The Calder Trophy Voters Are At It Again

The Calder Trophy Finalists were announced on Tuesday this week, and it confirmed what we've all known for months: Connor Bedard and Brock Faber are finalists. A final clash between the 2023 No. 1 overall pick and his highlight-reel offense and the minute-munching rookie defenseman will now finally come to a head, with the New Jersey Devils' Luke Hughes along for the ride.

It's disappointing that we'll have to wait a bit longer to see whether Bedard or Faber will win out as the voted-upon Best Rookie because, like a Presidential campaign, this has already dragged on for months. Bedard was the clear front-runner entering the season, with Faber's candidacy starting to solidify around early December. Once Faber, who out-scored opponents at 5-on-5 by a 33 to 21 margin through the end of 2023, picked up steam, the narrative of Bedard vs. Faber was all but calcified.

Faber's candidacy represented a new way of thinking in the awards voting. The league typically hands most Calder Trophies to the rookie who scores the most points. Therefore, the idea that a defensive defenseman like Faber could make a play for the award seemed like the promise of a better world — one where impact wasn't just measured by goals and assists, a world where voters had their finger on the pulse of analytics.

Now that we know the finalists, we know that's not the case. Are these the three best rookies? If you look at one specific category, yes. You can probably guess which one that is.

Points leaders, 2023-24 rookies:

1. Connor Bedard, 62
T-2. Brock Faber, 47
T-2. Luke Hughes, 47

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean those three weren't the best rookies this season -- the best players in the league tend to score a bunch of points. But what's revealing about these finalists is how difficult it is to find these three players at all (let alone together) when measuring play by any means other than points.

As someone who came into advanced stats via baseball, I'm drawn to Wins Above Replacement models as a guiding light. Not one, but two of these can be found on Evolving-Hockey. Let's start with Standings Points Above Replacement (since standings points, not wins, determine playoff teams). Who are the three best rookies there?

SPAR leaders, 2023-24 rookies:

1. Tyson Foerster, 3.9
2. Luke Evangelista, 3.5
3. Brock Faber, 3.0

Kudos to Faber for making the theoretical finalists circle here. But Bedard and Hughes are nowhere to be found. Bedard provided 2.2 points worth of value to the Chicago Blackhawks, just under the Dallas Stars' Logan Stankoven (2.3 SPAR) through just 24 games. Hughes sits tied at 44th with just 0.4 SPAR, barely above replacement level.

Then we have xStandings Points Above Replacement, Evolving-Hockey also hosts. xSPAR is a SPAR model based heavily on the one Emmanuel Perry developed at Corsica, a now-defunct early advanced stats site. How well do the Calder finalists show there?

xSPAR leaders, 2023-24 rookies:

1. Marco Rossi, 3.8
2. Tyson Foerster, 3.7
3. Connor Zary, 3.2

Hughes shows well this time. Still, he finishes fourth with 2.8 xSPAR. Instead, it is very harsh to both Faber and Bedard. Not only does it rank Faber tied for 42nd among rookies, but it also has him in a distant second as the second-best defenseman on his own team. Props to Declan Chisholm with 1.9 xSPAR in his 31 games this season. Bedard is 55th, exactly at replacement level.

We don't have many more "All-In-One" stats publicly available, but one such effort is Net Rating, developed by Dom Luszczyszyn, a national hockey writer at The Athletic. The idea for Net Rating is simple: How much would putting a player on an otherwise average team impact their full-season goal differential?

Net Rating leaders, 2023-24 rookies:

1. Luke Hughes, +5.1
2. Tyson Foerster, +4.6
3. Brock Faber, +4.2

We're the closest we'll get to seeing our three Calder finalists in one place. Hughes and Faber take the top three spots, but Bedard is in the cellar with a -2.7 Net Rating. Two out of three ain't bad, I guess.

Let's start speaking English, though, and use some stats we can easily understand. How about goal differential? If you're out-scoring your opponents, that has to be good, no? There are 39 rookies with 500-plus 5-on-5 minutes. Let's look at your leaders:

5-on-5 Goal Differential leaders, 2023-24 rookies:

1. Connor Zary, +15
T-3. Martin Pospisil, +15
T-3. Michael Kesselring, +13

Our finalists are nowhere near the top. Faber leads the Calder finalists with a 0 rating, while Hughes (-4) and Bedard (-30) are 26th and 38th, respectively. But it's impossible to have complete control over, say, what shots go in or how the goaltending behind you performs. So, to account for those things, let's look at how these 39 rookies controlled scoring chances with Expected Goal Differential.

5-on-5 Expected Goal Differential, 2023-24 rookies:

1. Luke Evangelista, +10.07
2. Tyson Foerster, +8.24
3. Marco Rossi, +6.35

This is another category where Hughes barely misses the cut (4th at +6.00), and Faber sneaks into the top-10 (9th place, to be precise) with a +3.61 differential. Again, Bedard is trailing the field at 37th, with a -16.55 expected goal differential at 5-on-5. Better than -30, but still way behind the pack.

Even if we want to look at points, looking at raw points can be flawed, as not all players are equal in terms of power play role. Look at Brock Faber, who was looked at as a pure defensive defenseman... until he started running Minnesota's power play. Roles at 5-on-5 can also vary, of course, but the influence of those roles doesn't swing the points race so wildly as it does when you add power-play points to the mix. Here's how the points race looks at 5-on-5 play:

5-on-5 Points leaders, 2023-24 rookies:

1. Connor Bedard, 34
T-2. Marco Rossi, 33
T-3. Matthew Knies, 33

Bedard keeps his stranglehold of being the Points candidate, while Faber is tied with Cooley for sixth (26 points), and Hughes' 16 points settles him into a tie with Leo Carlsson at 22nd place.

It's probably unfair to criticize the PHWA voters without putting myself out there, so here's how my voting would break down if I were given a vote.

Tony Abbott's Not Real Calder Trophy Ballot:

1. Tyson Foerster. The Philadelphia Flyer just checks too many boxes for me to ignore. A budding power forward who scores goals and plays Selke Trophy-caliber defense is such a valuable asset, and earning John Tortorella's trust can't be easy for a 22-year-old. It's a shame he didn't get more attention on a Flyers team that was more competitive than it had any right to be.

2. Marco Rossi. In some ways, Rossi's Masterton Trophy nomination feels like Minnesota's PHWA chapter throwing him a bone after putting their weight behind the Faber campaign. But Rossi was a deserving candidate in his own right, and I'd argue, more so than Faber. His two-way game stood out all season, positively impacting both goals and scoring chances. He also added 21 goals, showing he had that dog in him. 

3. Logan Stankoven. Why should a rookie have to play most of the season to get any consideration for the Calder? The award is given to "the player selected as the most proficient in his first year of competition in the National Hockey League." What in that definition excludes Stankoven? In only 24 games, Stankoven was tied for sixth in SPAR (2.3) and tied for 13th in xSPAR (1.3). He scored six goals and 14 points in just 352 minutes, a scoring rate that trails only Bedard in all situations. His only flaw is that the Dallas Stars didn't call him up earlier, and I'm not holding that against him.

Of the three candidates we have, Faber is the obvious choice if we look at the numbers. However, that same deep dive would likely fail to get all three members in the finalists, and perhaps even any of them. But that's what the voters want, clearly.

They've chosen to emphasize points and seemingly little else based on our finalist pool. Whatever protestations certain blocks of voters will have against Bedard's almost inevitable raising of the Calder will be betrayed by this fact. When points are all that matter to the voters, the voters get the awards winners they deserve.