PCL Top Performers

We are 2/3 of the way through the season, and I took a hard look at the top performers in the league, thinking about which individual players were the most valuable so far this season.

The first stat that one could look at would either be points scored or performance rating. One tells you how much total one player has contributed to the team's score, the other gives a measure of how well they have played overall, accounting for strength of opposition, and eliminating frequency of play as a factor.

If you look at most points scored, you are looking squarely at Fabiano Caruana, with a two point lead over Daniel Naroditsky. But while amassing all those points, Fabiano has actually performed a bit below his rating, while some have performed above their ratings over fewer games. Looking at the second stat, performance rating, the league leader would be Anish Giri with 2839. However, with only 7 games played, it's hard to imagine that he has contributed the most of any player in the league this season.

So I wanted to look at a bunch of factors: points scored, performance rating, performance rating differential, how irreplaceable the player is, and more. I made a lot of errors along the way and there is a lot of guesswork, so I'll hone and improve my calculations. But this much can be said for them: they do get the #1 MVP right, undoubtedly. Every other result of turning these numbers around may be silly, but I think if you asked 32 PCL managers which one player they would want to move to their city and play as a local for their team, you'd get about 25 choosing Nika Volkov of the Tbilisi Gentlemen. (The Gentlemen themselves would choose Nakamura or Duda).

A quick word on what each category in my tables means, though I won't take the time to justify every decision I made. Perf Differential is just the player's performance rating minus the official rating the league counts towards the team's weekly 2500 rating cap. v #5 is a measure of how much better this player's Perf Differential is than the #5 player in their rating band. Perf Diff 27 attempts to adjust Perf Differential to recognize that it is far more valuable to have a 2500 who plays at 2750 than a 2200 who plays at 2450. It does so by weighing performance points over 2700 double, over 2650 *1.5, and all the rest normal. Probably over 2500 should be multipled by 1.25 or so, bc it is definitely more valuable than performances under 2500. By how much these should be weighted I don't know, but with my current numbers, several low-rated players with differentials of +200-300 show up near the top, whereas I think it is actually more important to have 2600 and 2700 performances on the team. W/ Frequency finally brings in the points scores/games played aspect, increasing the value of a player based on how many games they have played. Here I chose 4 per game, and the right number might be 3 or 5, or some more complicated formula altogether.

On to best of the best!

1st Category: Highest performers, no rating cap:

2nd Category: Highest performers, u2650 official rating:

3rd Catgory: Highest performers, u2550 official rating:

4th Category: Highest performers, u2450 official rating:

5th Category: Highest performers, u2350 official rating:

6th Category: Highest performers, u2250 official rating:

Overall Most Valuable Players in the League

I do think that if you think about other factors, Nika is a deserving MVP if the season ended now. He is irreplaceable (only one other player u2250, Grant Xu has a comparable performance, but he's played twice as many games and costs his team 100 less points in rating cap), and specifically on his team, they don't even have a single legal lineup without him playing! On top of that, his team is #1 in the league without having a single 2700 player or player performing over 2700. Jobava and Giga have played well, but Nika has contributed a huge amount to his team's success, and almost any other team that had him would instantly become the best team in the league.

I think Shant Sargsyan also deserves a spot around #2, with his consistent 2700+ performances from board 3 putting his Armenia Eagles at the #2 spot in the league right behind the Gentlemen.

On the other hand, I think these numbers have overvalued the 2300 level performances of Manu David and Vinesh Ravuri. 2300 level performances from 2000 rated players are not quite enough to push a team to the top without some 2600+ players on boards 1-3 delivering major points. For that reason, I think my current system has undervalued Nakamura and Duda who have the two strongest performances in the league. I do think Grigoriants and Dobrov have scored enough points that they belong in the top 10 for sure. If, as a manager, I had to pick someone to join my team, and Nika Volkov were already taken, I would hesitate between Nakamura and Shant Sargsyan. Nakamura has been willing to play at 4 in the morning from tournaments, which may cost him a few points of performance rating compared to Duda who has prioritized his classical tournaments, but means that the Sluggers can always count on him to power them. To me that would be a tiebreaking factor in favor of Naka over Duda.

Grabinski popping up-- no offense to him, he has been valuable-- shows an error in the math as well, because 3 points just are not worth that much in the league; it hardly matters if the performance was 2220 or 2300 at that point. The teams who are at the top of the standings have been powered by Sergei Azarov's 19.5 points, Xiong and Conrad Holt's 18.5 points, etc. (with the exception of the Pandas who have 6 different super-GMs showing up for ~10 games each, and winning regardless of who plays which week). So when I revisit this work, I will look at why Iturrizaga and Xiong don't show up on the current top 10 list.

What do you think? If you put yourself in a manager's shoes, which one player would you most want? What aspects did I not look at? How should I weight the value of higher performances v lower ones?