I saw on reddit that the The Athletic website had published a list of the top 100 NHL players, and thought I’d review their selections.
The Athletic Website Top 100 NHL Players

Stapled to the Bench’s Top 100 NHL Players

In an act of homage to The Athletic, I’ll present Stapled To The Bench’s top 100 players based on Productivity Rating and Value Rating.
For more information regarding how these ratings are calculated, please refer to previous articles on Introduction to Productivity Rating and Introduction to Value Rating.
Comparing the Top 100 Players
As no two people would agree on the top 100 anything, it cannot be surprising that the two lists above have differences. The Stapled To The Bench list relies solely on statistics and their interpretation, while The Athletic list was selected by extremely experienced hockey journalists.
There is agreement on 75 players, which increases my confidence in the formulas used to calculate Productivity Rating and Value Rating. That the unsentimental calculations have a large degree of agreement with a list selected by experts (who weren’t relying on calculations) shows that the calculations work.
Several of the differences are related to the way Value Rating is calculated. There are players who are on The Athletic website list who either don’t have a Value Rating or whose Value Rating is low due to the rules I use for calculating Value Rating.

Moritz Seider and Trevor Zegras have not played enough games to qualify for a Value Rating.
Seider’s inclusion by The Athletic is logical: he had one hell of a first season. If his second season is close to his first season in terms of productivity, he will be in the top 30 players in the league for Value Rating.
The inclusion of Zegras must have been influenced by his eye-catching plays. His Productivity Rating placed him about 150th in the league. Another season like that and he might crack the top 150 in Value Rating, but he won’t crack the top 100.
Nikita Kucherov and Jack Eichel have missed many games due to injuries, and Value Rating is impacted by missing games: specifically, it is lowered. The logic for that is that there is Value in playing almost every game. Jack Hughes, Evgeni Malkin, Nico Hischier and Teuvo Teravainen also have reduced Value Ratings due to games missed.
Jason Robertson played three games in 2019/2020 with Dallas and 60 in Texas (the Dallas American Hockey League team). Those three games means he played in that season, and as a result it looks like he missed the vast majority of the season, which lowers his Value Rating.
It is unfortunate that happened, but I cannot figure out a good way to allow for a player playing a handful of games in one season. First off: what is a handful? Second off: how should the situation be rectified? Third off: did he miss games due to injury or due to the NHL team losing the phone number of their AHL affiliate? Fourth off: does the third question even matter? Lots to think about, and I don’t want the Value Rating formula to have more rules than letters in the alphabet.
Most of the remaining players that appear solely on The Athletic’s list are in the VR-First5 category. They were “in the right neighbourhood” to have been included in the STTB list, but they were outranked by other VR-First5 players.
In general, The Athletic website favoured:
- Youth. The average age of their top 100 players is 26.7, while the average age of my top 100 is 27.9.
- Forwards. They had 67 forwards and 33 defensemen; a normally distributed top 100 would have 60 forwards and 40 defensemen; the Stapled To The Bench list has 57 forwards and 43 defensemen.
- Wingers. The forwards that The Athletic listed that weren’t on the STTB list averaged 5.2 faceoffs per game played, while the forwards on the STTB list that The Athletic didn’t use averaged 9.8 faceoffs per game played.
- Players on good teams. The forwards that The Athletic listed that weren’t on the STTB list tended to play on teams with positive Corsi, while the forwards on the STTB list that the Athletic didn’t use tended to play on teams with negative Corsi.
- Forwards on the ice for offensive zone faceoffs. The forwards from The Athletic’s list were on the ice for faceoffs in the offensive zone 45% of the time, in the defensive zone 26% of the time. The forwards from the STTB list had a 39%-34% split: they did far more for their teams in defensive situations.
Summary
Lists are fun. A whole slew of lists have been published recently: top young players, top defensemen, top left-handed-shot six-foot-three players and so on.
The act of ranking players requires preparation and organization. You don’t want to put out a list of top players that omits Nikita Kucherov without knowing why he isn’t on the list: it looks like you just forgot about him. I chose to base my top 100 using VR-Score, The Athletic website probably used a number of writers who have detailed hockey knowledge.
I like my list, and I like their list.