Is Ryan Blaney The New Kasey Kahne?
And is that such a bad thing?
Waves were made in the motorsports world this week when, on NBC’s NASCAR podcast, Kyle Petty had this to say about Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney, drawing an unflattering comparison to former Cup Series driver Kasey Kahne:
Kahne’s career was indeed the story of a talented driver who burst on the scene early but ultimately never delivered on his championship potential before medical issues forced his premature retirement. And eight seasons into his full-time Cup Series career, it does seem like today’s fans are tired of waiting for Blaney to make the leap as well. For good or bad, Petty clearly tapped into something with the remark — but the numbers for both drivers at the same point in their careers tell a more complicated story than a simple 1-to-1 comparison would suggest.
For the purposes of this post, we’ll be looking at both Kahne and Blaney during their ages 24-28 seasons, since Kahne didn’t debut until age 24 and Blaney is only 3 races into his age-29 campaign. That leaves us with five full seasons to judge each driver on — and there are some pretty interesting similarities and differences to glean from those years:
In terms of pure counting stats, Kahne clearly had a higher ceiling when at his best. He had more poles, wins and podium appearances than Blaney over the same number of races. But Blaney has been more consistent, piling up far more Top 5s and Top 10s, giving him a higher floor to his week-in, week-out performance than Kahne had.
We can also see this in the per-race averages. Blaney averaged a higher position both on the starting grid (46 percent better than average, versus 35 percent) and at the finish of races (31 percent better than average, versus 14 percent) than Kahne, while he generated more adjusted points per race (54 percent better than average, versus 35 percent) as well. Since adjusted points does a great job of balancing high finishes against consistency, adjusted Pts+ (among everything else) paints the picture of Blaney as a driver who has actually been significantly better than Kahne was — even during the early, hype-filled portion of Kahne’s career.
But here is where things get even more complicated. If we judge each racer’s performance not in a vacuum, but rather relative to his teammates, we see that Kahne’s average teammates on the Ray Evernham team generated 18 percent fewer adjusted points per race than average, making Kahne’s own Pts+ of 135 highly impressive by comparison. Meanwhile, Blaney drives for a Roger Penske team that is annually one of the best in the field, producing three championships in the past 11 seasons. Blaney’s teammates are so good that their Pts+ of 167 is actually 13 units higher than Blaney’s own 154 mark. So by that standard, Kahne is the one who did more with a lot less, and Blaney is actually the underachiever.
My relative adjusted points metric tries to reconcile both points of view in a single metric, combining a driver’s overall performance with his stats relative to teammates, others in the same car manufacturer and those with similar grid positioning. After making those adjustments, both Blaney and Kahne come out above average, but Kahne was better when we account for what he had to work with.
In some ways, all of this means Blaney has even less of an excuse for his lack of championship success to this point. While Kahne would eventually have the car to contend once he joined Hendrick Motorsports — granting that he didn’t do much with it, never beating his teammates in Pts+ and finishing better than 12th in the points just once — his early-career story was one of shining through a bad situation. (Kahne’s 2006 in particular — 6 wins and 19 Top 10s on a team that otherwise had 2 total Top 10s — stands out as being far better than any season Blaney has ever had.) Meanwhile, Blaney has the car right now, but he’s lagged behind his teammates more often than not.
Blaney does have the edge in consistency, however, and he also owns one big advantage on Kahne: the final story of his career isn’t written yet. Whereas Kahne will be remembered as much as anything for spending his later years dragging well behind on a star-studded Hendrick team that also featured Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and Jeff Gordon, Blaney still has plenty of chances to do battle with Penske teammates Joey Logano and Austin Cindric. (At +1000, Blaney currently has the best championship odds of any Penske driver, in a three-way tie for fourth overall in the Cup Series.)
And as for the comparison everyone really wants to make: At ages 24-28, Blaney had Petty beat on poles, wins, podiums, Top 5s, Top 10s, average start, average finish and adjusted Pts+… though Petty edges ahead in relative adjusted points per race. The story of how that happened, however, is for another post at another time.
Filed under: NASCAR