Guest Post by MadJoy
Statistics aren’t perfect. Whenever you try to measure something concretely, you’re going to miss some of the bigger picture. But we use them anyway, because when something is measured concretely, it’s at least a lot easier to make comparisons across units (in this case, players) using that common metric.
So I decided to play around with some of the data available from the 2013/2014 season. In this post, my intention is to summarize “Minutes per goal” and “Minutes per goal or assist” for all West Ham players in one place. These stats alone are of course not a fair summary of an offensive player’s worth – perhaps great crosses that don’t turn into assists should still be counted in the crosser’s favoUr and perhaps some goals scored were more luck than skill – but offensively speaking, goals are the bottom line, and so these simple metrics are good to have. Compared to looking only at total goals/assists over the season, these statistics also compensate for the fact that some players are played disproportionately often even when not in form, therefore scoring more goals just because they’re playing more. Many (myself included) have complained that, while true, it is at least misleading to call Kevin Nolan our top goalscorer, because he started games more consistently than any individual in our rapidly rotating arsenal of strikers.
First I grabbed the total minutes played for each player (data obtained from Squawka. Mark Noble deserves special mention here for playing an incredible 3335 minutes – an average of 88 minutes per game across the ENTIRE SEASON. Seriously. Damn, Mark Noble! That alone makes him worthy of his Hammer of the Year title. That’s also 25% more minutes than our #2 most frequent player, Kevin Nolan, who ended up with 2677 minutes played. (Irrelevant sidenote: I was somewhat surprised to see that our #3 most frequent player was Guy Demel with 2627 minutes; followed by #4 James Tomkins with 2588; #5 Stewart Downing with 2502; and #6 Mo Diame with 2476. Everyone else was under 2000 minutes).
Then I grabbed goal and assist counts from "WhoScorehttp://www.whoscored.com to calculate the minutes per goal/assist. Here’s the full resulting table:
As you can see, Vaz Te and Carlton Cole actually top the list (for both minutes per goal and minutes per goals or assist). These stats for Vaz Te may not even reflect his true success, because it includes only Premier League games and excludes cup games. If you include his performances (an additional 189 minutes) against Cheltenham and Cardiff in the Capital One Cup where he scored a goal each, he actually improves to 112 minutes per goal.
Despite his injuries, Andy Carroll wound up getting a decent number of minutes in the end – more than Carlton Cole, but with no more to show for it. Maiga also doesn’t perform well under this statistic, suggesting (as we all witnessed) that he did not fit in well with our system at the club last year.
Kevin Nolan comes in at a respectable #4. Considering he is an attacking midfielder, 223 minutes per goal or assist is perfectly reasonable. Maybe it’s not quite worthy of an automatic start, but it’s better than most at the club, and I’ll admit that with my faulty pre-conceived notions I had assumed it would be worse than that. In fact, I’m surprised to see his per-minute stats look slightly better than Morrison’s, even though he played more than twice as much. Perhaps we the fans ought not to be knocking Sam so much for his decision to play Nolan as much as we seem to.
For comparison’s sake, here are the comparable stats for a few familiar names at other clubs:
Okay, so our squad doesn’t have a Luis Suarez, but considering Suarez’s valuation is higher than our entire squad combined, that’s not shocking. But our top players are holding their own. And even Maiga compares favorably to poor Jozy Altidore at Sunderland (as a US fan, I wanted so much for him to be successful, but you can’t always get what you want…)
Connor Wickham doesn’t come across looking like he will be a huge improvement over Carlton Cole or Vaz Te. But that’s where the extra factors beyond the statistics come in. Maybe Connor Wickham should get extra credit because he’s young and has more long-term potential. Or maybe Carlton Cole should get extra credit because he’s been a dedicated servant to the club for so many years. Hopefully these stats are the beginning and not the end of the conversation: stats don’t speak for themselves, so I hope they can provide supporting evidence in future discussions.