), per 60: 42th Percentile (EV: 38)
Sounds like we won’t get to check if they can repeat their overperformance of xG, with Bromé reportedly headed back to Sweden.
Prospects?
Now the reason I was able to spend so much digital real estate on the other categories is that there aren’t actually that many prospects to speak of. Obviously Switzerland has prospects [citation needed], they just don’t get to play in the NL.
One of the few u20 players to get some serious ice time was Joshua Fahrni, who didn’t look out of place, being an average fourth liner.
Simon Knak is still a slightly above average NL forward who shoots a lot but it wasn’t really a breakout season you could have hoped for (maybe this year’s playoff heroics are the start of that).
Seems like we’ll have to expand the definition of prospect to also include players over 20. Like Nico Gross. Who may have been most affected by the transfers of Alatalo and Diaz because those were his most frequent D partners last season, which served him very well.
Sandro Schmid got plenty of ice time and had pretty good on-ice results, but it seems more likely that those good results were driven by his linemates, which is why his WAR undershoots his scoring rate somewhat.
Benjamin Baumgartner… hasn’t had the greatest season, slightly below average xG impacts, a bit of bad shooting luck both directions. At this point, taking the the average of the last three seasons seems like the most reasonable take on his level, which would mean he’s roughly a league average forward.
Goalies
While some might say they don’t believe in heaven goaltending is voodoo, I think if we’re just straight up evaluating their impact (with the tools at our disposal), comparing the number of goals we expected the team to concede given the quality of chances to the actual number of goals surrendered pretty clearly defines the impact a goaltender had.3
Definitions:
FA: Fenwick Against, unblocked shot attempts against
FSV%: Fenwick SV%, save percentage on unblocked shot attempts
dSV%: FSV% - xFSV%, actual SV% on unblocked shot attempts - Expected SV% on unblocked shot attempts
GSAx: xGA - GA, expected goals against - actual goals against
And if we go by that logic, Reto Berra had the most impact this season, saving roughly 10 goals more than were expected. Excellent on the PK, especially.
Sandro Aeschlimann has the better performance but played fewer games so Berra had more opportunities to positively impact his team’s outcomes.
RAPM (Regularised Adjusted Plus Minus) attempts to isolate an individuals impact by including teammates, opponents and situational components in the regression. If you think of using xGF% but then attempt to mentally adjust your impression of a player’s numbers by looking at things like his zone starts, opponents and line mates: this is essentially that but with math.
Still confused why Zug didn’t also sign Emil Djuse, just for fun.
And I do pretty much exactly that except I additionally try to include the players on the ice via their impact on the shot quality beyond xG. This would take much longer to properly explain, so I’ll just say: Shooter (Toni Rajala is probably more likely to score than Marco Maurer), Goalie, on ice players (some players may do stuff not included in my basic xG model and those impacts deserve to be included, like closing down shooters better or placing passes better, etc.) are all thrown into a big regression to see who actually has the biggest impact on the difference between xGoals and goals.