2023 Player Ratings: A primer before the voting begins

After a bit of a delay, it’s time to get to everyone’s favorite part of the offseason: arguing about the previous season’s performances!

Yes, it’s player ratings season once again, a time for all of us to be very judgmental about the professional athletes/coaches we’ve dedicated so much time to following.

(More accurately, it’s a chance to use Google Forms to voice your displeasure with how the team’s season ended, right? TWOS ACROSS THE BOARD.)

I feel like we’re getting a later start than usual this year, and as I think I mentioned the other day, part of that is general “well that sucked” malaise and part of it is just life in general.

But here we are now, a chance to rate the players and management, while also giving us something to talk about for a few weeks.

This year’s process: More of the same

If you’ve been around these parts for a year or two, you’re already familiar with the process.

Rather than us know-it-all bloggers deciding what rating each individual gets, we open it up to voting: readers have one set of ratings, writers have another.

That leaves us with one average rating per individual from our loyal, intelligent readers, and one from our writers.

We started this a couple of years ago as a way to see who had the biggest differences, as there were some players loved by our writers and derided by our readers, and vice versa.

Anyways, if nothing else, it’s a nice way of examining different perspectives.

As a reminder, you’ll be rating the parties involved on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being the worst and 10 being the best. We’re taking a look at season-long performance, so playoffs too.

The scale we’ve tried to use in the past is 8-10 is exceptional, 6-7 is above average, 4-5 is kind of a “meets expectations,” and 1-3 is bad.

After the ratings are done, we’ll do one review per person and cover most of the summer with those.

The only real change from recent years involves who we’re covering: we went with guys who were on the team at season’s end, instead of the past approach of “everyone who was on the roster.”

As a result, we won’t do ratings and posts for fringe guys, cup-of-coffee AHLers, etc. Ultimately, there really wasn’t enough to go on and no one really paid much attention.

Rolling them out

As of today, we plan to roll out one set of rating forms per day this week, beginning tomorrow.

That will carry us through Friday, with separate rating forms for coach/management, goalies, defensemen, and forwards.

(We found that breaking them up like this made it more palatable for voters, instead of forcing yourself to scroll through 30+ people.)

After that, we’ll need a week or two to start getting the posts together, then we’ll publish one a day until we run out.

If there’s anything you’d like to change about the system, now’s your chance to sound off! It’s not too late for us to pull a switch or two.

As always, thanks for engaging — last year, we had something like 500 reader votes on nearly all of the players, which is a great sample size.