We have spent some time looking at power-play IPP before (and marveling at the accomplishments of one Evgeni Malkin), but the stat that shows up in a player's profile on Frozen Tools is a combined IPP. This week we are looking at that IPP number, checking in on a couple of player's extraordinary results and running a couple of comparisons.

To start of course we need to run a report that gives us the data we are looking for. Frozen Tool's Advanced Stats report does just that. If we set the time frame for the 2019-20 season, export and sort by points per 60 here is a glimpse of what we get.

I actually left off the IPP columns because the table was quite large and hard to read, but we will get to those in a moment. I just wanted to point out that this report contains a number of useful categories like PTS/60, %PP, and 5-on-5 S%, which we have referenced in other articles in this column.

Birdwalk aside, IPP. With a little re-ordering for convenience we can take a look at IPP by type for each player.

I filtered out players who had played less than 35 games and had less than 45 points. If I did not we would be spending a lot of time looking at players with sky-high IPPs because they don't have a lot of points to their name.

Now seems like a good time to pause and remind everyone what IPP is. IPP stands for Individual Points Percentage. It measures how frequently a player has pointed on a goal that is scored while they are on the ice. In the chart above Nikolaj Ehlers leads this pack and has recorded a point on 90.6 percent of the goals scored while he is on the ice. Does that seem like a lot? Well, it totally is. A good top line player is usually closer to 75-ish in their IPP over the course of a season. That being said we try and compare a player's current IPP to their historical IPP since all players (whether because of their skill or deployment) tend to fluctuate around a different percentage (like how every player has a different shooting percentage). Ehlers for example has a range of 70.6 to 78.7 in this last three years (a 74.3 percent average). That puts his 2019-20 performance in context. He has improved more than 16% over his three-year average. It also indicates that his 19-20 number might be a bit inflated (i.e. lucky), and that if he were to get in on goals at the same rate as usual he would see a drop in his overall scoring pace.

We have two additional columns in the table above, even-strength IPP, and power-play IPP. These are pretty self-explanatory. It is nice to see how players are performing in each of these situations as it can provide some additional context to their current percentages (for more on PP IPP check out this post). If we look at Ehlers again we can see that he is definitely the most productive at even strength. Sidney Crosby, and Timo Meier are the only ones who are close. His power-play IPP is fairly low though, whereas someone like Malkin is crushing it on the power play but being slightly less effective than some on this list at even strength.

Another side note here: take a look at Timo Meier. He has a great even strength IPP, but his power-play IPP is down at 60 percent. That is the lowest power-play IPP until we get down to Tanner Pearson who's overall IPP is ten points lower than Meier's. Meier definitely struggled in 19-20 and was not able to break out as many hoped and predicted. One possible reason? That IPP.

I also wanted to highlight a number of players who saw pretty big differences in the IPP between the last two seasons. The table below shows players whose IPP has decreased fairly dramatically between the last two seasons.

For this list we are looking to see if there is rebound potential. Dylan Larkin is no surprise here as he had a relatively disappointing season. Based on his personal history and where he is in his career Larkin could see a bounce back. David Perron is an interesting case. He has generally had a good season, but has the lowest IPP of the last three seasons. Unfortunately, those IPPs were some of the highest of his career. It seems fairly likely that something like his current IPP is a bit more likely than a bounce back.

This next table is the opposite – players who saw the largest improvements from 18-19 to 19-20. Like with the table above we want to know if there was any change that makes this new IPP more sustainable.

John Carlson's number is a bit surprising here. Sure. he leads the league, but given his point pace I would have expected his IPP to be even higher in 19-20. J.T. Miller and Tony DeAngelo are also interesting notes on this list. Both saw relatively dramatic changes in deployment in 19-20 so we might want to wait another year or so before calling their performance unsustainable.

That is all for this week. Thanks for reading.

Stay safe out there.

Want more tool talk? Check out these recent Frozen Tool Forensics Posts.

Frozen Tool Forensics: I'm Not Throwing Away My Shot

Frozen Tools Forensics: How predictable are game-winning goals?