Every team is looking for the best Power Forwards, either by drafting them or acquiring them. I've generally objected to the way that draft prospects are ranked, as too much emphasis is placed solely on points. My definition of a Power Forward is a combination of a point producer and a player who is really difficult to play against (very physical). So I decided to quit whining to myself about that and quantify that into a statistic that I find revealing.

Power Forward Index (PFI) compares a player's Points per Game (PPG), combined with a player's Hits per Game (HPG). At first just multiplying one factor with the other overemphasized the hitting and made stars out of the Chris Neils. So after playing around with this for weeks, I finally added the HPG to ten times the PPG in order to get a nice spread in the PFI.

The formula became PFI =  (PPG * 10) + (HPG*1.5).

I included most of the Sens and some other good NHL players into the mix and the spreadsheet I came up with is below.

via img21.imageshack.us

Note that Spezza gets his ranking almost solely from his PPG, whereas Toews, Kopitar and Kesler who have similar point production are considered better Power Forwards (according to this stat) because they are more physical. Greening gets his ranking from his PPG and his HPG totals combined.

Perhaps there is an assumption made here that the more physical players do better one-on-one in coming away with the puck. In any case I consider them to be more valuable if they can stay healthy through all of the physical play.

Once I have a well developed Draft Prospect List, later on, I'll plug their stats into the spreadsheet and see how it turns out.

This stat seems to give a pretty good indication of how good a Power Forward is. I look forwad to testing it on how well it predicts who will be the best Power Forward.

I am open to suggestions on how to make this stat more powerful. If you want to add other stats into the formula mix, they need to be stats that are readily available.

As an aside, I do have some knowledge on how to do Excel Spreadsheet Pivot Tables.