A LATE PEAK
There are two key factors when evaluating a player's career performance: How well he played at his peak, and how long he was able to perform at or near that level.
Doan started with the Winnipeg Jets in 1995-96 at age 19, but his career didn't reach its peak until his 30s.
During his first four seasons, Doan was used on the checking line and had 22 goals and 62 points in 249 games. At age 23, the Coyotes moved him into the top six and he responded with 26 goals and 25 assists, each second on the team to Jeremy Roenick.
Doan didn't reach his peak until eight seasons later, when he had 28 goals and 78 points in 2007-08, and 31 goals and 73 points the following season. That makes him one of 14 players to top 70 points twice in his 30s without doing so previously.
How great was his peak? Doan played for Canada at the 2006 Torino Olympics and finished sixth in voting for First-Team NHL All-Star in 2007-08 and 2008-09. Those accolades suggest he was viewed as one of the League's top 20 forwards.
Statistically, a player's peak is measured using three seasons, in order to avoid temporary fluctuations. From 2006-07 through 2008-09, Doan had 206 points (86 goals, 120 assists) in 235 games, which ranked 28th in the NHL.
Not all of Doan's contributions can be measured in goals and assists because he was a physical player who was trusted to prevent goals as reliably as he scored them.
There are catch-all statistics that attempt to measure all of a player's contributions into a single number. The most popular one that goes back across all of Doan's career is Tom Awad's Goals Versus Threshold (GVT), which estimates how many goals a player scored and/or prevented, relative to the best available replacement in the American Hockey League (or elsewhere).
From that perspective, Doan's peak performance improved the Coyotes by 37.6 goals in that three-season peak, which would place him just outside the League's top 50 players. Historically, that places his peak near those of other respected forwards Jeff O'Neill, Vinny Prospal and Brian Bellows.