2021 Player Ratings: Wrapping up the summer series

With the publishing of Kevan Miller’s rating yesterday, we have officially reached the end of the summer player rating series!

What a long, strange journey at has been — I guess. It actually was pretty normal, I think. But “what a normal journey it has been” just doesn’t carry the same weight.

Anyways, this series started back in late July and has carried us all the way to the precipice of a new season, so I guess it did its job.

Considering we went with a new format this season, I thought it made sense to wrap things up with an overview post, taking a look back at what we found and a deeper look at some numbers.

SCOC highest overall rating: 9.8

Brad Marchand and Patrice Bergeron each took home near-perfect scores from our staff.

What can we say? We’re admirers of the first line.

Reader highest overall rating: 9.8

That honor went to Marchand as well, though you fine folks didn’t appear to hold Bergeron is quite as high esteem (I am shaken by this fact).

SCOC lowest rating: 3.6

This not-so-high honor went to Chris Wagner, who finished 0.2 points lower than fourth-line pal Sean Kuraly.

Reader lowest rating: 2.8

The readers gave this rating to short-lived Bruin Ondrej Kase.

Biggest disagreement (forwards): 1.2 points

Us bloggers and you fine readers had a pretty sizable disagreement about...Cameron Hughes? Of all people?

We gave him a rating of 5, which was meant to signify “yeah, he was here, and he was fine.” The readers gave Hughes a slightly subpar rating of 3.8.

If you take out Hughes as an anomaly due to being a borderline “not enough data” player, the next biggest gap was Curtis Lazar — we put him at 7.4, while readers put him at 6.4.

Biggest disagreement (defensemen): 1.8 points

This one was slightly less surprising, as it involved a player that we often didn’t see eye-to-eye on: Kevan Miller.

Readers put Miller at 6.8, while we had him at 5.

Again, not a massive discrepancy: the different between “fine” and “a little better than fine.”

The “Samesies” Award

Both SCOC and the readers gave the same rating to two players: Marchand (9.8) and Trent Frederic (6).

Overall (and this isn’t super scientific, so don’t put too much stock into it) the average “difference” in rating was the same for both defensemen/goalies and forwards: 0.5.

By that, I mean that the reader ratings and the SCOC ratings averaged a difference of just half a point across the series (excluding the incompletes).

In some cases, ours were higher; in other cases, yours were higher.

But ultimately, we were pretty close.

I guess we’re all pretty smart! Or maybe we all know nothing. Either way, we’re in this together.

As a way of wrapping things up, I extend a “thanks” to all of you who participated in this series.

We ended up having more than 400 people participate in the ratings, a pretty impressive snapshot of Bruins fandom.

Plus, it gave us hockey to talk about and posts to comment on from late July through mid-September.

Until next year!