I made up a new statistic

I call it the Detrimental Idiot Quotient, or DIQ. It measures what a waste of space a big dumb idiot is by comparing the penalty time a dude incurs to his total ice time. It's my favorite kind of statistic in that it is totally unitless: it compares a measurement of time to another measurement of time, so it's merely a ratio. DIQ is calculated by dividing Penalties In Minutes by Time On Ice (in minutes). So a DIQ of 1.000 would mean that a player incurred one penalty minute for every minute he played.

For example, Sunday night, when the Rangers took the Flyers all the way to school and back, Dan Girardi took a 2-minute interference penalty in the first period, and he logged a total of 22:09 on the night, so Girardi's DIQ for the night would be 0.090. Most players, who were not penalized, had a DIQ of 0.000. Meanwhile, Luke Schenn had a fight in the second along with a roughing and a 10-minute misconduct in the 3rd, for a total of 17 PIM in a game in which he played 16:31, for a DIQ of 1.029. As you can see, any DIQ over 1 is a really big DIQ.

Back of the napkin: league average PIM/game among the 30 NHL teams so far this season is, oddly, exactly what it was throughout 2013: 11.09. (Just trust me, I looked it up and have since lost the page.) Split over 18 skaters, that's a league-wide average of 0.616 PIM/game. Of course, average TOI/game must be (close enough to) 16.667 (300 man-minutes, 18 skaters). So, the league average DIQ should be 0.037: on average, an NHL skater earns 0.037 penalty minutes per minute of ice time. Anything over this is an above average DIQ.

Why did I make up this statistic? (It wasn't actually to make a bunch of DIQ size jokes. That was secondary. But worth it.) I wanted to put into perspective last night's stat line belonging to colossal waste of colossal space Tom Sestito, and I was not disappointed. Last night, Sestito earned a DIQ of 1620.000, nearly 44,000 times the league average.

What a DIQ!