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A crude attempt to quantify the effect of Ryan Reaves 'firing up the boys'
The value of Ryan Reaves has been the subject of much debate in recent weeks, and it's worth examining if his fighting has a galvanizing effect on his teammates.
From the moment Ryan Reaves signed with the Toronto Maple Leafs it was inevitable that he'd become a significant source of discourse within the team's fanbase.
Through no fault of his own, the 36-year-old invites philosophical discussions about what it takes to win hockey games and how to conceptualize value that's hard to pin down in a precise way.
Some see him as a guy who injects needed toughness into a Maple Leafs team that has continually disappointed in the playoffs. Others perceive him as a waste of a roster spot who soaks up cap space that could be better used on a more versatile player able to occasionally chip in on offence and perhaps kill penalties.
The difficulty with any debate around Reaves — or players of his type who are "tone-setters" that lack utility outside of their physicality — is they tend to be spoken about in two difficult languages simultaneously.
If you're pro-Reaves, the toughness, locker-room presence and willingness to fight seem like obvious assets, but they are undoubtedly subjective. If you're anti-Reaves, your arguments are likely to be rooted in possession metrics and data about his lack of offensive impact.
A person armed with statistics is unlikely to heed an argument centred around something they see as unprovable. By the same token, someone who believes that players like Reaves serve a vital purpose probably won't be moved by his lack of tangible production — particularly considering he sees the ice for less than 10 minutes a game.
In order to help bridge the gap between these sides, we've decided to try putting some numbers to the effect Reaves has on his teammates — specifically via his signature skill of fighting.
Since dropping the mitts is meant to energize your team, we thought it would be worth exploring whether the squads Reaves has played for have performed well in the immediate aftermath of his tilts.
Method
Using hockeyfights.com we found the moment of the 83 regular-season fights of the bruiser's career, and looked at the play-by-play logs of the 10 minutes following those bouts.
It's difficult to know how long a fight is supposed to fire up a team, but half a period felt like a fair compromise between keeping things relatively narrow and still gathering a solid quantity of data.
With that play-by-play information, we tallied up how the veteran's teams have fared by both shots and goals after his 83 fights.
That's not precisely 830 minutes of hockey because some of the fights came with less than 10 minutes remaining in games — but that situation was fairly rare. Many of these battles happened in the first period in true tone-setting fashion.
Results
After Reaves has fought, his teams have done undeniably well.
Following his fights his squads have outshot opponents 410 to 361 and outscored them 46 to 25.
There are a few mitigating factors to consider with that. The first is that every Reaves fight contains another combatant who is theoretically also firing up his team. While Reaves tends to take care of business with his fists, those numbers include occasions when the opposing squad might've gotten more of a boost from the battle than his own.
It's also noteworthy that Reaves has generally played for good teams. For instance, in his first seven NHL seasons he played for a St. Louis Blues club that ranked fourth in the NHL in points during that timeframe (682). Immediately after his fights, St. Louis outshot its opponents 231-226, good for a 50.5% shot share, but over the course of those seasons the team had a 50.3% shot share.
Reaves also played for the Vegas Golden Knights between 2018-19 and 2020-21 at a time when they ranked 10th in the NHL in points and outshot opponents by an average of 34.1 to 29.1 each night.
The shot totals after all of the Reaves fights have his teams getting 53.2% of the attempts on net, which is a strong number — but not an overwhelming one considering the quality of the clubs he's played for. The goals make a much better case for the enforcer, but they come from a smaller sample.
Conclusion
Like all things Reaves, there's plenty up for interpretation here.
There is no way to measure the precise value of the winger energizing his teammates because we don't have a counterfactual if he hadn't fought.
Digging through his fights you can find instances where his pugilism came at a moment when the momentum in a game seemed to shift. For example, on Oct. 6, 2018, his Golden Knights were trailing the Minnesota Wild 1-0 with 6:23 left in the third when Reaves got in a fight with Marcus Foligno.
For the rest of the period the Golden Knights perked up, outshooting Minnesota 6-0 and scoring the tying goal before winning in a shootout.
On the flip side, later that season his team had a comfortable 3-0 lead against the New York Rangers early in the third period when he dominated Adam McQuaid in heavyweight matchup.
Despite the unimpeachable performance by Reaves in that battle, the Rangers immediately turned it on afterwards, outshooting Vegas 8-3 and scoring a goal to get back into the game.
The goal differential after the 36-year-old fights provides some evidence that he gets his teammates fired up, but it's tough to explain why his squads would shoot 11.2% while opponents shoot just 6.9%.
It's possible that his galvanizing effect inspires fellow skaters to create better chances — and goalies to greatness — but small-sample-size noise is probably a better explanation.
The Maple Leafs clearly believe there is value Reaves brings that's impossible to neatly distill into statistics. If they didn't they wouldn't have offered a 36-year-old who's never topped nine goals or 20 points a three-year contract.
In that sense, trying to put some numbers to the way he affects his teammates was likely a fool's errand from the beginning. There is a reason the words "crude attempt" appear in this headline.
That said, if you believe that Reaves dropping his gloves helps boost the Maple Leafs' play, there is at least some evidence for that. If you don't think what the veteran does with his fists affects the outcome of games, that evidence has enough holes in it to dismiss.
