How much more valuable are goals compared to assists?

[GOilers88]

You're not seeing anyone score 50/60 goals in a season without playing with gifted playmakers to generate offense.

Discussions like this seem to be nothing more than an attempt to devalue some players to prop up others that play on teams people like.

 

[RavenGuard]

Depends.

Player A is outside the crease and Player B feeds a slick pass to him that redirects off his stick. Which is more valuable? The pass that had to go throw 6 legs and hit the tape just right or the goal that was scored by a dude just standing there?

Dman steals the puck and feeds a sick 40 foot pass right on the tape to a winger at full speed, the winger then passes over to Player C who puts it past the goalie. In that scenario both assists and the goal are all equal IMO.

You could only put a value on them if you evaluated every single goal scored.

Another example.....
MCdavid steals the puck inside his blue line, avoids the forechecker, shrugs off the Player coming behind him, dips around the dman, passes the puck through the other dman to Yamo who wrists a shot into a wide open net.

What's more valuable? The goal or the assist? I'd say that the level of effort would make the assist worth more since very few Player make that play while ¾ of the league would bury the pass

 

[Dekes For Days]

It can vary depending on the play in question, but on average over a significant sample, G = 1A >> 2A.

 

[Machinehead]

I think assists and especially secondary assists are over-hated.

Sometimes guys drive play and don't get points at all. "You touched it," which is literally all points mean, is a bit arbitrary.

Ultimately, I think the points system is fine and you just know that it's something you have to take with context. I just feel there's a reflex these days to write off second assists.

There's a tendency to see goals as more definitive and I don't know if I agree with that.

Look at Kreider for example. Do I think he's a 50-goal scorer? No. At the same time, is anybody but Mike Bossy, Alex Ovechkin, maybe Auston Matthews a "50-goal scorer" in the sense that they're going to sustain 50 goals for multiple years? Also no. All variance in production is, to an an extent, luck.

Meanwhile, when I look at a ten-year sample of how consistently well the Rangers play offense when Kreider is on the ice, and consider that he's fully healthy for maybe the first season in his career and certainly for awhile, and look at the unprecedented (by his and the Rangers' standards) talent he's surrounded by, is it the most shocking thing to ever happen that he scored 50? Probably not.

At the same time, does he shoot 20% next year? Also probably not.

Even goals are something you have to take with a lot of context.

 

[Hockey4Lyfe]

Give me the dude that has 100 secondary assists over the guys that scored 99 goals every time. All other things being equal.

To acquire a point, a goal had to be scored. Whether it’s a secondary assist or a goal, I really don’t care how that player contributes.

 

[Caps8112]

this is a very simple and yet extremely complicated topic. Seen a few times already, " goals can happen without assists but assists cannot happen without goals", or "goals are the most important part of the game" or "Mcdavid makes his linemates better by not Shooting". imo goals are extremely more difficult to score then it is to make a play. Does it apply always? no of course not. But another aspect of this is different levels of players. Crosby made a lot of his wingers have career years by being absolutely amazing at playmaking. That said 2007-2009 Ovi was scoring a bazillion goals even if a homeless guy on the street was passing to him. Backstrom has generally been considered one of the better playmakers of the last 10-15 years but if he only played with Mojo and say another playmaker type over that span, you can cut his points in half. Just getting to an open space on the ice for a shot you pray goes near the net is an actual talent that gets no credit what so ever on these boards. Players accumulating 3-4 shots a game have done an amazing thing even if they do not score. So yes a great center can elevate a 10-15 goal guy to a 20-25 goal guy but thats not common and Cheechoo/ Thornton are the great outlier.

Whats better tho.

50 goals, 20 assists
20 goals, 50 assists

The guy scoring 50 is more rare.

 

[AlanHUK]

you could argue an unassisted goal in a vacuum has more value than an assist, but even then you can get an unassisted goal for someone putting the puck in their own net

 

[Sasha Orlov]

Not enough for Matthews to be better than McDavid or Draisaitl (that’s obv the point of this thread)

 

[syz]

Much like goals, not all assists are created equally. Sometimes somebody gets an assist because the puck hit them in the ass and bounced to someone else, but sometimes the puck only ends up in the net because of a 3rd or 4th assist that lead to the play to begin with.

 

[Rengorlex]

It depends on so many factors. Secondary assists definitely have more variance and can be accumulated more easily through puck touches that are replaceable, especially on the powerplay. Then there are God level playdrivers like McDavid who will get a ton of secondary assists through clearly driving the play and generating those goals through a volume of zone entries, shot assists et cetera.

Valuating the worth of points by only looking at video of the goal and assessing individual credit based on that can be faulty because it only has the succesful play. If a playdriver generates ten chances for the shooter, or defenceman gives you ten passes off the rush, we'll never see the times the players set up failed, we'll only see that one time when he beats the defenceman and makes a highlight goal or assist.

There's a synergy between pairing an elite shooter with an elite playmaker and determining the value is difficult and may have more to do with how rare these abilities are. Looking at large timeframe trends on impact on even strength goal differential, it's the playdriving beasts like Crosby, Bergeron and McDavid who have the best impact on their teams goal differential. Not usually the Stamkos or Ovechkin (post 2010) type. Sniping is very valuable, but gimme the overall package over goals any day of the week.

 

[HugeInTheShire]

They are both worth exactly 1 point

 

[pi314]

This just isn't true. Hockey's one of the few sports that even bothers tracking assists. In football played with ball, no one cares about "assists". Only goals are tracked.

All in all, only goals are in the goal-scorer's hands. Assists aren't in the passer's hands, they're completely reliant on the goal-scorer. Tracking assists isn't very useful for assessing players, rather the scoring chances they generate should be tracked - the amount of these that become goals is out of the passer's hands. But if we really want to give value to an assist, something like 0.5 * goal for primary and 0.25 * goal for secondary assists seems approximately right.

When I was little and just got started with watching hockey I always wondered why they track assists.

Are you sure you've watched a hockey game before?

Every night there is a goal caused by a great pass.

Hockey plays are bang-bang.

You very rarely see a goal scorer go end to end and create a goal all by themselves. It happens, but rare.

Passes are generally what make hockey goals.

 

[J bo Jeans]

Primary assists most of the time are just as valuable. Secondary assists usually aren't as valuable but a certain portion of secondary assists are.

The best players in history for the most part weren't the top goal scorers each season but they created the most chances for their teams.

 

[Midnight Judges]

There’s no possible way to figure out a proper value. None.

Every goal is different. Some goals happen where the player didn’t even know the scores because the puck hit off his stick accidentally, or went off his ass. Some secondary assists come from an incredible defensive play and effort and a tic tac toe where everyone was involved.

Sure I’m theory secondary assists in theory may hold less value, but you really have no idea unless you went through every single point a player had in a season.

Seems pretty dumb to devalue anything just based on “you can score without an assist”.

Is it not equally dumb to assume the values are precisely the same?

 

[Hockey4Lyfe]

They are both worth exactly 1 point

Exactly. At the end of the day, all things being equal, the person who acquired more points is of greater importance to his team.

Whether it’s 100 secondary assists or not. Anything below that total is a net negative.

 

[AD1066]

"Value" is not so simple to calculate. But in terms of difficulty, I think it's universally recognized that goals are less abundant and more difficult to compile. There are 1.66 assists on average for every goal.

There has been 26 individual 50-goal seasons since the 2004 lockout*. Just comparing scarcity, there has been 30 individual seasons of 68+ assists in that same timeframe. So I'd consider a 50 goal season to be roughly as difficult to achieve as 68-70 assists.

And a 60 goal season is about as rare as 87+ assists in that same timeframe.

*Ovi accounts for 35% of them.

 

[TGWL]

Second assists devalue assists.

Do they though? How often do we see the secondary assist being the assist that broke the play out on the rush to open a 2-1, or a turnover on the boards that lead to a point blank shot, where another player got the rebound? You might be right but it's clearly just a guess and I don't think we can say for sure that second assist devalue assist.

 

[Midnight Judges]

Exactly. At the end of the day, all things being equal, the person who acquired more points is of greater importance to his team.

Whether it’s 100 secondary assists or not. Anything below that total is a net negative.

You are overrating the precision of how points are awarded:

Some NHL Stars Get More Assists At Home Than They Deserve

Pittsburgh Penguins center Sidney Crosby is one of the most talented players in the National Hockey League. But sometimes, he also gets lucky. This clip comes f…

fivethirtyeight.com

 

[nbwingsfan]

Is it not equally dumb to assume the values are precisely the same?

When there is no possible way to judge the difference between then without watching every single goal scored, what else are you supposed to do?

 

[Cotton]

Being as goals are the point of the game they have far more value, but as someone pointed out on the first page, you really need to look at it case by case.

 

[boredmale]

A Goal is a goal but in the case of assist you can argue some are almost worthless, while others have huge value(ie person passes off to Player B who skates up the ice deeks out the defense and passes it to another player who scores on an empty net, that first assist is worthless, the Player B one you can argue is worth more then the goal)

 

[pi314]

You're not seeing anyone score 50/60 goals in a season without playing with gifted playmakers to generate offense.

Discussions like this seem to be nothing more than an attempt to devalue some players to prop up others that play on teams people like.

When people argue this, there is a 99% chance they are fans of Ovechkin or Matthews.

It’s very transparent.

 

[Midnight Judges]

When there is no possible way to judge the difference between then without watching every single goal scored, what else are you supposed to do?

I'm just pointing out that the argument that states...

"We can't possibly know the real values...therefore we must assume X, Y, and Z, must be the real values."

...makes no sense.

If an outcome is inevitable, why not make it the most approximately correct answer? What is so magical about 1, 1, and 1, that absolves it of logic?

 

[Suntouchable13]

Being as goals are the point of the game they have far more value, but as someone pointed out on the first page, you really need to look at it case by case.

When Cheechoo scored 56 goals that one season, nobody would argue that he was more valuable than Joe Thornton.

 

[DingerMcSlapshot]

3x secondary assist and 2x primary assist.... on average imho. Assists are just passes unless someone hammers it home. Plus 10 to 15 percent of assists, by definition/rules aren't assists. Tons of free assists given out.