Welcome back to another week of Analytics Advantage! This week we are going to be covering 5-year takeaway graphs, so just as the previous two installments, we are going to be looking at more graphs than anything. As always, let's make sound decisions and use all our available context and information to help aid in the understanding and usage of any graph, and it's especially important in these team-based/skill-based stats, as takeaways are a product of team systems and player execution.

What is a Takeaway?

As simple as it gets, it is the statistic that measures how many times a player has taken away pucks – no extra calculations, just a plain old counting stat. This means that there is a direct relationship with giveaways as well, so every takeaway equals one giveaway for the player who lost possession. Both are important statistics if you want to see how a team is performing possession-wise.

Why Analyze Takeaways?

Analyzing takeaways can reveal a lot about a player’s defensive prowess and potential impact on the game. If a player’s takeaways are increasing, it means they are improving in their ability to disrupt the opposition and create opportunities for their team, which is a good sign for their future performance. On the flip side, if their takeaways are decreasing, it might indicate they are struggling defensively or facing tougher competition.

Takeaways are great for spotting players who are making a big impact on the game, even if they're not scoring a lot of goals. While takeaways show how well a player is doing in terms of disrupting the opposition and creating opportunities, it doesn't tell you everything about the quality of their defensive play or individual contributions. So, use takeaways as part of a broader analysis to make the best fantasy hockey decisions.

Data Sources

The data for this analysis was sourced from player statistics spanning the 2019-2024 NHL campaigns, obtained from NaturalStatTrick.

Data Processing

Player statistics from the 2019-2024 campaigns were combined into a single dataset, then filtered for players who played at least ten games in each year to ensure a significant amount of playing time.

Selected Players

This week I elected to show the top five forwards and defensemen who have accumulated the most takeaways over the past five seasons. The league mean takeaways are around 22 per year, a dip is seen during the COVID season. These graphs are to show the peak of takeaway production on both ends of play, with some interesting results.

Top five defensemen by takeaways over the last five seasons:

Jaccob Slavin– 338 Total

Adam Fox – 308 Total

Erik Karlsson – 274 Total

Alex Pietrangelo – 265 Total

Brent Burns – 243 Total

Top five forwards by takeaways over the last five seasons:

Auston Matthews – 370 Total

Leon Draisaitl  –  349 Total

Connor McDavid – 312 Total

Evgeni Malkin – 309 Total

Mark Stone – 301 Total

Thank you for reading and have a great rest of your day! Twitter/X – @DH_staspup for any questions, corrections, or comments. Please feel free to ask for any player’s graph, I can post it or DM.