Driving Play

Driving Play Podcast - Take Three & Fore(checker)

2012-02-25T23:11:00.001-05:00

The latest two additions of the Driving Play podcast come in a bit of a somber mood. We had originally recorded an extensive chronicling of the Western Conference buyers, but like your favorite European in the playoffs, Jared's hard drive couldn't handle the pressure and gave out on us.

In addition to the excellent discussion we had with Geoff Detweiler of Broad Street Hockey about the buyers of the East, we luckily salvaged an interview about the Nashville Predators with another of our favorite bloggers, Dirk Hoag of On the Forecheck.

Below are the third and fourth editions of the Driving Play podcast, first with Geoff and then the interview with Dirk. Enjoy.

Eastern Conference Buyers

Download (Right Click and choose "Save Link As...")

Discussing the Predators with Dirk Hoag

Download (Right Click and choose "Save Link As...")

Driving Play Podcast Take Deux

2012-02-24T02:10:00.001-05:00

Hello, today. With the deadline fast approaching, the Driving Play podcast marches on. This time, we're privileged to be joined by none other than Derek Zona of The Copper & Blue to discuss the sellers of the Western Conference.

Though Jeff Carter was actually traded today, do your best to let it sink in that Scott Howson only got Jack Johnson and a first round pick in return.

Anyway, enjoy.

Download (Right Click and choose "Save Link As...")

Scott Gomez Modified Corsi

2012-02-21T11:25:00.004-05:00

I recently watched the film Moneyball - in it, the essence of sabermetrics and finding efficiencies in the 2002 baseball market was reduced to three words: Get on base. Baseball has come a long way since then - on-base percentage has come to be correctly valued by the market. I also re-read the book Moneyball has a chapter devoted to the concept of DIPS (Defense Independent Pitching Statistics). Voros McCracken found that aside from home runs, walks, and strikeouts, pitchers have no control over how many hits they give up. However, that's not quite true - some pitchers have a little better control and it manifests itself over a career. It's not worth all that much - maybe a few hits over a season, maybe a run or two a year - but some pitchers give up a few more hits and some a few less hits than we would expect by just assuming that everyone gives up hits at the same rate. I got to thinking about applying this sort of winnowing to hockey - as the years go by, we're accumulating more and more data, now it's time to really look at some of it.

There's been some amazing work done on shaping Corsi/Fenwick into something more intelligible than it is in its raw form; I don't need to list off every blogger in this field. It's not like these concepts are being ignored. So someone may well have done this before, but I'm not consciously stealing their material.

Now, to hockey - I'm a Devils fan, and so I watched Scott Gomez play for 8 years. I didn't really understand shooting percentage when I watched him, but now I do, and I can say unequivocally that Scott Gomez is a horrible shooter. Hockey-reference.com finds only one forward with more than 1000 shots on goal and a career shooting percentage below his - Henri Richard, for whom we only have shot data for the final 8 seasons of his career. Bear in mind that New Jersey, the place where he played the majority of his career, tends to undercount shots - there could be between 25 and 100 saved shots that went uncounted over the course of his career there, driving his shooting percentage even further down.

Yet I see bloggers all over praise Gomez's Corsi and his potential value even as his shooting percentage slides further into the toilet. For me, the reason why Gomez's Corsi has always been high is pretty simple - he loves to shoot the puck from all angles, and many of his shots are extremely low-percentage shots that are merely an attempt to generate a rebound that a teammate can score on. Keep in mind that before I conduct this experiment, I think that Gomez's Corsi will not be affected very much at all - it's still going to be quite good. Still, we have to account for the fact that he is a terrible shooter, and that we finally have enough data to be pretty darn sure that his presence on the ice lowers shooting percentage.

Now unfortunately for ease of data collection (and the fact that behindthenet has been spotty the last couple of days), I am only closely examining data from between 2007-08 to 2009-10. timeonice.com presents the data I wanted in a much easier format for me to compile. I'll spare you the raw data and just present a simple chart: shooting percentage with Gomez on the ice at even strength versus shooting percentage with Gomez on ice with Gomez's shots removed. In all 3 years, his teammates actually shot better than he did while on the ice with him. This doesn't seem that remarkable, but we have to remember that 2 of his teammates are always going to be defensemen, who typically shoot much at a much lower percentage than forwards.

Year	S% With Gomez	S% W/O Gomez Shots
2007-08	7.38	8.08
2008-09	6.16	6.45
2009-10	7.87	8.51
TOTALS	7.1	7.66

Now unfortunately to complete the post, I had planned on getting more shooting data so I could compare Gomez's shooting rate to an average forward both in terms of shots on goal and in shooting percentage at ES, but I can't find that data anywhere. It would be a haphazard look anyway - what I will do instead is look at Gomez's Shots % while on ice with Shots For normalized such that 8% of shots were goals, as that is generally considered to be the NHL average at even strength.

Year	Shots % Actual	Shots % Modified
2007-08	58.04%	56.02%
2008-09	56.35%	49.86%
2009-10	49.40%	49.82%
TOTALS	53.92%	50.92%

Is this 'correct'? No - obviously in 2008-09, Gomez's teammates were just as much of a letdown as Gomez himself, as the shooting percentage doesn't move much with Gomez's shots taken out. It looks like that year he was certainly unlucky, in addition to being a poor shooter.

We don't have quite enough data included to make any sort of sweeping statement here. We know that the Gomez trend continues - according to behindthenet, Gomez himself shot 3.5% at 5 on 5 in 2010-11, and while he was on the ice, the Canadiens shot 4.7% as a whole. This year, he has 0 goals in 38 5 on 5 shots.

And yes, before I get a deluge of complaints, I am ignoring the effect that additional shots have - an increased chance of drawing a penalty, more offensive zone starts, not being in the defensive zone, and so forth. I'll leave that to someone with more comprehensive data. All I'm saying is that with nearly 5 seasons worth of data, and a close examination of 3 seasons worth of it, we have to account for the fact that Gomez is only a +2 player at even strength despite having 406 more shots than his opponents while on ice, and that much of it has to do with Gomez's horrific shooting percentage. Corsi and its brothers are something, but not everything - we mustn't be completely wedded to such a proxy for what's actually going on.

The Driving Play Podcast - Take 1

2012-02-14T23:23:00.003-05:00

Hear ye, hear ye:

Today marks the launch of a new feature here at Driving Play. In an effort to try and examine what teams may be thinking as the the NHL trade deadline approaches, we've decided to record a six-part podcast series examining the league's buyers, sellers, and every team in between. Today, Matt and I take a look at the teams currently at the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings.

Enjoy.

Download (Right Click and choose "Save Link As...")

Editorial: Widen The Net, Please

2012-02-13T11:15:00.001-05:00

It doesn't have to be all statistics and graphs here at Driving Play. Sometimes we actually have opinions about the games we're not watching (we're not watching because, obviously, we're too busy looking at our FenwickCorsi in Tuesday night games played in October). Still, the opinions expressed herein are the sole property of Triumph, and not Driving Play at large.

In 1992-1993, the league added two franchises, and scoring exploded. The league went from 6.95 Goals Per Game in 1991-92 to 7.26 Goals Per Game. It's been mostly downhill from there - the league is currently at 5.37 Goals Per Game, and it seems the trend is towards less scoring. I see more and more games with 1 or 2 power plays for a particular team, and that can only mean that scoring is going to continue to fall.

It was somewhat of a revelation when Kevin Weekes publicly questioned former teammate Martin Brodeur's equipment choices three weeks ago. Weekes told the Marek vs. Wyshynski Podcast that he felt that Brodeur did not take advantage of new equipment regulations. We've all seen the picture of an 80s goalie in his net with net peeking out behind him on all sides, whereas a picture of a current goalies leaves nothing to shoot at. Here was Weekes acknowledging that yes, basically the current trend in goaltending is to strap as much equipment as is legally possible to your body, which makes them look like Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka. If the Everlasting Gobstopper actually did make your body expand like that, you can bet goalies would be interested.

I'm completely fine with the standup goaltender having gone the way of the barefooted placekicker and the scheduled doubleheader, although I have memories of watching Chris Terreri make acrobatic kicksave after kicksave at the old Brendan Byrne Arena. Still, isn't there more to being a goalie than just being square to the shooter and sitting down in the right place for 40 times a night? Isn't there more to defense than getting men and sticks in lanes and defying the puck to go through the mass of men, composite sticks, pads, and Size 251 jersey?

Rules changes can often have unintended consequences - hell, this could possibly make everything worse, but why not, right? We know the goalies aren't giving up their enormous equipment any time soon. So here's a list of pros and cons to widening the net:

PROS:

1. Bring back the shot off the wing!

The red line is gone. The stretch pass is in vogue. Yet no one scores off a 1 on 1 rush without a massive failure of goaltending or a phenomenal move around a defender. Maybe this play isn't that exciting, I don't know, but now it's basically out of the game because missing the net on these plays can be so dangerous and can lead to scoring chances the other way, whereas scoring on it is damn near impossible.

2. Maybe change the way defense is played in the NHL

It's funny how people still trash the neutral zone trap, but I never hear a peep about the Tortorella-style defense in the defensive zone where everyone collapses into the center of the ice and we watch teams try to generate scoring chances through a labyrinth of players. I think this style of D is going to become more of a trend over the next five years, and I'd hope that a wider net would make this strategy less viable.

3. Bring back the acrobatic save

I see acrobatic saves all the time because Martin Brodeur's reflexes and positioning are shot so he's basically gambling on any dangerous play. But I don't see enough of it from other goalies. I'm not entirely sure if widening the net would lead to more highlight-reel saves, but I suppose it couldn't hurt in that regard.

4. More goals = more lead changes

Defense isn't going away. If defenses continue to grow more stalwart, we will see a return to the late 90s, early 00s where you could basically turn a game off if one team had a lead going into the third period.

CONS

1. Alters how goalies play

Goalies learn on one net their whole lives - changing it will fundamentally alter the game from the highest to the lowest levels of hockey. It's entirely possible that there are some goalies who would be incapable of adapting.

2. Might alter game into table hockey

I love the idea of guys coming down the wing and blasting the puck, but a game full of it might be horrendous - no flow, less passing, no board work, less beating guys 1 on 1 down low - I don't like the sound of that any more than I like the NHL's future as a series of 2-1 games.

3. Might introduce more luck, not less

Goals off crazy deflections and fluky bounces are a part of hockey, but one imagines more shots off skates and shins ending up in the back of the net with more net to cover. It might become more of a strategy to blast pucks from the point, and more of a strategy to block shooting lanes and passing lanes closer to the goalie.

Anyway, it's a fantasy - how could the league possibly introduce this? Just throw it on players before the season? And how much will it be widened? I guess they could test it out in the AHL for a season, but I don't see them being too thrilled about the position. So, it won't happen, and goal scoring numbers will continue to decline year after year.

Why Do Score Effects Exist?

2012-01-25T14:43:00.009-05:00

First off, I must thank and give full credit to 2+2 poster atakdog. Most of this article is just a small model tweak and different presentation of his work in this post. Worlds are colliding!

We talk a lot about score effects. The idea is that when a team is behind they will tend to dominate and teams that are ahead find themselves in their own end more often than when the score is tied. This occurs because teams have different incentives - if you are ahead then preventing the other team from scoring is more important than scoring yourself, so you'll play less aggressively forcing the other team to work for it. Similarly, if you are behind then scoring becomes far more important so you are willing to take chances, pinch with your defensemen, have them jump into rushes and so on.

In this article, I will take a look at score effects by graphing out the incentive to score and prevent goals. In future articles, to come out in the next week, we will use a similar methodology to look at how the points system (2 for any kind of win, 1 for an OT/SO loss, 0 for a regulation loss) affects incentives and whether there might be better systems out there.

A Simple Model

It wouldn't be a JaredL article, or an atakdog derivative for that matter, without introducing a model. To look at the incentives to score and prevent goals, I took the average goals per team per game since the lockout, about 2.88, and divided by 60 to get the average goals per minute, roughly 0.048. I made this number the probability of either team scoring in any given minute. Using backward induction, I determined the probability of winning the game any given minute with any score difference. So this is two average teams facing each other, scoring at the average rate each minute and each with a 50% chance of winning the extra point in overtime/shootout should it get that far. I also assumed that if at any point in the game one team is up 10 goals then they will certainly win.

You may find it a little strange that we're looking at score effects using a model which assumes that they don't exist. A good way to think about this is to ask what happens if the other team plays exactly the same way no matter what the score is. How should we respond?

Score Tied

Let's start with the score tied. If this were baseball, basketball or either North American brand of football, this would be simpler. Unlike those sports, the NHL tiebreaking rules make hockey games non-zero-sum. If two teams tie, then the total number of points both get goes from 2 to 3. Note that in soccer it is exactly the opposite - if a game ends in a draw, the number of points drops from 3 to 2. The NHL rules actually make the incentive to score and prevent goals different when the score is tied, which we'll cover in greater depth in future articles.

Here is a graph showing the marginal benefit, in league points, of scoring and preventing a goal with the score tied. The horizontal axis represents what minute of the game it is and the vertical how many expected points are gained by scoring or preventing a goal. For scoring this would be the difference between starting the next minute up one and starting the next minute tied. For preventing this is the difference between starting the next minute tied and starting it down 1.

This gives us a somewhat strange pattern. Early in the game, scoring and preventing goals are about equally important. When the score is tied you will gain or lose about a third of a league point on average if a goal is scored. Very late in the game, this changes and getting to the 1-point-bonus round becomes the important thing. It's easy to see why we don't like this, but let's move on and look at score effects right now.

The One-Goal Game

Let's now shift to the score not being tied and start with the team that is ahead in a one-goal game. Here is a similar graph:

You can see that every minute of the game preventing a goal is more important than scoring. It's an interesting coincidence that at the start of the third period preventing a goal is almost exactly twice as important as scoring one. I think this is a bit overstated because my model does not take into account a team pulling the goalie, which I think will make it just a bit more important to be up 2 goals. Something worth noting is that the points system somewhat cushions the cost of conceding a goal here - if you are up one then giving up a goal very late isn't all that bad, at worst it costs you just over half a league point. Perhaps paradoxically, it's worse to give up a late goal when the score is tied than when you are up one.

Here is the graph for the team that is losing:

Perhaps the most clear thing from this is the already obvious justification for pulling the goalie - the last couple minutes giving up a goal almost doesn't matter at all while scoring is worth close to a point and a half. I've wanted to take a closer look at the optimal time to pull the goalie for a while, and hopefully will get to it, but just eyeballing this graph it seems earlier than usual might be better.

Another thing about this graph is that it provides some justification for the definition of close game, ~~I believe first proposed by Eric T. over at Broadstreet and now~~ used by many, including Gabe Desjardins for his power rankings, which he posts far more regularly than I (coming soon, I promise!). Under that definition, a game is close if it's within a goal in the first two periods and tied in the third. While such a definition is always somewhat arbitrary, we can see some justification for it by noting that the incentive to score for the team that is behind stays relatively flat earlier but really moves upward in the third period.

Something worth noting is that it is far more important for the team that is behind. Scoring a goal right at the end of regulation is three times as beneficial for the team that is behind than it is costly for the team that is up. Again, this is due to extra point being given in tie games. To better see the size of these effects, here's a graph with all four together:

Based on these incentives, it's not surprising that so much more of the play is in the leading team's end of the ice. The key for both teams is putting the puck in or keeping it out of that goal. The later in the game, the stronger this effect is and that's mostly because of how big a goal would be for the team that is behind.

Two-Goal Games

I'll be very quick with two-goal games and just show the combined graph. Here it's interesting because right near the end of the game it basically doesn't matter what happens - with a minute or two to go the team up two goals is almost certainly going to win whether they give up a goal or not. The key time is 10-15 minutes out when the trailing team has a decent chance to get another goal and equalize. Again, this slightly overstates the case because it assumes teams leave their goalie in there at the end, but the overall shape of the graphs would be mostly the same:

Score/Prevent Benefit Ratio

Finally, here's a graph of the ratio of the marginal benefit of scoring to preventing the other team from doing the same based on the score and time. The larger this is, the more important scoring a goal is relative to preventing one. If the ratio is greater than one that means scoring is more beneficial than giving up a goal is bad, the opposite if it is less than one.

I cut it off at 5 because it shoots way up for the team that is behind. With two minutes to go, scoring becomes 40 times as important as preventing the other team from putting the puck in your net if you are down 2. It is very clear that while teams that are ahead have some incentive to play more defensively, most score effects are driven by the team that is trailing.

In the next installment, I will look at how score effects, and play with the score tied, would be expected to change under alternative points systems such as 3-2-1-0, the simple 2-1-0 with ties at the end of regulation and the soccer system which is 3-1-0.

Was the Brian Elliott Extension a Good Idea?

2012-01-18T19:22:00.001-05:00

Earlier today, the Blues decided to re-sign goaltender Brian Elliott to a 2-year extension worth $3.6 million in the midst of his first All-Star campaign. On the surface, this doesn't seem like a terrible move for St. Louis. After all, should Elliott keep form through the end of the season, another team would probably have to pay more than $3.6 million for his services. The biggest problem with this, however, is that Elliott's current form differs quite a bit from what we've seen over his career (numbers via NHL.com):

Season	Team	GP	ES SA	ES GA	ES SV%
2007-2008	OTT	1	22	1	0.955
2008-2009	OTT	31	628	50	0.920
2009-2010	OTT	55	1089	101	0.907
2010-2011	OTT/COL	55	1237	124	0.900
2011-2012	STL	22	459	25	0.946
Career	3 Teams	164	3435	301	0.912

We've seen teams give out similar contracts based on similar samples, contracts which don't always turn out so well in the department of expected performance (See: Leighton, Michael). At the end of the day, however, a $1.8 million cap hit isn't going to handcuff a team beyond repair. If Elliott turns out to be at least average or a little better, St. Louis will have him locked in at a very good price. If a 22 game sample indeed regresses back to his career averages, the modest average annual value will make this an easy contract to trade or demote, a win-win for the Blues.

On the Blue Jackets' Struggling Power Play

2012-01-11T21:57:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I made a short post on the Blue Jackets' low PDO, making the point that we should expect the Jackets to have a much better second half as their shooting and save percentages climb back towards the mean. In the comments, Rob Vollman brought to my attention this Hockey Prospectus article by Timo Seppa, which brings into question Columbus' Power Play production dropoff after the transition from Ken Hitchcock to Scott Arniel. Timo asserts that

Arniel's track record wasn't favorable, particularly when compared to that of former coach Ken Hitchcock. In many aspects, the Blue Jackets had taken steps backwards since his departure, and they'd done no better than tread water elsewhere.

One example is on the power play. Never a particular strength of the Jackets—you need star players to have a truly upper echelon man advantage—the production of several key contributors had taken a highly visible nosedive in a year-and-a-half under Arniel's watch:

In other words, the dropoff in scoring under Arniel signifies a dropoff in overall power play production since Hitchcock left. This is a fine assertion to make judging by what these numbers tell us on the surface, however, I actually believe the Blue Jackets were a better PP team under Howson than Hitchcock. Let's take a look at why with some numbers via Behind the Net and NHL.com:

Season	5v4 SF/60 (NHL Rank)	5v4 SH%
2007-2008	44.8 (24)	11.4
2008-2009	47.2 (25)	9.4
2009-2010	51.8 (12)	12.9
2010-2011	53.7 (8)	8.9
2011-2012	53.5 (6)	9.1

Timo only looks at '08-09 onward, but I decided to include '07-08 under Hitchcock since I don't have the ability to break down the '09-10 season with splits before & after Hitchcock was let go. Regardless, it is clear from these numbers that Columbus actually increased their shot rate on the PP under Arniel to levels that the Hitchcock-coached team were never able to reach.

How, then, could have Columbus actually posted better scoring results under Hitchcock? The answer is simple: shooting percentage. As Jared has pointed out, there is a tremendous amount of luck involved in shooting percentages, especially in small sample sizes. When you're looking at results on the power play, it is important to keep in mind that PP shots are going to represent about 1/4 (or less) of a team's total shots throughout the regular season, enough where luck is still going to be a major factor in scoring goals. The fact of the matter is this: the shots were going in under Hitchcock, and they weren't under Arniel. Regardless of whether Rick Nash was playing in front of the net or on the half-wall, the team was still unlucky to shoot at such low rates under Arniel, which resulted in lower point production for the team.

Though there were definite shortcomings in Arniel's system, e.g. going into an absolute shell when up by 1 or 2 goals, this is more evidence that he was yet again on the wrong side of luck.

On the Firing of Scott Arniel

2012-01-10T15:45:00.000-05:00

Yesterday the Columbus Blue Jackets announced that they had relieved head coach Scott Arniel of his duties. This shouldn't come as a surprise to many, the Jackets are in the midst of a disappointing 11-25-5 start, good for a league worst 27 points in the standings. After an exciting offseason, the Jackets were poised to make a run at the playoffs as predicted by a slew of excellent bloggers. Before the 'I told you so' comments start pouring in, however, let's take a look at a few of Columbus' underlying statistics (via BTN here and here):

ES SH%	ES SV%	PDO	Score-Tied Fenwick %
7.3	0.905	978	51.27

For the past few weeks, Gabe Desjardins has been writing about the importance of PDO and its tendency to regress towards the mean as the season progresses. Columbus is currently rivaling the worst PDO we've seen over the past four seasons, yet their possession statistics indicate that GM Scott Howson has indeed built a strong group of skaters. In net, even though Steve Mason may not be very good, he is also well below his career ES SV% numbers. This is good news for interim coach Todd Richards should (when) the Jackets see a revival of sorts during the second half of the season. We've already seen Ken Hitchcock receive media praise for a turnaround in St. Louis that was bound to happen anyway, and don't be surprised if we see the same for Todd Richards in Columbus.

Anomalies: Is Shooting Percentage Predictive?

2012-01-06T10:19:00.008-05:00

There is a mountain of evidence that shooting percentage is overwhelmingly driven by luck. We've written a few articles on it and basically every top blogger has either written directly on the great role of randomness in shooting percentage or makes frequent use of that fact in analyzing hockey stats.

To summarize all of that work very briefly, over a season or less worth of data team shooting percentage is mostly driven by luck. It is not very sustainable, in other words there is very little correlation between shooting percentages in one period of time and another, whether that's even/odd numbered games, those in the first half of the season and second or from one season to the next. Stats such as shooting percentage, save percentage and the sum of these, referred to as PDO, show very high regression to the mean. So a team shooting for a low percentage in the first half of the season is essentially as likely as one shooting well to make a high percentage of shots in the second half of the year. I am fully on board with shooting results being mostly luck and have done a bunch of work on this myself.

A related but separate question is whether shooting percentage is predictive of future scoring. For example, is a team that shot at a high percentage in the regular season going to score more in the playoffs on average than a team that shot at a low percentage? All signs would seem to point to no. In addition to the work summarized above, if you just look at the correlation between shooting percentage in the regular season and scoring rate in the playoffs, it is very low. As you may have guessed by the existence of this column, and it having "anomalies" in the title, shooting percentage does turn out to have both statistical and, I would argue, actual significance in predicting future scoring.

Results

To study the predictability of regular-season shooting percentage on playoff scoring rate, I took 5-on-5 data from BTN for both the regular season and playoffs for the four seasons from 2007-2008 through 2010-2011. This gives us a sample of 64 team seasons. The variable we are trying to predict is goal-scoring rate (5-on-5 GF/60) in the playoffs. Here is the regression equation for playoff scoring rate on regular-season 5-on-5 shooting percentage (expressed out of 100) and, importantly, regular-season shooting rate (5-on-5 SF/60):

Playoff scoring rate = 0.213 * RS Sh% + 0.132 * SF/60 - 3.482

The coefficient on shot rate is nearly 4 standard errors greater than zero and very strongly significant. That should surprise nobody; shot rate is a solid predictor of future scoring. More surprising is that the p-value for regular-season shooting percentage is 0.014 which is easily significant at the standard 5% and almost significant at the stricter 1% level. Despite how much variance there is in playoff scoring rates, you have to factor in matchups and some teams only play 4 games, if you include shooting rate then shooting percentage is a statistically significant predictor of playoff scoring!

That's great for the stats nerds, but is it significant enough for anyone else to care? Let's look at this with a hypothetical example. Let's take two teams that had the playoff-team average shooting rate 5-on-5, give one the playoff-team average shooting percentage in the regular season and the other a shooting percentage one standard deviation higher. Here is a table with their regular-season shooting rates, RS shooting percentages and expected scoring rate in the playoffs:

RS Sh%	RS SF/60	Exp. Playoff GF/60
9.264%	29.927	2.438
8.44%	29.927	2.262

Going by average 5-on-5 ice time and series length, you could say that if two teams have the same shooting rate, the team with the good shooting percentage will score a little under a goal per series (0.81) better than the one that is average. If you compared one team with a high percentage and another below average it would be higher. If you'll forgive me for making simplifying assumptions such as independence, over 20% of first-round matchups should feature teams with shooting percentages different enough for their predicted expected goals for in the series to be off by more than a goal. I think it's large enough that this is significant in practice, not just statistically so.

Better to be good than lucky.

I want to emphasize that while shooting percentage appears to be a significant predictor, shooting rate is stronger. A good way to look at this is to consider predicted scoring rates for teams one standard deviation above the mean in one or both of these.

+1 SD	Shot Rate	Shooting%	Predicted GF/60
Both	32.014	9.26%	2.713
Shot Rate	32.014	8.44%	2.538
Shooting%	29.927	9.26%	2.438
Both Avg	29.927	8.44%	2.262

You can see from the bolded that a team with a higher rate but average percentage is predicted to score more goals than one with an average rate and higher percentage. Using a similar method as I used above, the team with the better rate will score just under half a goal more per series.

Spurious Explanations

So we have established that if you take two teams with equal shooting rates but different shooting percentages in the regular season, the one that made a higher percentage of its shots will have a significantly higher average scoring rate in the playoffs. I have come up with two theories on why this would be even with the extreme idea that shooting is all luck.

The first is that the higher shooting percentage means the team probably scored more goals, which means they probably had a better record and perhaps this means they faced weaker competition in the playoffs. So luck-based results in the regular season led to weaker playoff competition. This seems unlikely because changes would be so marginal, but in theory it could be the case.

A more complicated idea is based on score effects. It's pretty well established that teams tend to shoot at a higher rate when they are behind and a lower rate when they are ahead. Extending this, the team that got the bounces to go their way was in the lead more often. Since they were in the lead more often but put up the same shooting rate then they are better when it comes to shot rate and that will shine through in the playoffs.

Neither of these theories can be disproven 100%, but I think we can safely conclude that such effects would be quite small. I got at this by including a different variable: regular-season goal-scoring rate for all time that isn't 5-on-5. So this includes all special teams, 4-on-4 and 3-on-3. Since this is goal-scoring rate directly, and about 1 in 3 goals are scored in such situations, it seems like this would have a stronger connection to playoff seeding or being ahead than luck-based 5-on-5 shooting percentage. When I ran a similar regression of playoff scoring on 5-on-5 shooting rate and non-5-on-5 scoring rate the latter wasn't close to significant, with the standard error greater than the size of the coefficient and the R^2 barely budged from using shot rate alone. There are also other reasons I'll get to in the near future that make me think score effects are out as an explanation.

I think we can reasonably conclude that while there may be some negligible score or even playoff-matchup effects, that's not what's driving most of the predictive power of regular-season shooting percentage.

Shot Quality? Aim?

Having racked my brain for the week or so since discovering this, the only explanation I can find is our good friend shot quality. Getting high-quality shots isn't easy; the other team is doing their best to keep you out of the dangerous areas and stop rebounds from going there. If you have two teams that shoot at the same rate but one gets more high-quality shots then they are probably better possessing the puck and generating offense. Perhaps an entire season of 5-on-5 shots is enough for this to shine through.

There is some evidence to back this theory up. Running a regression we find that if you take into account regular-season SF/60, regular-season shooting percentage is a significant predictor of playoff shot rates! In other words, if you have two teams that shot at the same rate during the regular season then the one that shot for a higher percentage will, on average, have a higher playoff SF/60. The coefficient is 0.918, so increasing regular-season shooting% by 1.1 percentage points would increase the expected shot rate in the playoffs by 1.

To me shooting percentage indicating something about shooting rates in the future is pretty strong evidence that if either it's about shot quality and not sniping ability. If you had a team very good at hitting the corners during the regular season, it's not clear why they would be more likely to take more shots in the playoffs. In contrast, if you have a team very good at creating shots from just in front of the crease then it seems reasonable that they'd shoot more often in the future because that takes skill that more readily translates.

What do you think?

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. In particular, I'd like any alternative theories beyond shot quality. Are you surprised at all by this? Does it make sense? Let us know by leaving a comment, or a tweet @drivingplay.

Preaching To The Choir - On Why Plus/Minus Is Stupid, Part 38

2011-12-30T09:53:00.003-05:00

Plus/Minus is often maligned by fancy stats types as not descriptive - it doesn't take into account the quality of competition or teammates. It doesn't acknowledge whether your team's goaltending is great, horrible, or somewhere in between. There's yet another reason why it's dumb - it describes game states that are not entirely relevant.

Let's take as an example my favorite team, the New Jersey Devils. They are having quite a bizarre season so far - 8-1 in shootouts, their record in regulation is a mere 10-15, but right now they're holding on to a playoff spot. More strange is their special teams play - they've scored a mere 17 power play goals, while allowing a whopping total of 11 short handed goals. Yet while shorthanded, they've only allowed 10 goals and have scored 7 short handed goals themselves. In addition, they've allowed 4 empty net goals and have scored none at even strength. All this has made the team plus minus even more useless than it already is, since as we know, plus/minus includes short handed and empty net goals.

Let's just look at the top 9 forwards' plus minus:

Forward	+/-
Adam Henrique	7
Petr Sykora	2
Dainius Zubrus	Even
Patrik Elias	-4
Zach Parise	-5
David Clarkson	-10
Ryan Carter	-11
Ilya Kovalchuk	-12
Mattias Tedenby	-14

Looks pretty bad, right? But when we take out short handed goals for and against as well as empty net goals, it looks a lot different:

Forward	+/-	+/- at ES	Difference
Adam Henrique	7	7	0
Petr Sykora	2	9	-7
Dainius Zubrus	Even	8	-8
Patrik Elias	-4	6	-10
Zach Parise	-5	2	-7
David Clarkson	-10	-4	-6
Ryan Carter	-11	-10	-1
Ilya Kovalchuk	-12	-1	-11
Mattias Tedenby	-14	-12	-2

We see a lot of pluses where there were minuses before. If we were using +/- to talk about even strength play on the Devils, most players have a radically different even strength +/-. We might erroneously think that Ilya Kovalchuk is having a horrible season at even strength, but he's merely been average-ish. What are we even looking to describe when we talk about +/-?

Conclusion: Plus/Minus is stupid. Again.

Is the Power Play Its Own Beast?

2011-12-22T22:10:00.007-05:00

To what extent are even-strength and power-play performance linked? If your team is an offensive juggernaut five-on-five, should you expect them to dominate with a man advantage?

One might say that hockey skills are hockey skills and whatever helps you score at even strength should carry over. Thinking more about it, though, there are lot of aspects of the game that are in one but not the other. If your team excels at the breakout, On the Forecheck or has a mean neutral-zone trap then that won't help you too much when the other team simply clears the puck and waits for you at the blue line.

In the analytical community, the most-cited metric for power-play quality is shooting rate. See the recent article that got me thinking about this by Derek Zona or the definitive article on the subject by Gabe Desjardins. Since I am using 5-on-4 shots for per 60, the most obvious stat for comparison is 5-on-5 shots for per 60. So the question at hand is how correlated are 5-on-5 and 5-on-4 shooting rates.

Using data from BTN, over the last four full seasons the correlation between shooting rates 5-on-5 and 5-on-4 is 0.4. Normally I would put out an R^2 interpretation, but for this relationship it isn't one driving the other but some hockey skills and tactics driving both. Here is a graph showing the relationship:

With a correlation of 0.4 one could say there is a relationship between the two, but it isn't particularly strong. Luck is obviously one factor. We tend to focus on shooting rates because that reduces the luck factor, but it is still present. That is particularly true for the power play due to reduced sample sizes.

Here is a chart showing the average difference between 5-on-4 shooting rate and the one predicted by the above regression formula for each team. You can think of this as how good they have been 5-on-4 compared to offensively 5-on-5.

Team	Difference
S.J	8.19
ANA	7.94
DET	6.21
MTL	3.93
WSH	3.57
VAN	3.41
N.J	3.31
MIN	2.04
T.B	1.89
DAL	1.64
L.A	1.57
CBJ	-0.17
FLA	-0.22
BOS	-0.76
COL	-1.03
PIT	-1.09
BUF	-1.67
CGY	-1.75
NYR	-1.75
TOR	-1.9
PHI	-1.99
OTT	-2.44
STL	-2.45
NSH	-2.69
ATL	-2.76
NYI	-2.89
PHX	-3.62
CHI	-3.67
CAR	-4.25
EDM	-6.59

As you can see, the Sharks, Ducks and Red Wings are outliers at the positive end. Their power plays have performed better than you would expect based on their 5-on-5 shooting rates. The Sharks under McLellan have been very strong with the man advantage. The huge outlier in the graph above is the ungodly 72.6 5-on-4 shots/60 they put up last year. They currently lead the league this year at 68.8. Getting slightly off-topic, I think a safe prediction is for the Sharks to improve their power-play results since they top the league in 5-on-4 SF/60 but are only 10th in PP%.

On the bad end, the Edmonton Oilers stand alone. This is saying something, since the Oilers haven't exactly been machine gunning pucks at the net 5-on-5. Going by 5-on-4 shots for per 60 they have finished the last four years 30th, 30th, 30th and, you guessed it, 30th. This year Ryan Nugent-Hopkins can barely miss on the power play and perhaps he's helped their shooting rate out as well since they are currently all the way up to 24th in the league.

Given how consistently the Sharks, Ducks and Red Wings have outperformed expectations with the man advantage and how terrible the Oilers' power play has been, I think it's pretty clear that there is some skill component of the power play that is distinct from 5-on-5.

CBA Look - Part 2 - The Salary Cap

2011-12-21T12:20:00.006-05:00

Salary caps are now as big a part of our sports lexicon as touchdown, goal, and sex scandal. 3 of the 4 major sports have them, and the 4th has a luxury tax system that effectively functions as a salary cap for most of the MLB franchises.

Let's take a look at each sport's system (the Revenue Split is Players %/Owners %):

League	Revenue Split	Current Cap	Current Floor	Roster Size
NHL	57/43	$64M Hard Cap	$48M	23
NBA	50/50	$58M Hard Cap¹	$49M	12
NFL	50/50	$120M Hard Cap	89% Of Cap	47
MLB	None	$178M Luxury Tax²	None	25

¹ Hard Cap to become Soft Cap with Luxury Tax in 2013 and each year thereafter.

² The MLB Luxury Tax Threshold year to year is set in the CBA and not as a function of revenues.

Salary caps have a two-fold function - first, they limit the amount that top revenue teams can spend on players. This is under the guise of competition, but we'll see that it doesn't exactly work that way. Second, they depress salaries for top players. Both the NHL and NBA have a maximum dollar amount per year for a player contract, yet while the NBA has had several max contracts, the NHL has only had one. It's not just that the cap-bending huge deals have altered the NHL landscape for player contracts - despite the fact that revenues have clearly returned to pre-lockout levels, the salary cap restricts teams from signing players to the kind of deals we were seeing before the introduction of the salary cap. People with long memories will remember the summer of 2002, when both Bill Guerin and Bobby Holik received $9 million per season. Both of these guys were fine players, but neither one is going to the Hall of Fame except perhaps to visit. The only player currently making that more than that over the entire length of his contract is Alexander Ovechkin, and I suspect it will stay that way.

One thing that is interesting about the present NHL salary cap is that players on one-way contracts who are sent to the minors or overseas don't count on the cap. It's unclear whether or not this will change in the next CBA - on the one hand, someone like Wade Redden probably doesn't want to play in the AHL, but on the other hand, he certainly makes more money doing that than if he were bought out or signed to a less risky contract. The rumblings in journalists' columns suggests the NHL wants it so that all one-way contracts count against the cap, but we'll see how the NHLPA reacts - I can't imagine they're married to the idea of guys riding buses for millions of dollars, so they could give that up in exchange for NHL concessions.

The salary cap as a whole doesn't interest me all that much - anyone paying attention will see that it will come down if the revenue split changes. I'll show just how much it might come down when I focus on the NHL's escrow system in a later post. What's more interesting to me is the salary floor, a mechanism that forces teams to spend money whether it's in their best interests to do so. We already saw a strange move earlier this season when the Dallas Stars picked up Eric Nystrom because otherwise they would have been under the salary floor.

Salary floors have three functions:

A: Ensure that teams receiving revenue sharing spend it on player salaries

B: Ensure that teams do not intentionally lose by fielding a horrible roster (see also: 2004 Penguins)

C: Ensure that players are properly compensated

In practice, however, salary floors often necessitate superfluous free agent signings or superfluous trades. Some markets quite simply won't be appealing to free agents and will, for whatever reason, have a dearth of existing expensive contracts. We saw that as a possibility this summer when the Florida Panthers had less than $25 million in contracts on the books, but the Panthers quickly signed half the available free agents. Regardless, the salary floor is currently $9 million above where the salary cap was set in 2005 - have hockey-related revenues in markets near the floor really risen that much since then? I doubt it.

These are estimates, but Derek Zona via Putting On the Foil provides us with these numbers for the profits that NHL clubs reaped in 2010:

Top Six Most Profitable Teams (average): $37.9 million

Everyone Else (average): -$2.79 million

Now since these are estimates based on estimates, we can't be sure that these are even close to correct, but it doesn't take a financial whiz to figure out that there are some teams in the league whose revenues are off the charts, and likewise a lot of teams at the bottom of the food chain who struggle to make anything.

(This will be a feature on each of my CBA articles outlining what I think should happen. I by no means think that they will happen - that will go in my predictions.)

Triumph's Take: The salary cap should come down from its current high of $64 million, as it is driving the middle market teams to spend above their means. The NHL should institute a luxury tax above a soft salary cap - teams would pay $2 for each $1 spent above the salary cap, with that money going towards revenue sharing. There should be a hard ceiling of 15% above the soft salary cap where teams interested in paying luxury tax can spend to. Furthermore, all one-way contracts should count on the cap whether or not the player is playing in the NHL.

The salary floor should reflect the revenues of the bottom teams, and not the league as a whole. The salary floor should be set according to a percentage, say 60%, of the revenues of the bottom 15 revenue teams in the league plus, say, 80% the total amount of revenue sharing received by these teams divided among them equally. This enables the NHL's lower revenue teams to spend without having to spend above their means.

The NHLPA's ability to increase the salary cap by 5% each year by placing a greater amount of their money into escrow should be eliminated or scaled back.

What Will Happen: I think despite the clear need for reform, the NHL owners will be persuaded that a falling salary tide raises all their boats. The system in place will remain largely the same, all that will change is the percentage of revenues, which will likely fall at 50/50 as they have in the other two major sports leagues that have a salary cap. This revenue change will also result in salary rollbacks and the possibility of amnesty buyouts.

Now a question for the reader - was this post clear? Should it have more citations from the NHL CBA? The NHL CBA is written so jargon-y that it's usually best to avoid it unless we need it for some sort of clarification, but I'm not sure if I'm assuming too much knowledge here (for instance, on what the revenue split means).

Corsi and Fenwick Power Rankings through Dec. 18

2011-12-19T20:06:00.003-05:00

Here are the updated power rankings through yesterday. If you are unfamiliar, I get these by using a logit model to take into account schedule, score effects and special teams.

The big movers this week were the Kings and Jets. The Kings are an interesting case as they jumped up this week largely on the back of their performance against the Red Wings, who have topped these and other Corsi/Fenwick based power rankings since early in the season. This is somewhat odd since the Kings got beat 8-2. In that game, the Kings put up a Corsi of +8, 54.4% at even strength. We expect a team to win the territory battle when they are behind, but given how good the Red Wings have been those are still strong numbers. They also had two more shots on the power play than the Red Wings.

Winnipeg is more straightforward - they played a weak schedule: Minnesota, Washington and Anaheim all at home. While they got two wins out of that, their possession numbers were bad. At even strength with the score tied they put up a Corsi percentage of 47.1%, 48.7% for Fenwick. They were worse taking all even-strength time, which is to be expected given score effects. Still, their shooting stats were pretty weak when you consider how bad their opponents were as a group and that they were playing at home.

Corsi Rank	team	Corsi%	Fenwick	Fen Rank
1	DET	57.6	57.5	1
2	VAN	56.1	55	4
3	PIT	55.9	55.3	3
4	STL	55	55.5	2
5	BOS	53.8	53.4	7
6	COL	52.7	52.4	8
7	S.J	52.6	53.5	6
8	CHI	52.5	53.7	5
9	L.A	51.5	50.2	12
9	PHI	51.5	51.7	9
11	PHX	50.9	50.2	12
12	N.J	50.8	50.8	10
13	WSH	50.2	49.7	16
14	CBJ	50	50	15
15	OTT	49.7	49.1	18
16	FLA	49.6	49.5	17
16	WPG	49.6	50.4	11
18	MTL	49.4	50.2	12
19	CGY	48.9	48.2	21
19	TOR	48.9	48.5	20
21	DAL	48.2	49	19
22	BUF	47.4	45.8	27
23	CAR	47.1	46.8	25
24	NYI	46.9	47.7	22
25	EDM	46.5	47.3	23
26	NYR	46.2	47.2	24
27	T.B	46.1	46.7	26
28	ANA	45.8	45.1	29
29	NSH	45.5	45.5	28
30	MIN	43.2	43.8	30

I'm working on testing this with older data, and quite likely will be tweaking the formula to improve the way I deal with special teams.

Assessing Zone Entry Methods

2011-12-14T22:21:00.003-05:00

Over at Broadstreet Eric T. and Geoff Detweiler have been collecting and analyzing zone-entry data for all Flyers games this year. They track each entry into the offensive zone, recording who is on the ice, how many shots and scoring chances there were before the puck left the zone and whether the puck was carried in, dumped in, passed in etc. Here is a post archiving some of their previous work. I think it is an excellent idea and the early data look promising.

In recent articles, which can be found here and here, Eric uses early data to make the argument that carrying the puck into the offensive zone is better than dumping it in and teams, or at least the Flyers they've got data on, should be more aggressive, carrying it in more often. He does put in a couple caveats that the fourth line should be more inclined to dump the puck in and top 3 lines should perhaps be more cautious late with the lead. While intuitively I think he's correct, the extra pressure you put on your opponents with the puck seems more valuable than the risk of a bad turnover, I don't think the results he cites tell us anything about whether or not teams should try to carry it in more often in marginal situations. I have a different interpretation of the data.

Their results: teams do better when they carry the puck in.

One thing there is no doubt about whatsoever is that in their dataset teams get substantially better outcomes when they carry the puck in than when they dump it or even pass it in. (Before you ask, they exclude situations where a team dumps the puck and makes a line change with little to no effort to go after the puck) As an example, when the puck was carried in the team doing so generated 0.57 shots before the puck was sent out of the zone. The similar number is only 0.22 when the team dumps it in.

On the face of it, it seems reasonable to think that this means carrying the puck in is smarter and that teams should be doing it more often. However, this ignores the circumstances. Most of the time when a player can easily carry the puck across the blue line into the zone it is both correct to do so and what he does. These situations tend to overwhelmingly favor the attacking team. In extreme cases you have breakaways and odd-man rushes. In general the defense will not be very well set up - if they were the offensive team would not be able to waltz into the attacking zone without risking losing the puck.

Now think about times where it would be very difficult for the player to cross the blue line with possession of the puck. The defense is set up, putting pressure on the puck handler. He is likely to be facing a very good defenseman. He might even have multiple defenders perfectly executing a trap. In these situations, dumping the puck is the correct move and usually what is done.

Looking at the two together, when the situation is favorable to the team about to enter the offensive zone they tend to carry it in. When it is unfavorable, they will usually dump it. Let's flip that around - when teams carry the puck in the conditions are usually very good for the offensive team and when they dump it in they are usually bad. I think it's pretty clear that the circumstances would drive the numbers in exactly the way they appear. From the numbers alone it's not clear whether or not the teams in question attempt to carry the puck into the offensive zone too rarely, too often or about the right frequency. Intuitively I agree with Eric's conclusion, but I don't think the data provide any evidence for it.

Let's shift the focus.

In my view Eric focused too much on the decision the puck carrier makes and not enough on what is happening on the ice when, and just before, he makes it. I'm not saying this to be negative, in fact it's quite the opposite. He, Geoff and Broadstreet in general write some of my favorite hockey stuff, and that's saying something since I'm a Pens fan and the Flyers are my least favorite team. I love the idea of looking at zone entries and, perhaps paradoxically, my interpretation puts more value in these metrics than his does.

Let's take a different view of some of the data from the three recent articles, including comments:
- the top line (Hartnell, Giroux and Jagr) carried the puck in 3.1 times as often as they dumped it in. For second and third liners this drops to 2.2 times as often and for the fourth liners it's all the way down to 1.4 times. Better players tend to carry the puck in more compared to dumping it.
- when the puck is carried in the results are better than for any other type of entry going by shots/entry, chances/entry, goals/entry and how often the next play is in the defensive zone.
- the team carrying the puck in gets the next shot off 69.8% of the time, just above passing it in (68.6%) and well above both deflecting (62.4%) and dumping it in (56.3%)
- carrying the puck into the zone is substantially more advantageous than getting a faceoff in the offensive zone, going by any of the above metrics.
- when the Flyers have a lead of 2+ in the first two periods or any lead in the third, so their opponents are taking risks, 58% of their zone entries are carried in or passed in where they maintained control. When trailing, their opponents are more defensive minded, this figure drops to 48%. When the game is close and the opponents are more balanced it is in the between at 55%.

What does all this say to you? To me it screams out that the ability to carry the puck, or pass it in with control, is a fantastic proxy for winning the neutral-zone and transition-game battle! Giroux isn't good because he carries the puck in, he carries the puck in because his strong play has given him the opportunity. The more the conditions dictate the decision, the better controlled entries measure how well teams and players are doing in the neutral zone. It is precisely because as I see it the conditions drive the entry decisions that I think it's such a good thing to track.

Conclusion and Suggestions

While Geoff and Eric only have 22 games so far this season, a preliminary look at the data indicates that zone entries, especially those where the puck is carried in, may tell us a lot about who is excelling in the neutral zone, on transitions from offense to defense and vice versa. This is quite promising and I have a few quick suggestions for ways they could use these stats.

Firstly, I would put it in percentages as we do for Corsi. In other words carried-in entries for divided by carried-in entries for and against. I would also consider weighting them differently to come up with one overall number. People often ask about high-value shots and other notions related to shot quality. In this case, there appear to be high-value entries and low-value entries. Another thing to look at is how often the opponents carry it in with different defenseman on the ice.

Power Rankings through December 11th

2011-12-12T21:41:00.003-05:00

First off, you, dear reader, have my humblest apologies for the lack of update last week. I made a bonehead move and didn't save my name database and by the time I had everything set up again it was late in the week so I decided just to wait until the end of the weekend. In the future, I'll try to make updates every Sunday night and if that fails I'll make them on Monday with results through Sunday.

As I explained in the previous version, these rankings use a simple logit model to account for schedule, score effects and special teams. The numbers you see in the chart represent the expected even-strength score-tied Corsi/Fenwick if the team played each team once, at home and away, and the total number of shots per game stayed the same.

Before getting to the rankings, here are a few notes, comments and anecdotes.

- Things have stabilized for the most part. The average team's rating has moved up or down only 0.6 percentage points for both Corsi and Fenwick. That's with the addition of about 6-8 games per team.

- Minnesota continues to amaze and... bewilder. Their rating dropped off the most in the league since the previous version, going from a mighty expected Corsi rating of 45.1% down to 43.2%, a drop of 1.9 percentage points moving them down to worst in the league in both Corsi and Fenwick. Their record in that time? 7-0-0. Is Tebow secretly suiting up for them?

- The team with the second-biggest drop in rating is Washington. The model has the Caps' effects-adjusted Corsi at 50.4%, a drop of 1.2 percentage points. The last time I did these rankings was just before Boudreau was sent packing in favor of Hunter, so the change is all on Hunter's watch. The Capitals have put up a Corsi of 45.2 since Hunter took over. Six games is a meaningless sample size, but it'll be something to keep an eye on.

- Remember when people were talking about the Stanley Cup hangover for both Boston and Vancouver? With Boston's fantastic November and Vancouver's great last 4 or 5 weeks, both have pulled themselves up in the standings after somewhat slow starts. They are both in the top 5 in the Corsi ranking. I don't think anybody expected the Canucks, at least their skaters, to forget how to play hockey but that is an improvement for Boston - the Bs were pretty average last year.

Here is the table:

Corsi Rank	Team	Corsi	Fenwick	Fen Rank
1	DET	57.6	57.4	1
2	VAN	55.6	54.9	3
3	PIT	55.4	54.9	3
4	STL	54.9	55.8	2
5	BOS	54.1	53.3	7
6	CHI	52.6	53.9	5
7	COL	52.5	52.2	8
8	S.J	52.4	53.6	6
9	PHI	51.7	52	9
10	PHX	50.7	50.1	14
11	WPG	50.6	51.3	10
12	CBJ	50.4	50.5	13
12	N.J	50.4	50.6	12
12	WSH	50.4	49.9	15
15	L.A	50.2	49.1	18
16	MTL	50	50.8	11
17	FLA	49.9	49.5	16
18	OTT	49.8	49.3	17
19	CGY	49.5	49.1	18
20	TOR	48.7	48.2	21
21	BUF	48.3	46.3	26
22	DAL	48	48.8	20
23	CAR	47.7	47.4	23
24	EDM	46.6	47.9	22
25	NYI	46.2	46.6	25
26	T.B	46.1	46.3	26
27	NYR	46	46.8	24
28	NSH	45.5	45.4	28
29	ANA	44.8	44	29
30	MIN	43.2	43.9	30

NHL Trends That I've Spotted, November Edition

2011-12-05T12:29:00.002-05:00

I like JaredL's Power Rankings, though they do take some of the wind out of my monthly column about NHL trends. Since this column is just a hodgepodge of stuff I notice, I'll just focus on the player level. Today's edition will involve forwards.

Predict The Future And Win The Praise Of Basement-Dwelling Bloggers Everywhere, aka Finished Or Not Finished

Shots on goal trends are starting to emerge - information-wise with regard to shots, we begin the NHL season with chaff and build slowly up to wheat. A decline in shots on goal rate can have many causes - the biggest one, it seems to me, is shifting ice time. Since shot rates increase on the power play, less time on the power play and more time on the penalty kill is going to take a bite out of a player's shot rate. Still, we're at the point where we can begin to make pronouncements about a player's direction.

#1: Jarome Iginla

Finished or Not Finished? Finished.

Iginla's ice time has been cut slightly, but his shot rate is lowest since 98-99. With over 1100 games at the age of 34, it's hard to imagine Iginla's numbers coming back up, but perhaps a change of location would help him out.

(Naturally, Iginla had an 8 shot game in between when I first wrote this and when it will be published. Still, I think Iginla will not be a 30 goal scorer for much longer.)

#2: Brad Richards

Finished or Not Finished? Not finished.

Richards's shot rate has to be worrisome, but right now his shooting percentage is making the issue. His shot rate is a full shot below his career mark, and nearly a shot and a half below last year. My suspicion, however, is that linemate Marian Gaborik is 'taking' his shots - he's a full shot higher than last season. Richards has 13 5 on 4 shots according to behindthenet - last season he was credited with 108 - he essentially went from a shot and a half per game on the PP to a half-shot. Sometimes tactical changes can reduce a player's shot rate.

#3: Alex Ovechkin

Finished Or Not Finished? The jury's out.

Alex Ovechkin came into the league and led the NHL in shots on goal for 6 straight years. He's still shooting nearly 3.5 times per game, a rate which most NHLers would envy. Still, at his peak he shot over 6.5 times per game.

Let's see if we can't identify some causes.

1: Ice time reduction. Ovechkin's career average ice time is nearly 22 minutes a game, but he's only averaging 19 minutes a game so far this season. Assuming the decline to be linear between power play ice time and even strength ice time, that should result in a reduction in his shot rate - in fact, assuming that Ovechkin and his linemates still have the same true talent, we'd expect him to shoot 4.51 shots per game instead of his career 5.22. Still, that doesn't explain the decline completely, as he is below 4 shots a game.

2: Linemates. As we saw above, his linemates may be taking shots away from him. This doesn't seem to be the case - Ovechkin shot just over 1 time per game on the power play last year, and while he is shooting less often than that this year, it's the entire Washington power play that seems to have fallen. Last season, it generated 59.1 shots per 60 minutes, good for 3rd in the NHL. This year it's generating 48.2 shots per 60 minutes, which ranks it solidly in the middle of the pack. The difference is only 1 shot per 5 power play minutes, which doesn't seem like a lot, but over the course of a season, it adds up to 8 expected goals.

3: Shooters have a peak, perhaps Ovechkin has passed his. If we look at the careers of pure scorers, like Paul Kariya, Brett Hull, and Phil Esposito, we can see that they had a clear prime. Kariya had 6 years where he was top 10 in the league in shots, and a 7th year where he would've led the league in shots had he not both held out and been injured. Brett Hull led the league 3 straight years, then finished 2nd in the league 3 straight years, and was never again top 10 in the league in shots after his 33rd birthday. Esposito had 5 straight years where he had 5+ shots per game, but never had a season where he approached that number either before or after. This is sobering news to Ovechkin and Washington Capitals fans, but it's entirely possible that Ovechkin will never lead the league in shots on goal again. We can't make that pronouncement for sure, but players have leveled off at his age from being a top 5 player to being a top 20 player.

Wayne Gretzky said that 100% of the shots you don't take don't go in, and it's a truism that NHL fans don't quite understand. When your favorite player isn't generating as many shots as he once did, it's a sign that he probably won't return to his previous level of play.

The NHL CBA - A Very Long Series of Articles - Part 1

2011-12-01T21:10:00.001-05:00

NBA fans and NHL fans have always had a kind of rivalry. Whereas baseball and football seasons have minor overlap, people don't often identify themselves by not liking the other sport. However, NBA and NHL fans tend to look down on one another - their seasons run concurrently, and in my experience, you will rarely meet a passionate NBA or NHL fan who also has a serious passion for the other sport. There's only so much time in the day for professional sports.

For the past few weeks, if you're like me, you've been enjoying a few chuckles at the NBA's expense watching the league circle the drain and nearly throw away the season. Schadenfreude isn't mankind's noblest feeling, but if you've heard years of jokes from smug fans weaned on SportsCenter about how no one likes the NHL, it might tickle you to hear that that sport might miss a season. You might've been looking forward to sports-starved NBA fans learning how to pronounce David Krejci. All that is over with now that the NBA and NBAPA has settled their differences - they have a new collective bargaining agreement, with the league set to begin in less than a month.

Thus, my glee turns to dread as I remember that the NHL's CBA expires in September of next year. We've seen both the NFL and NBA lock out, and I'm virtually certain that the NHL owners will once again lock out the players. Furthermore, unlike the NFL and NBA whose CBA expiration dates were well in advance of the beginning of the season, the NHL's CBA expires less than a month before regular season games are scheduled. If the two sides cannot agree to a new CBA before that time, we're going to see at the very least another shortened regular season.

So far, there's yet to be much saber-rattling. Larry Brooks commented in his November 13th Slap Shots column: "A high-ranking executive of one of the league’s most successful clubs on and off ice matter-of-factly told Slap Shots during the course of a conversation about something else entirely this week that the players, “will get 48 to 50 percent, and there will be a rollback” in the next CBA as if it is a fait accompli and [NHLPA president Donald] Fehr doesn’t exist." '48 to 50 percent' refers to the revenue split between owners and players as enforced by the salary cap. At present, the NHL players receive 57% of the revenue. Doing a little basic math, this means that the salary cap and likely NHL salaries would be rolled back by between 10 and 15%. Now we know that Larry Brooks is an NHLPA shill, as we'll see in the coming months, but I can recall him breaking the news during the summer of 2004 (at least to me) that the NHL was prepared to offer the NHLPA a $32 million salary cap. This seemed totally bonkers, since there were many teams spending upwards of $50 million on player salaries in the 2003-04 season. Yet when the dust settled, the salary cap was $39 million and the players were earning three-quarters of their 2003-04 salaries. Brooks will attempt to spread fear and panic, but his sources are generally good.

Between the salary cap machinations of the Devils in 2006, the Malakhov fiasco, and the Kovalchuk circumvention, I've gotten to know my way around the current NHL CBA pretty well. Furthermore, as a former philosophy student, I think I've trained myself to plow my way through jargon into what the hell a thing is actually saying. I will also be looking at the other three major team sports' CBAs, since they all ratified one this year, seeing what the NHL and NHLPA should look into and what they should shy away from. I'll focus more on the NBA CBA as that sport seems to share a similar mindset and similar problems and will be discussing issues related to:

- The Salary Cap and Salary Floor

- The Revenue Split

- Revenue Sharing

- Free Agency and Contract Length

- Entry Level Contracts

- Escrow, Escrow, Escrow!

- Guaranteed Contracts

- Other Stuff TBD!

I will also be discussing some of the 'unintended consequences' of the present CBA and how those issues might be resolved in a new CBA. I don't have a lot of faith in either the Players' Association or the owners, but I'm hoping that like the NBA, everyone can return to their senses long enough to at least get a season played.

Power Play Trends: Why We Shouldn't Focus on Merely Results

2011-11-28T20:43:00.003-05:00

As I was watching the CSN-Philadelphia broadcast of the Coyotes/Flyers game on November 18, during a break in the action of the Flyers’ first Power Play the following chart was shown to the viewer, entitled “Special Teams Reversal.”

	First 8 Games	Last 9 Games
Power Play	27.5%	9.3%
Penalty Kill	82.9%	90.2%

Presumably to reinforce play-by-play voice Jim Jackson’s comment at the beginning of the Flyers’ first man-advantage that the power play had been “struggling here of late,” I see a completely different trend when I look at the same numbers.

As Gabe Desjardins pointed out in this article, “The PP is all about directing shots on goal,” and I’m feeling daring enough to assert that the PK is all about preventing shots towards your own net. Looking at the Flyers’ shot rates per 60 minutes on special teams during the first 17 games once again thanks to JaredL, it becomes less surprising why such a reversal took place:

	First 8 Games	Last 9 Games
PP SF/60	50.7	40.7
PK SA/60	39.4	39.6

As of today, if the Flyers were to sport 50.7 SF/60 on the PP, they would rank 12th in the NHL according to BTN and 40.7 would put them 28th. Their PK numbers would rank them 2nd in both occurrences. What is more, if we look at the shooting data from the same span we see another trend bolder than Jaromir Jagr’s Movember ‘stache:

Power Play

	Shots	Goals	Shooting %
First 8 Games	53	11	20.8
Last 9 Games	46	4	8.7
Total	99	15	15.2

Penalty Kill

	Shots	Goals	Save %
First 8 Games	43	7	.837
Last 9 Games	44	5	.886
Total	87	12	.862

In addition to their more potent shot-generating PP in the first 8 games, the Flyers were shooting at an unsustainably high rate and opposing goalies were stopping an unsustainably low number of shots. The numbers are more reasonable on the PK, though the Flyers’ opponents were still running a bit warm with their shooting. As the sample size began to grow, we see the Flyers’ shooting percentage come back down to Earth as their opponents began to stop a more reasonable number of shots. Philadelphia’s PK numbers also even out by a bit less of a margin as we might expect based on the unit’s consistency.

Though such a turnaround may be alarming to those who still choose to judge power play success based on results, the fact of the matter is that the Flyers PP of the first 8 games was merely a mirage. As the season rumbles along, expect the Flyers’ special teams to mirror the second half of CSN’s chart rather than the first.

Weekly Power Rankings #1

2011-11-28T02:18:00.002-05:00

Every Sunday night, I will be posting updated objective power rankings. Instead of only focusing on 5-on-5 play with the score tied, for each of Corsi and Fenwick I use a logit model to take into account score effects, schedule and special teams. Using the numbers the model spits out, I generate what each team's expected even-strength score-tied Corsi and Fenwick percentages would be if they played a balanced schedule. It is important to note that my model ignores goaltending. Also, while it adjusts for special teams, it does not reward or punish teams for getting there. So teams that are mediocre on the power play but get there a lot or bad on the penalty kill but very disciplined will be underrated.

As usual with these sorts of things, they should get better as the season goes on and we get more data.

A handful of teams jumped out, that I'd like to comment on:

- Colorado has put up decent, much-improved possession numbers at even strength. In special teams they have been above average getting pucks toward goal on the PP and very strong suppressing shots on the PK. They have not gotten the goaltending or bounces at either end. I think this ranking overrates them, but a deeper look points to them being better than I initially thought. Perhaps mediocre is more accurate than bad.

- The Jets are another team that this ranking puts substantially above where they are in the standings. They have put up better than average possession numbers but whatever combination you like of bad bounces in their own zone and bad goaltending has done them in. They have also haven't been disciplined, ranking dead last in the league at times shorthanded. If the team hadn't moved, this would be familiar to Jets fans since they had a similar pattern in the second half of last season.

- They won't win the rest, but I think we can expect the Canucks to continue their rise and pull themselves up near the top of the standings.

- The Rangers are in trouble. They've had an unsustainably high save percentage and a ridiculous shooting percentage at even strength (9.9%), both of which are almost certain to drop. They are getting dominated 5-on-5 and are fourth worst in the league in shooting rate 5-on-4 (BTN). I don't see them making the playoffs.

Here is the ranking, sorted by Corsi%

Rank	Team	Corsi%	Fenwick	Fen Rank
1	Detroit Red Wings	57.9	57.6	1
2	Vancouver Canucks	56	55.1	3
3	Pittsburgh Penguins	55.3	54.8	4
4	St. Louis Blues	55.1	56.5	2
5	Boston Bruins	54.1	53.1	6
6	Chicago Blackhawks	53	54.4	5
7	Colorado Avalanche	52.8	52.4	8
8	San Jose Sharks	51.8	52.7	7
9	Washington Capitals	51.6	50.7	12
10	Philadelphia Flyers	51.4	51.6	10
11	Winnipeg Jets	51	51.8	9
12	Florida Panthers	50.8	50.2	13
13	Montreal Canadiens	50.7	51.5	11
14	Ottawa Senators	50.1	49.9	14
15	Phoenix Coyotes	49.7	48.9	18
16	Los Angeles Kings	49.7	48.4	19
17	Columbus Blue Jackets	49.5	49.6	16
18	New Jersey Devils	49.5	49.9	14
19	Buffalo Sabres	49.2	47.6	24
20	Calgary Flames	49.2	49.3	17
21	Toronto Maple Leafs	48.1	47.8	22
22	Carolina Hurricanes	47.9	47.7	23
23	Edmonton Oilers	47.4	48.1	21
24	Dallas Stars	47	48.4	19
25	Tampa Bay Lightning	46.3	46.5	25
26	New York Islanders	45.6	45.3	28
27	Minnesota Wild	45.1	46	26
28	New York Rangers	45.1	45.8	27
29	Nashville Predators	44.6	44.5	29
30	Anaheim Ducks	44.5	43.9	30

Anomalies: Why Are Crosby's Possession Numbers Merely Good

2011-11-20T21:15:00.004-05:00

This will perhaps be the start of a continuing series in which we analyze and discuss strange things we've noticed about hockey statistics. A feature of these articles is that we won't have all the answers, so comments and discussion are strongly encouraged.

In this installment, I want to discuss something that has irked me since I first got into hockey analytics. After reading about Corsi and Fenwick stats I went to BTN to look at the numbers for my favorite team, the Pittsburgh Penguins. I was quite surprised by how bad the team was according to these metrics, this was in the Therrien days, and in particular Crosby's numbers were downright mediocre. They have improved since but over the last two seasons, in which he played a season and a half, his even-strength Corsi/Fenwick stats are merely good instead of great. To state the obvious, he is considered by many to be the best player in the game and nobody reasonable would put him outside the top 5-10 players, head injury aside. What gives?

5-on-5 Corsi

Here are his Corsi numbers from 2007-2008 through 2010-2011. I include his rank among forwards that played 40 games or more for the given year.

Season	Corsi On/60	Rank
2010-2011	8.55	64
2009-2010	12.55	29
2008-2009	-0.21	186
2007-2008	2.35	140

Even with the improvement, including the huge points streak taking up much of the 2010-2011 season, you can see that his stats aren't close to the elite level most everyone would put him at, including us nerds. I have a couple possible explanations, but would love to hear from you if you've got more.

Weak Linemates

For Pens fans, a frustrating part of having so much strength at center is that there is not a lot of money to go around for wingers. If you look at the guys consistently at the top of the Corsi rankings, you tend to see pairs or groups of top guys that play together or perhaps an elite player with at least one good player. Examples include a number of Detroit combinations, whichever combination of Kane, Toews, Sharp and Hossa you like, the Sedins, Ovechkin with Bäckström and Kesler with Raymond. Crosby has spent most all of his time with guys like Dupuis and Kunitz who aren't bad but are definitely role players and don't compare well to those names.

Let's take a look at the Corsi QoT for selected players in the last 3 full seasons. Corsi QoT is the average Corsi rating off all skater teammates for the player's ice time. It isn't perfect because a player influences his teammates' ratings but gives a rough idea how good the teammates are.

Player	2008-2009	2009-2010	2010-2011
Sidney Crosby	-3.628	5.297	5.779
Alexander Ovechkin	12.953	8.438	4.013
Pavel Datsyuk	17.246	12.229	7.363
Jonathan Toews	11.629	14.858	8.437
Henrik Sedin	1.368	7.435	8.28
Ryan Kesler	-0.149	7.021	7.624

You can see that going by this metric Crosby's teammates have not been as strong as those of other elite players.

An exception to this rule is that he has played a bit of time with Malkin. How has that duo been? I haven't pulled data from 2007-2008, but I do have it from the last three years. Here is a chart with their Corsi rates together. Unsurprisingly, they are all much better than Crosby's overall numbers.

Year	Corsi%	Corsi/60	Minutes
2008-2009	47.5%	-5.647	393
2009-2010	56.2%	16.377	202
2010-2011	62.0%	32.047	163
Total	53.4%	8.317	758

I'll have more on that 2008-2009 season in a bit, but in the last two years for the time they've been on the ice together they have dominated. I didn't list the score-tied numbers but they are actually pretty similar.

Coaching

People are making similar arguments for Ovechkin this year, which I think is at least in part an overreaction to some brutal shooting luck, but it seems like in the early years the cautious, defensive approach espoused by Michel Therrien may have held the Penguins back. It's beyond my area of expertise to analyze the particulars of this, but there are data to back this up.

Courtesy of time on ice here are the Corsi percentages (Corsi shots for divided by Corsi shots for and against) the seasons before during and after Bylsma took over for Therrien. While the Pens were and still are a young team, the jump is pretty big and the 2008-2009 season is damning.

Season	Coach	Corsi%
2007-2008	Therrien	45.6%
2008-2009	Therrien	46.0%
2008-2009	Bylsma	52.8%
2009-2010	Bylsma	52.2%

A problem with this analysis for the 2008-2009 season is that Gonchar, Pittsburgh's best defenseman that year, was out most of the early part of the season coming back right around the time Bylsma took over 25 games from the end. Here are the numbers from 2008-2009 for all time in which Gonchar was off the ice, whether or not he was in the lineup, under Bylsma and Therrien.

Coach	Corsi%
Therrien	46.0%
Bylsma	52.8%

For that 2008-2009 season, here are Crosby's on-ice Corsi numbers with each coach:

Coach	Corsi%	Corsi/60
Therrien	48.8%	-2.836
Bylsma	50.5%	1.205

Of course there are many many other factors like overall team skill going up and variance may have played a role. That said, based on these splits I think some of the blame for the first couple years goes to Therrien, or you might say the praise for the last few goes to Bylsma.

Putting It Together

Let's look at Crosby's Corsi numbers with and without Malkin since Bylsma took over:

Situation	Corsi%	Corsi/60
With Malkin	57.7%	20.239
Without Malkin	53.0%	7.12

That's in 421 minutes of ice time with Malkin, or over 7 full games worth of time. If Crosby played 75% of his time with Malkin then his Corsi% would be about 56.5% and his rate about 17. Both of these numbers would be right up at the top of the Corsi rankings.

Conclusion

These are my ideas, I'd love to hear more if you've got them. I'd also be interested in your thoughts on what I'm putting out there. I think the biggest factor by far is the relative weakness of the wingers. This is supported by how dominant Crosby was when Evgeni Malkin played the top-winger role for him over the last couple seasons.

Can Rinne Earn All That Money?

2011-11-15T12:55:00.008-05:00

The Pekka Rinne contract extension a couple weeks back remains the most interesting off-ice move of the season. It touches on a lot of things we have written about and discussed behind the scenes, most notably the role of luck and skill in results and whether it's better to build a team by spending big on goaltending or leave that money for the skaters - see Matt's thought-provoking post on the subject. The Predators are also in a peculiar spot as a team that has spent near the floor in the past but now will perhaps change gears and spend closer to the cap. This is all happening, and almost certainly related to, with Weber (RFA) and Suter (UFA) coming up as free agents this next offseason. Chase covered the cap/budget impact quite well last week. There is a lot to unpack here and we'll be revisiting this deal, looking at Nashville's situation and trying to answer more general questions like how much top goaltenders should be paid over the course of the season.

In this article, I will look at how his contract compares to those of other top goaltenders, at least those paid like one. The question at hand is how much he has to contribute for his $7M a year to be reasonable compared to other big-money goaltender deals. I am ignoring several key things like regression to the mean that might impact the overall value of goalies. In other words, I'm not looking at more general things like whether goaltenders as a whole are overpaid, or even if Rinne will be but rather what he has to do for us to say he's not overpaid relative to other top-dollar goaltenders.

Everywhere Is WAR

The nice thing about analyzing goalies is that we have a large number of discrete events and while there are teammate, opponent and rink/scorekeeper effects, the strength of a goaltender's performance pretty much boils down to how well they stopped the puck in different situations. Goaltender analysis is more similar to hitters in baseball than it is to skaters in hockey. The metric I'll use is WAR, Wins Above Replacement, which is very similar to the baseball stat of the same name. The idea is to look at how many goals the goalie in question gave up and compare that to what a typical replacement-level goalie (think free agent paid the minimum salary) would have allowed on the same number and type (ES, PK, PP) of shots. We can translate this number into wins to see how many wins each goaltender gave their team over what a replacement-level goalie would have.

I'm far from the first to use this method. As far as I understand it, GVT follows a similar approach for goalies. For a few other examples, Gabe Desjardins did something very similar two years ago over at Puck Prospectus and there was a fanpost on the subject by DoctorMyBrainHurts at Gabe's usual home, Arctic Ice Hockey. Philadelphia's goalie issues and the signing of Bryzgalov motivated some similar work by our friends Kent Wilson and Geoff Detweiler. With skaters it's rather more complicated, but for goalie analysis this approach is pretty clearly the way to go.

This is already one of the longest intros of all time so I won't go too far into detail about exactly how I calculated this. For replacement level, I took took the combined results of goalies that were not in the top 60 in games started for each season after the lockout. Another difference between my work and the others linked above is that I use 5.52 goals per win instead of the usual 6.0, which I feel is more accurate based on regressing league points on non-empty-net goal differential since the lockout. This warrants an article of its own, which I'll post later this week.

What does $4+ million buy these days?

Capgeek only goes back a couple years and nhlnumbers, which I used, only stretches back to 2007-2008. In those four seasons, we have a sample of 60 in which a goaltender had an annualized cap hit of $4M or greater. Here is a scatter plot showing the relationship between goaltender wins-above-replcement and the cap hit minus the minimum player salary. Something to note is that there isn't a very strong relationship between a goaltender's cap hit and how much value in wins he turned out to provide to his team. This is a sign that maybe high-price goaltenders as a group are overpaid, but I'll leave that for future work as it's outside the scope of this article.

The regression equation you see tells us what we should expect a goaltender to produce for a given cap hit over the minimum salary. The last two seasons the minimum has been half a million dollars. Going by that, here is what we should expect out of goaltenders in this range:

Cap Hit ($M)	WAR
4	3.42
4.5	4.28
5	5.14
5.5	6
6	6.86
6.5	7.71
7	8.57

So 4 million dollars buys you about three and a half wins.

How productive must Rinne be?

And finally we are ready to answer the question at hand. How well does Rinne need to play for his contract to compare well to other high-dollar goalie contracts? Looking at the last row of the table, we see that producing a WAR of about 8.57 a year is about right. Here are his last 3 seasons, which comprise 167 of his 168 career starts:

Season	Starts	WAR
2009	49	4.75
2010	54	3.76
2011	64	11.17

This averages out to a WAR of 6.56 per season, far below the expected 8.57. However, there might be two reasons to be optimistic. His number of starts per year has gone up each season and even on a per-start basis his WAR was substantially higher last year than the first two. While our gut instinct may chalk the latter up to random variance, the starts going up each year is obviously important since it's hard to provide value from the bench or IR. This raises two issues, how much he needs to play to get his WAR up to the 8.57 range and/or how much his save percentage might need to improve to do so. Let's consider those separately.

Rinne has faced an average of 24.35 shots at even strength, 4.32 shots on the PK and 0.67 shots with the Preds up a man per start in his career up to the current season. Based on his career save percentages in these spots (0.928/0.877/0.903) and the replacement group's (0.907/0.845/0.908) he has a WAR of 0.118 per start. To get to 8.57 for the season, he would have to start about 72 games a year! Keep in mind that this would be starting almost every game without seeing any dropoff in save percentage from his career average. Only Lundqvist has gotten close to that many starts and based on what Rinne has done the last three years I think we can all agree that this isn't realistic.

So, then, it would appear that he has to improve on his already high save percentage that most of us would guess is over expectation. How much improvement? Let's take his 64 starts last year as the jumping-off point. If he faces the same number and type of shots per start as he has in his career thus far that would be about 1,877 shots a season. A replacement-level goaltender would allow almost exactly 3 goals per start, or 192 goals for the season. At 5.52 goals per win, Rinne would need to concede about 47 fewer goals to be worth 8.57 wins above replacement. This translates to a save percentage of 0.923. Here is a table with all goaltenders with a career save percentage of 0.923 or above, minimum of 500 games played:

Player	Starts	Career Save %

Just off the list is Dominik Hasek with a career save percentage of 0.922.

For his contract to be about about equal in value to other goaltenders making $4M a year or above, all Rinne has to do is play at the Hasek level for 65+ games a year for 7 years.

A Look at the Pekka Rinne Extension

2011-11-10T02:16:00.002-05:00

This past Thursday, the Nashville Predators announced they had signed franchise goaltender Pekka Rinne to a 7-year, $49 million extension – the largest deal awarded in team history. After this season, Rinne’s average annual salary of $7 million will represent the highest cap hit for a goalie in the NHL, up from his $3.4 million number this season. On the surface, locking up a player that the franchise sees as “the best goaltender in the NHL” for the foreseeable future may seem wise, but there are a few underlying reasons that make this deal foolish for the Preds.

Let’s think about this again: 7 years, $49 million. For a team that is only spending $49,588,730 towards the cap this season and spent $50,903,696 last season, Rinne’s new $7 million cap figure would represent roughly 1/7 of Nashville’s entire budget. What is more, this doesn’t take into account the inevitable contract situations of both Shea Weber and Ryan Suter.

Weber, of course, was awarded a $7.5 million salary in arbitration this past summer and is entering his final season of restricted free agency. He will once again be arbitration-eligible and shouldn’t command a salary less than $7 million. Without signing him to a long-term deal making his cap hit more favorable, Nashville would likely be committing $14+ million to two players next season. Even if they choose to extend Weber long-term, I don’t see him taking much less than his current salary, further guaranteeing an emerging cap constraint.

Suter’s situation is equally sticky. He is set to become an unrestricted free agent next summer, the clear prize of the defensive UFA class. Considering there hasn’t been a defenseman of Suter’s caliber on the open market in quite awhile, he could easily command a salary upwards of $6 million for multiple seasons. Once again, if the Predators plan to keep Suter they will have to back themselves into a corner salary-wise.

Even worse, all of this hasn’t taken into account Nashville’s dire need for forward depth. If the Predators continue their trend of spending ~$50M relative to the cap, any combination of Rinne-Weber/Suter will easily cost $12-14 million and approach $20 million should they decide to keep all three. Here’s where it gets dicey – the Predators are already on the hook for 11 contracts next season (including Rinne) for a total of $30,710,833. Should they keep one of Weber/Suter, they will be at roughly $36-38 million with 12 players signed. Should they keep them both, they will be approaching $43-45 million with 13 on the roster.

This is where the rubber meets the road. If they choose to spend to the upper limit, the Predators would have roughly $2.8 million per opening to fill out a 20-man roster. If that number seems high, it probably is. It’s very rare for teams to field only 20 players on an active roster for lack-of-depth reasons. No team will go through an entire season with the same 20 players intact, and for each additional skater they chose to ice the Predators would lose about $358,735 per available roster spot. Also, for every $1 million below $64.3 million ownership chooses to spend, that $2.8 million number would drop another $142,857. I’m skeptical that the Predators are ready to step into the arena with the NHL’s heavy spenders just yet, meaning they could easily be looking at $1.6 million (or less) per salary opening just to ice a 21-man roster.

Previewing next year’s offseason, Nashville currently has 8 players not named Shea Weber set to become restricted free agents at the end of this season – seven skaters (4 forwards, 3 defenseman) and G Anders Lindback. Their current salaries total $9,004,167 which wouldn’t take into account any potential raises each player would earn. It is very unlikely Nashville will find the cap space to even address their RFA needs, let alone address their weakness up front in the UFA market. For a team that claims to be solidifying its future, the idea begins to look counterintuitive.

What, then, is the answer to the equation if both Weber and Suter can't fit under Nashville's cap? The difference between Weber's upcoming RFA status and Suter's UFA status may be the deciding factor here. If another GM wants to shoot Nashville an offer sheet for Weber this offseason, they would stand to lose at least two first round draft picks because of the high salary Weber would command. As we saw this past summer, GMs are very reluctant to offer sheet high-priced RFAs for this exact reason, thus giving Weber more certainty to be back next year. Should the Predators find themselves out of contention by the trading deadline, shopping Ryan Suter could fetch a ton of offers for a playoff run because of his affordable $3.5 million cap hit. While a trade may be the best option moving forward, if Nashville is in the playoff picture it seems less likely any deal would happen. Should Suter decide to test the UFA waters come July, the Preds may lose out on receiving compensation for his departure. If it became clear that he wasn't going to re-sign, they could trade his negotiating rights before July 1 but any return would be less than what they could get at the deadline.

Regardless of what happens to both defenseman this summer, there is no way around the fact that having Weber and Suter on the ice is a heavy positive for the Predators. While Nashville ownership claims to be making every effort to re-sign them both, having the Rinne contract on the books will make it extremely difficult. At the end of the day, $7 million is an astronomical salary for a goaltender, especially for a team on an internal budget. Without taking nearly all of that salary and pouring it into better options up front, it may be awhile before we see Nashville capable of producing a positive shot differential per 60 minutes at even strength. In the end, it was GOB who said it best:

Next up will be JaredL delivering your statistics fix by taking taking a deeper look into the actual values of Rinne and other goaltenders to their teams.

October Trends, A Week Late and Possibly A Dollar Short

2011-11-05T12:53:00.003-04:00

I don't know if there was an equivalent in hockey for all you Canadian readers, but as a child I loved summer Sundays. That was the day the newspaper printed the statistics of all the baseball teams. Some guy I never heard of was hitting .353 - fascinating! Why's so and so hitting so poorly? It's easy to forget what it was like without having access to all the information you want, all the time. We're so awash in data that talking heads are constantly spinning narratives about what a particular hot or cold streak means. Well, I'm here to tell you what they actually mean.

I was doing some clicking around for this year so far, now that we're more than an eighth of the way through the NHL season - narratives are already emerging. I intend to make this a monthly column, and next time I won't think of the idea on the 4th of the month.

The Red Wings Stink Right Now

Will This Continue? No

Why: The beginning of the season is when people notice things. A team on a 105 point pace having a mediocre 10 game stretch in February gets noticed, but it's not alarming. That team is still a big favorite to make the playoffs. Anyway, the Wings' problem is simple - they're getting the shots but they're not going in. It's almost impossible to win consistently in this league shooting 5% at even strength, as the Wings are so far this year. During the Wings' losing streak, they're shooting 1.9% at evens - it's almost impossible to win this way.

Since I wrote the above, the Wings spanked the Anaheim Ducks, both on the scoreboard and territorially. They're going to be just fine.

Michael Grabner Is Perhaps Not The Tactical Genius I Thought He Was

Will This Continue? Yes

Why: Fortune favors the bold; predictors of others' fortunes doubly so. That's an Edward De Vere original quote that I just made up. Whatever the case, Michael Grabner's having a rough start to the season. 11 games, 3 goals, 0 assists, -4. What's most alarming are Grabner's 17 shots on goal through his first 11 games. I think Grabner will continue to be a play driver and dangerous forward, but I am not convinced that he is an elite player. I would not be shocked to see him end this year with 35 points over a full season.

Manny Malhotra Is Looking Like The Player The Rangers Threw Away for Martin Rucinsky

Will This Continue? Kind Of

Why: Manny Malhotra currently has 0 goals and is a -10 on the season. Last year, many close observers of hockey felt he should win the Selke Trophy. Malhotra starts his shifts in the defensive zone more often than just about any player in hockey - right now he has a Zone Start of 24.8%. Last year somehow he was a plus player in spite of this usage, but that was in part because of a .944 SV% while on the ice at even strength. I don't expect that to continue - while Malhotra will likely finish the year at or around -10 (right now his SV% ON is .844), it's really difficult to maintain a positive plus-minus when you're behind the eight ball that often.

Trends To Watch Out For:

Anaheim and Nashville do not look like playoff teams so far this year

While the Leafs are riding a ridiculous hot streak, they are also better than last season

Evander Kane just might be ready to break out

Triumph might write his post about playoff teams' records against non-playoff teams

Splitting Up Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook

2011-11-03T02:12:00.003-04:00

Outside of Patrick Kane's impressive move to the middle, perhaps the biggest story in Chicago's impressive 7-2-2 start has been Joel Quenneville's decision to split up Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook. The natural reaction to a coaching move so major is curiosity - why would the Blackhawks decide to split up one of the game's best pairs?

Depth

The most obvious explanation is that the move is Joel Quenneville's way of mitigating the loss of Brian Campbell. On a simple level, separating Keith and Seabrook ensures the Blackhawks will play the vast majority of their even strength minutes with at least one of their superstars on the ice, especially given Nick Leddy's relative inexperience in playing top-4 minutes.

Development

It's pretty obvious that the organization is high on Leddy (Scotty Bowman compared Leddy to Phil Housley), and I can't help but think that their confidence in his ability to eventually play top-4 minutes helped to ease the blow of trading Brian Campbell, as evidenced by the team choosing not to sign or trade for any top-4 defensemen (I believe Montador was primarily signed to solidify the bottom pair, though he obviously has shown the ability to do well in a heavier role).

I think the surprise comes not from Leddy's presence in the top-4, but mostly from who is primary defense partner has been.

Strategy/Usage

I'll note from the outset that using QualComp or any variant thereof is useless at this point in the season. There is just too much variance in strength of schedule to draw inferences from those numbers. What I will use instead is PBP data (h/t Jared).

The first section of data only focuses on Zone Starts and their Corsi numbers based off of where they started a shift.

Keith-Leddy	% of TOI	Corsi Rate
Ozone Faceoff	13.6%	33.277
All neutral	79%	3.127
Dzone Faceoff	7.4%	-38.889

Seabs-Hjalm	% of TOI	Corsi Rate
Ozone Faceoff	13.3%	47.872
All neutral	74.6%	12.54
Dzone Faceoff	12.1%	-28.18

From here we can see that the Seabrook/Hjalmarsson line is much more likely to take a defensive zone draw. We can also see that the Seabrook/Hjalmarsson pairing has performed much better territorially, no matter the situation.

As I said above, I am not using QualComp or any variant of QualComp to adjust for the toughness of the minutes. Instead, I'll use forward pairing as a proxy, as the roles in which Chicago forwards are used are pretty rigid. As we can see below, the Keith/Leddy pairing is most often used alongside Jonathan Toews and Patrick Sharp in any situation. As for Seabrook/Hjalmarsson, the forward they play with most often is David Bolland.

Ozone	Keith-Leddy	Seabs-Hjalm
Toews	41.8%	30.6%
Kane	37.9%	21.9%
Sharp	44.8%	22.5%
Hossa	31.8%	12.8%
Bolland	12.6%	39.4%
None of above	5.5%	14.1%

Neutral	Keith-Leddy	Seabs-Hjalm
Toews	32.7%	19.6%
Kane	38.2%	26%
Sharp	33%	15.3%
Hossa	33.6%	23.1%
Bolland	14.1%	44.6%
None of above	16.4%	8.8%

Dzone	Keith-Leddy	Seabs-Hjalm
Toews	33.3%	10.3%
Kane	32.3%	21.2%
Sharp	47.1%	4.6%
Hossa	23.6%	21.1%
Bolland	21.9%	62.7%
None of above	9.1%	6.8%

As I briefly mentioned above, I believe we can validly infer that the Seabrook/Hjalmarsson pairing has played tougher minutes, mainly because of how much more likely they were to play with David Bolland, whose role for the Blackhawks is well-defined as a shutdown Center. If you guys feel this is an unreasonable assumption, let me know.

Results

Here are the results of the three centers, along with the rest of the ice time, with the Keith/Leddy and Seabrook/Hjalmarsson pairings. As you can see, the Seabrook/Hjalmarsson pairing has gotten better Corsi results with each of the top three lines in the small sample we have.

Forward	Pairing	Corsi/60	Time
Toews	KL	6.063	49.5
Toews	SH	21.352	28.1
Kane	KL	7.643	55
Kane	SH	22.222	35.1
Bolland	KL	2.841	21.1
Bolland	SH	10.154	65
None	KL	-2.857	21
None	SH	-4.604	13

Conclusions/Recommendations

To be honest there are numerous explanations for why the Keith/Leddy pairing hasn't performed as well as the Seabrook/Hjalmarsson pairing. The first is that Seabrook/Hjalmarsson have played together more (in previous seasons) than Keith/Leddy have and the disparity is largely driven by a lack of familiarity. The second is that Nick Leddy isn't as good (yet) as Keith, Seabrook, or Hjalmarsson - it is possible that Leddy is dragging Keith down a bit. Finally, this could merely be variance.

As for my recommendation, I honestly see no issue with keeping these pairings together. As I noted above, all 4 players are off to solid starts, and while there is no doubting the chemistry and effectiveness in a pairing of Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook, the fact that the Keith/Leddy pairing has done as well as it has speaks volumes to both of those players. The eye test leads me to believe reason #1 above is the best explanation for why there has been a disparity in their possession totals. I believe that as the Keith/Leddy pair grows and each player becomes more comfortable with each other, the net result for the Hawks will be positive, couple that with the long-term developmental benefit of pairing Keith and Leddy, and I see no issue with continuing this pair.

A Short Note On Second Contracts

2011-10-31T14:55:00.005-04:00

I should've posted this last week, but the David Booth trade was interesting to me for a few reasons. If you recall, and who would in this information overload society, the trade was:

From FLA: David Booth, VAN's 3rd round pick

From VAN: Mikael Samuelsson, Marco Sturm

The things that are interesting:

- Vancouver dealt a player they signed in the off-season. Marco Sturm played exactly 6 games for Vancouver before being dealt. That's rare, but I suspect it will become slightly more common.

- Vancouver took more risk in the deal despite getting the younger player. David Booth is only 26, soon to be 27, but taking on his contract which has 3 more years after this one on it, is without question a large gamble. If he tanks, that contract may be difficult to move. Meanwhile, both Sturm and Samuelsson are on the final years of their contracts, and both could probably be moved at the trade deadline for extra draft picks.

The second contract can be an albatross just as much as a contract on a late 30s player. Take Derick Brassard, a player fighting for ice time in Columbus. He's getting less than 15 minutes a game, despite having been signed to 4 year, 12.8 million dollar contract. In the old days, a player like Brassard would never command that kind of money, and would almost certainly be in another organization by this point. This is something to keep an eye on as we see more and more of these enormous second contracts - some players will be cap albatrosses at 25, and some players' careers will be significantly hurt by contracts they sign at age 21 or 22.

How Much of Shooting Percentage Is Skill?

2011-10-29T13:56:00.007-04:00

The correct answer, as it is for most questions, is "it depends." In this case, on sample size.

In a recent post at Arctic Ice Hockey, the indispensable Gabe Desjardins argued that we should move away from working on metrics for shot quality because there isn't much payoff. This has motivated me to write a follow up on an article I wrote a couple months ago on how luck vs skill influence shooting percentage based on sample size. In that article, I took two teams, one above average and one below average at shooting, and examined how likely the good team is to shoot at a higher percentage for a given numbers of shots. Here I will look at how much variation in shooting percentage is explained by skill and luck for different numbers of shots.

Methodology

My methodology is a sort of mirror image of what JLikens did in his article on the same subject and Vic Ferrari's imaginary dice rolling. JLikens assumed each team had the same real shooting percentage and ran simulations to see how much variation in results there would be after a season worth of even-strength shots. In my simulations I will create a distribution of shooting talent and see how much that skill explains variation in results for a given number of shots.

Here are the steps:
- Going by this more recent JLikens article in each of 10,000 simulations I created 30 teams by drawing a shooting percentage from Beta(263,2977), a distribution pretty close to that of actual even-strength team shooting skill in the NHL.
- All 30 teams take the same number of shots, which score a goal or not based on the probability given by the team's shooting skill.
- For each simulation, I calculate the R^2 between shooting percentage on those shots and the shooting talent of the teams. The average of these tells us how much variation in shooting percentage results is explained by shooting ability.
- The rest is luck.

Results

Here is a table with the results. The first column is the time period in question. The second is the number of shots each team took in the simulations. The third column is the percentage of variation in even-strength shooting-percentage results that is explained by the skill component - the average R^2 of all simulations. The last column is simply 100% minus that and represents the percentage of variation that is due to random chance, luck if you will.

Time Period	Shots	Skill	Luck
Season to today	250	9.9%	90.1%
1/4 season	500	15.7%	84.3%
half season	1,000	25.1%	74.9%
1 season	2,000	38.9%	61.1%
2 seasons	4,000	55.4%	44.6%
3 seasons	6,000	64.9%	35.1%
4 seasons	8,000	70.9%	29.1%
5 seasons	10,000	75.3%	24.7%
6 seasons	12,000	78.4%	21.6%
7 seasons	14,000	80.9%	19.1%
8 seasons	16,000	82.9%	17.1%
9 seasons	18,000	84.5%	15.5%
10 seasons	20,000	86%	14%

Here's a graph:

Put in words, at this point in the season shooting results are 90% luck and 10% skill. This is likely an underestimate, as I'll discuss below. Over a whole season it goes to a little over 60% random chance. It takes about 140 games worth of shots for results to be 50/50.

Some thoughts

I'm making several assumptions that are not valid. The biggest and most obviously dubious is that shooting-percentage skill will be the same for every shot. In reality, if a team shoots at an 8.5% clip their top line will shoot higher, their fourth line lower, they'll do better against weaker opponents and worse against good goaltenders and so on. Injuries, trades, free agency and coaching changes are obviously a big issue as well. On a related note, I assume that each team takes the same number of shots. In practice, teams obviously take more or fewer shots than average over a given stretch. To make things more problematic, it is probably the case that teams that shoot more often tend to be better at making their shots. One thing all of these factors have in common is that they will increase the randomness factor. Think of the above estimates as lower bounds on how much luck explains variation in shooting percentage or an upper bound for how much skill matters.

A Contract I Actually Like: Martin Hanzal

2011-10-26T14:02:00.000-04:00

Two days before the Phoenix Coyotes were set to open the 2011-2012 regular season, they announced the signing of Martin Hanzal to a brand-new 5 year, $15.5 million contract extension. Though it wasn’t earth-shattering news and most likely ignored by the majority of NHL fans, there are a few things that stand out making this deal very good for the Coyotes.

1. Term

Hanzal was scheduled to become a restricted free agent after this season. Under the current terms of the CBA, he would have been eligible for unrestricted free agency status after the 2013-14 season, his 7th in the league. Rather than risk the (slim) possibility of another GM firing an offer sheet his way, Phoenix was able to buy the rest of his RFA eligibility and an additional three seasons of UFA status.

2. Salary

Hanzal’s extension will earn him an average annual salary of $3.1 million, his number against the cap. Because he was set to become a restricted free agent, Phoenix had the luxury of exclusive control over Hanzal and did a good job not to overpay for his services. Regardless of how the cap is drawn up in the next CBA, Hanzal's cap hit will not tie up a significant portion of Phoenix's money, always a plus for teams operating with an internal budget.

3. On-Ice Production

Speaking of said services, let’s take a look at exactly what Hanzal brings to the table. Per NHL.com, here are Hanzal's ice time numbers from his first four seasons:

Year	Age	GP	ES TOI/Game	PP TOI/Game	PK TOI/Game	TOT TOI/Game
07-08	20	72	12:49	2:43	1:11	16:44
08-09	21	74	12:48	0:48	2:44	16:21
09-10	22	81	14:16	2:05	2:06	18:28
10-11	23	61	14:22	3:00	2:07	19:30

As we can see, Hanzal is playing in every possible situation for Phoenix, the very definition of versatility. What is more, Hanzal entered the league garnering top-6 minutes and steadily increased his ice time to become the team's leader last season. How has Hanzal handled these assignments? Upon first glance, his point totals don't seem to be passing the test of a top-6 forward:

Year	Age	GP	ES G (Team Rank)	ES A (Team Rank)	ES Pts (Team Rank)	PP G (Team Rank)	PP A (Team Rank)	PP Pts (Team Rank)
07-08	20	72	6 (7)	16 (5)	22 (6)	1 (9)	11 (3)	12 (T-5)
08-09	21	74	9 (6)	17 (T-4)	26 (T-5)	0 (T-14)	2 (T-8)	2 (T-10)
09-10	22	81	9 (T-8)	18 (5)	27 (T-7)	2 (T-7)	4 (7)	6 (T-7)
10-11	23	61	9 (T-7)	10 (10)	19 (T-9)	7 (3)	0 (T-11)	7 (4)

However, Hanzal is yet another case where applying proper context is vital to determine his value. If we take a look at some key numbers thanks to Behind The Net, Time on Ice and Eric T., we find an entirely different story:

Year	Age	GP	CorsiRelQoC (League Rank - Min 20 GP)	Balanced Corsi	Balanced Corsi Rel	Zone Start %	Zone Finish %	Corsi/60	ZS Adjusted Corsi	Score-Tied Fenwick %
07-08	20	72	0.873 (37)	4.56	4.66	47.1	49.1	-1.52	-0.998	52.8
08-09	21	74	1.177 (7)	3.29	11.29	38.4	45.5	-5.76	-3.672	45.5
09-10	22	81	1.006 (11)	7.61	3.07	46.6	50.9	4.9	5.512	54.3
10-11	23	61	0.837 (21)	9.2	8.3	46.5	49.1	7.1	7.73	52.8

During his rookie year, Hanzal was thrown to the wolves at even strength, facing the 37th toughest CorsiRelQoC score in the entire league. He hasn't slowed down since, routinely showing up on the list of players who face the league's elite night-in and night-out. His Balanced Corsi scores show that he is performing well above his expectation pushing the play forward in these situations, handling extremely tough assignments with relative ease. Though his Power Play stats have been less than impressive, Phoenix has never ranked above 19th in SF/60 on the PP during Hanzal's time in the desert. Regardless, his excellent play at even strength means that Phoenix will have a young and versatile tough-minutes forward locked up no matter where the franchise finds itself at the expiration of the contract.

On the Chris Kunitz Extension

2011-10-25T14:32:00.003-04:00

Since there is no time like two weeks after it was signed, let's take a look at the Chris Kunitz contract extension.

The Terms

Kunitz's current cap hit of $3.75M was extended for another 2 years with salary to match. There are a couple things to note about this. For one, it was signed at the start of the season, a practice Triumph discussed in a recent post. From the Pens' perspective, this opens them up to risk in case Kunitz gets an injury or is otherwise drastically less productive this year than he has been in recent years. I don't think this is quite as bad for the Penguins as other teams since they should be willing to spend over the cap by burying his contract if necessary. On the positive side of things, Shero doesn't risk Kunitz testing the free-agent market which could drive his price up.

Kunitz's age is a factor here. At 32 it seems likely that his skills will start to decline. Based on that, it may be surprising that he's not taking a salary cut but you have to remember the salary cap. The first season of his current deal, 2008-2009, the salary cap was $56.7 million. It is currently at $64.3M so his cap hit is down from 6.6% of the salary cap to 5.8%. Putting it in 2009 cap-hit dollars would make his salary $3.3 million, so it is a small drop.

Pittsburgh's Cap Situation

The Penguins are a unique team due to having Crosby, Malkin and to some extent Staal down the middle. I'll discuss the player-evaluation side of that later, but there are major salary-cap implications as well. Next offseason looks pretty standard as far as the cap goes, but bombs are about to fall on the Pens' cap situation. Here are the major players hitting unrestricted free agency, their current cap hit and the summer they become free agents.

Player	Cap Hit $M	Year
Sidney Crosby	8.7	2013
Jordan Staal	4	2013
Evgeni Malkin	8.7	2014
Kris Letang	3.5	2014
Brooks Orpik	3.75	2014
Chris Kunitz	3.75	2014

Orpik seems like the odd man out there, but the rest of that group figures to get a raise and to be honest it's hard to see Shero being able to keep all of them together. In any case, cap space will be at a premium those seasons and Kunitz's contract runs out the summer after Crosby and Staal would need to be re-signed.

Even-Strength Production

The traditional fans would discuss his leadership and Cup experience helping tremendously in the 2009 Cup run. As important as that may have been, I prefer to look at measurable contributions.

Due especially to Crosby, one needs to take a with-or-without-you (WOWY) approach to analyze the production of wingers for the Penguins. Kunitz is a good example of that; he has spent more than half his time in Pittsburgh on Crosby's wing. Here is a table of the Corsi rate for Crosby, Malkin, Staal and none of those with and without Kunitz, as well as the time in minutes that Kunitz spent with them. I'm excluding time where two of Crosby, Malkin and Staal were on the ice together.

Center	w/ Kunitz	w/out Kunitz	with TOI (m)
Crosby	10.17	4.912	808.3
Malkin	5.093	-5.336	141.4
Staal	16.665	5.867	302.4
None	3.484	2.025	223.9

As you can see, Kunitz improved every line. Crosby's Corsi rate was nearly twice as high when Kunitz was beside him and in smaller samples Malkin and Staal's production was substantially higher with him. I should point out that Malkin's possession numbers without Crosby were drastically better in his shortened 2010-2011 season than previous years and over half of Kunitz's time with Malkin was last year. Kunitz gets some credit for that, but it seems like Malkin was better as well. The fourth line got marginally better results.

It's pretty clear that Kunitz has been a big boost.

Two Potential Concerns: Injuries and Scoring

In the summer, Pensburgh wrote a nice summary of both Kunitz's injuries and scoring with the Penguins. For a left winger, his points totals have been underwhelming due in part to his injuries. According to this guideline at PPP, an average first-line left winger would put in 27 goals. In the last three seasons, Kunitz put up 23, 13 and 23 goals. Going to points, the average for a first line left wing is 50 and Kunitz put up 48, 32 and 53 the last three years. So he's somewhere between an average first-line winger and an average second-line winger when it comes to scoring. A big reason for this is obviously missing significant time the last two years.

Another factor is that Kunitz's individual points percentage is nothing to write home about. He registered a goal or assist on 69.4% of all 5-on-5 goals scored with him on the ice, 7th highest among forwards on the team. This combined with his Corsi numbers make sense given his role - he is important in driving play, helping to move the puck into the offensive zone and keep it there, but Crosby is typically the man with the puck in the attacking end. I don't think his somewhat low scoring for a first-line winger is an issue given his role.

The Verdict

Overall, I think it's a good deal for both sides. Kunitz has been a very good role player the last 2+ seasons for the Penguins. While he is on the wrong side of 30, it seems reasonable to expect a similar level over the life of the contract. Injury concerns and his contract ending the season after Crosby and Staal are due to sign their extensions keep me from saying it is a great deal for the Pens, but even Shero would have to spend some money on wingers.

Zone Start Adjustments: A Rejected Idea

2011-10-24T16:46:00.009-04:00

We got a lot of feedback from my recent article going over a method for adjusting for zone starts. Among the suggestions was actually my initial idea which I later rejected - look at the player's Corsi rate in each situation and weight them using average ice time in each situation. I rejected this idea in favor of the reverse - use the player's ice time and the league average Corsi rate in each situation to determine what the average player would get with the player's ice time and subtract that. In this article, I will discuss my initial idea, why I rejected it and how the results differ. The good news is that both methodologies yield quite similar results.

The idea is to use each player's Corsi rate in each type of start - the first shift after an offensive-zone faceoff, time after offensive-zone faceoffs but where a change has been made, time after neutral-zone faceoffs, time after defensive-zone faceoffs following a change and the first shift following a defensive-zone faceoff. Take those rates, assume the player has average ice time and you get an idea what that player's Corsi would be with even starts. To see how it works in practice, let's use the player that made me rethink things, Dan Carcillo.

Here are Carcillo's numbers in each zone:

Dan Carcillo	Corsi / 60
Ozone - faceoff shift	67.071
Ozone - after change	-0.777
Neutral Zone	-15.666
Dzone - after change	-13.988
Dzone - faceoff shift	-64.128

Here is the average percentage of minutes in each type of start:

Ozone - faceoff	11.4%
Ozone - change	19.3%
Neutral	38.7%
Dzone - change	19.3%
Dzone - faceoff	11.4%

Averaging using those percentages as weights, gives us -8.574. In other words, if Carcillo got the results he did in each type of start and faced average time his ES Corsi rate would be -8.574. That seems pretty reasonable, the fancy thing I came up with last time put him at -9.956 and his even-strength Corsi rate was -11.441 with a 5-on-5 ozone% of 40.6 according to BTN.

The part that concerned me is that Carcillo's Corsi rate the first shift in the offensive zone was 67.071. He played 38 such minutes, which is a small sample and puts him 595th in such time but he did play 57 games last year. Someone playing a decent number of games and getting 40% ozone starts is just the kind of player we'd likely be the most interested in finding adjustments for. Among players with his ozone faceoff shift time or more, Carcillo had the 12th highest Corsi in the league the first shift after an offensive-zone faceoff. This fails the eye test and his ice time is an indication - he was only 21st on the Flyers at PP time.

This raises a theoretical problem with the metric - we are taking the average of five averages, some of which have very small sample sizes. Eric T from BSH suggested lumping in all the situations which are more-or-less neutral - neutral-zone faceoffs and time after faceoffs at either end after a change has been made. That's a great suggestion, which I'll look into later, but time the first shift after a faceoff at either end is the most problematic so it won't help. For Carcillo, it's very clear that his numbers are skewed for that first average. In contrast to the idea I proposed last week, the methodology of averaging averages will lead to bigger problems with small samples. It's not surprising that Carcillo's numbers in the rejected metric are better than the version that made the cut.

What's the Difference?

While I didn't know this at the time I published my article last week, I was quite happy to see that there is very little difference between the two ways of adjusting for zone starts for players that have played a decent amount. Here is a graph with the Zone Start Adjusted Corsi using the methodology I put forward about a week ago and the rejected idea I've discussed in this article for all players with at least 300 minutes of even-strength ice time last year. Needless to say, they are extremely similar.

Given how little difference there is in results, I think the better method to use is the one in the previous article - subtract off what the league average Corsi player would get with the player's ice time. It should do better with the smaller samples common in one season.

Here is a link to a google spreadsheet with ZSAC and ZSAC2, which is the methodology discussed here. I've also included the Corsi rate for each player following offensive-zone starts, defensive-zone starts and in neutral situations.

On The Practice Of Signing Players To Contracts A Year Before Their Current Contract Expires

2011-10-18T13:05:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday of last week, the Boston Bruins announced that they've signed Rich Peverley to a 3-year contract extension. On Thursday of last week, Pittsburgh announced that Chris Kunitz had agreed to a two year extension. This in itself isn't really news - teams are signing players 365 days a year. But that trend is news - teams are now much more willing to negotiate with players a year in advance, even players who aren't superstars.

According to the CBA, a player signed to a multi-year contract can sign a new contract beginning on July 1 the year before his current contract expires. A player signed to a one-year contract is eligible to sign a new deal beginning on January 1 before his deal expires.

Unfortunately, the Internet isn't that good at logging contracts before 2008, but the thing that's interesting to me is that we're not just seeing star players sign deals a year before their current one expires - 'star' players who've done this recently include Zdeno Chara, Tyler Myers, Chris Pronger, and Marc Savard. We continue to see it even though there are plenty of cautionary tales for both player and team - Marc Savard took his brutal blindside hit from Matt Cooke later in that season, and has only managed to play 25 games under his new deal. It's very likely that Savard will never play again. We've also seen the player get screwed over - Jeff Carter was traded from Philadelphia to Columbus before the 11 year deal he signed with Philly even took effect. It's very likely that had Carter not signed that deal, he would not have been worth the 1st round pick and Jakub Voracek that Philadelphia acquired in exchange for Carter - Columbus would have had no idea whether he wanted to stay there. Now he's stuck there.

What's more interesting to me is that this trend has trickled down to less important players. I already mentioned Peverley, but the Capitals locked up Jason Chimera for 2 more years a few weeks ago. Why? I don't know. Chimera played 13 minutes a game last season. Still, the Capitals saw fit to give him a 2 year deal worth 1.75M per season that doesn't take effect until next year.

Let's look at the pros and cons of this move from the team's perspective.

Pros

Get The Player Locked Up - This is self-evident, but it needs mentioning. There's no need to scour the trade market or free agency at season's end, you know this guy is going to be on your team.

Perhaps Get A Discount? - The earlier a player is signed, the more vague next season's cap number will be. If a player is signed in July of the year before his contract expires, he and the team will likely be negotiating a contract based on the current year's salary cap number. The cap has gone up every year, and only once by an insignificant amount - the team is likely gaining some sort of savings. Remember, for teams that have effectively unlimited budgets (Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Philadelphia, New York R., Washington, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo), this is huge - it's not a question of how much money you spend, but how much money you spend relative to the cap. If a guy is theoretically worth 1/30th of the cap today, and also worth 1/30th of the cap next season, signing him at 1/30th of the cap now means that he will be more valuable next season when the cap rises - there's going to be $X additional dollars available in the budget.

Give The Player Additional Trade Value - There's a sizable portion of the NHL that has trouble attracting free agents. Either the team is bad or plays in an undesirable place. It's disingenuous for teams to sign players to contracts they have no intention of honoring, but it's a practice I expect to see more and more often. If you're a team that struggles to sign players, getting a guy who's been extended is almost certainly more favorable than getting a rental.

As More Teams Adopt This Policy, The Price of All Available Free Agents Rises - This seems a tad paradoxical, but bear with me. Each early signing takes another potential body off the market. It also incrementally raises the price for each body that ends up on the market - teams always need players, and since there are so many teams who effectively don't have a salary cap, those teams are always looking to improve if they have available dollars. Furthermore, a team that loses a player to free agency will often try to replace that player via free agency. Demand always outstrips supply when it comes to free agency.

This leaves teams in a bind - they may want to risk that their potential UFA player gets to market for fear of overpaying him. On the other hand, they may already see that potential replacements either aren't on the market now, or quite possibly won't be on the market when July 1 rolls around. Furthermore, even if their replacements are on the market, they may well be overpriced because of demand. One would think that the market would correct for this, that players would recognize that they figure to make a lot more money by waiting until July 1 and playing all the bidders against one another. However, it's become clear in the salary cap world that not every player is out for the biggest dollar amount - many are willing to give up the promise of potential dollars if they're being compensated fairly and they're comfortable on the team, in the city, etc. The players who are unhappy in their current situation are the ones who figure to reap the greatest financial rewards.

Cons

Risk. We've already seen more than one of these deals go bad. I don't think the Bruins are being significantly affected by the Savard signing, but it can still be a pain to work around these things, as it can dry up the amount of cap room a team has at the deadline. Yes, it's true, if you have a player on injured reserve, you can replace his salary with People yelled and screamed about the Flyers never getting anyone at the deadline from 2008 to 2010, but that was for a simple reason - they had all kinds of dead IR money on their cap preventing them from banking cap space and thus discouraging them from making any but the most minor of moves. That's of course not the only risk - the other risk is that the player's performance declines precipitously. or that they suffer a calamitous injury before their current contract is up. Tom Poti was signed to an extension by the Capitals during last season's training camp and has played 21 games since then. It's thought that he may have to retire.

That's really the only downside, though, and for teams who figure to spend near the cap, it's not much of one. I expect to see more and more of these signings going forward.

I can see why teams are locking up young players like Tavares, Van Riemsdyk, and Myers to contracts like this - it's entirely possible that those players will improve greatly this season, making their value difficult to ascertain. The player and the team are each taking some risk there (with the exception of Van Riemsdyk since that contract is insane). However, with older players, the risk is more on the team than on the player - the player probably isn't passing up very much money by signing early. We've already seen some of these deals go bust before they start - it will be interesting to see which teams are either emboldened by success or dissuaded by failure with these sorts of contracts, and who's still signing them several years from now.

Part III: The Aftermath of the Mike Richards and Jeff Carter Deals

2011-10-16T19:05:00.003-04:00

Earlier this summer, I wrote extensively on the deals that sent Mike Richards and Jeff Carter from ~~dry island~~ Philadelphia to L. A. and Columbus respectively, promising a trilogy of sorts. After looking at what the Flyers gained in both the trades and free agency, the final step is to evaluate what the Flyers lost in those deals. While this post is certainly long overdue, the aftermath of last night’s 3-2 Kings victory over the Flyers in their only meeting this season seems like the perfect remaining opportunity to bring closure to this saga.

Beginning with my familiar approach, let’s take a look at both Richards and Carter’s average ice time from last season per nhl.com:

Player	Games Played	ES TOI/Game	Team Rank	PP TOI/Game	Team Rank	SH TOI/Game	Team Rank	Total TOI/G	Team Rank
Richards	81	13:47	4	2:56	3	2:08	3	18:52	2
Carter	80	14:39	2	2:56	4	0:39	6	18:14	4

Unsurprisingly, we see that both guys gave the Flyers a good chunk of minutes in all situations. With the exception of Carter’s reduced role on the PK thanks to the emergence of Darroll Powe, Flyers head coach Peter Laviolette was not afraid to send out either player when he felt he needed a boost in any particular area of the ice. In order to give these minutes their proper context, we will begin by looking into where both players stacked up amongst Flyer forwards in point production, once again thanks to nhl.com:

Player	ES G (Team Rank)	ES A (Team Rank)	ES Pts (Team Rank)	PP G/A/Pts	PP A (Team Rank)	PP Pts (Team Rank)
Richards	15 (T-5)	24 (4)	39 (6)	5 (T-4)	16 (1)	21 (1)
Carter	28 (T-1)	21 (5)	49 (3)	8 (1)	9 (T-3)	17 (3)

As we can see, both players seemed to match their top-6 ice time with top-6 scoring numbers both at even strength and on the power play. If we take a look at a few more key statistics according to Behind the Net and Time on Ice, it will become quite apparent why Richards and Carter are so good at what they do:

Player	Corsi ON	CorsiRel	Score-Tied Fenwick %	CorsiRelQoC	SF/60	Zone Start %	Zone Finish %
Richards	-1.23	1.1	53.6	0.752	30.6	46.8	50.1
Carter	3.34	7.8	50.5	0.896	29.2	43.8	51.9

Breaking these numbers down, beginning with Richards, his negative Corsi score is perhaps the first thing that stands about his totals. However, if we judge his performance according to Eric T.’s Balanced Corsi, we see that according to his zone start he is actually around 3 shots better per 60 minutes than we might expect. His balanced zone shift is also a little higher than we might expect, and if we couple this data with his extremely impressive 53.6% Fenwick with the score tied, there is a lot here to suggest that Richards is carrying the water at even strength.

Moving to Carter, his totals are just as impressive. Carter actually was put in tougher defensive spots than Richards, and his Corsi ON score is a little more than 4 shots higher per 60 minutes. His Balanced Corsi is around 7 shots higher than what we might expect from a player put in similar situations, and his BZS is around 3 percent to the good. His Fenwick score, though lower than Richards still suggests that he was also doing a major part driving the play forward for the Flyers considering his zone starts.

What is even more impressive is that the above analysis doesn’t even take into account the elephant in the room: quality of competition. Below is a chart of the toughest CorsiRelQoC scores of every player listed as a Center on Behind the Net last season, minimum 20 games played:

Rank	Player	Team	CorsiRelQoC
1	BRANDONDUBINSKY	NYR	1.436
2	ARTEMANISIMOV	NYR	1.412
3	HENRIKZETTERBERG	DET	1.383
4	DAVEBOLLAND	CHI	1.353
5	PAVELDATSYUK	DET	1.175
6	BRIANROLSTON	N.J	1.084
7	JORDANSTAAL	PIT	1.037
8	PATRICEBERGERON	BOS	1.026
9	OLLIJOKINEN	CGY	1.006
10	STEPHENWEISS	FLA	1.004
11	PATRICKMARLEAU	S.J	0.998
12	NATETHOMPSON	T.B	0.973
13	MARCUSJOHANSSON	WSH	0.953
14	BROOKSLAICH	WSH	0.95
15	BRADMARCHAND	BOS	0.921
16	DAVIDBACKES	STL	0.907
17	JEFFCARTER	PHI	0.896
18	TOMASPLEKANEC	MTL	0.895
19	SAKUKOIVU	ANA	0.879
20	DARRYLBOYCE	TOR	0.857
21	MARTINHANZAL	PHX	0.837
22	JERREDSMITHSON	NSH	0.83
23	STEVEOTT	DAL	0.809
24	DAVIDLEGWAND	NSH	0.805
25	PAULSTASTNY	COL	0.802
26	MIKERIBEIRO	DAL	0.8
27	MARTYREASONER	FLA	0.796
28	BRENDANMORRISON	CGY	0.771
29	MIKERICHARDS	PHI	0.752
30	JORDANCARON	BOS	0.745

Both Richards and Carter show up in the conversation with guys who are playing against some of the toughest players in the league. Though they may not score upwards of 80 points per season, both players are certainly producing at elite levels considering the players that they are expected to face night-in and night-out.

What is more, thanks to JaredL we are able to take a look at how the Flyers performed during the past two seasons with and without either Richards or Carter on the ice:

Player On-Ice	Corsi/60	Time (mins)	Corsi QoC
Both	3.398	211.85	0.646
Richards	1.286	2053.55	0.51
Carter	4.953	1950.467	0.386
Neither	-2.322	3514.417	-0.214

Unsurprisingly, these numbers fall in line with everything else we’ve seen – they were able to send the play in the right direction while eating the majority of the team’s tough-minute assignments. Jared was also kind enough to provide data that looks into how some of the Flyers’ other key players performed in situations both with and excluding one of Richards or Carter on the ice during the same time-frame:

Player On-Ice	With	Corsi/60	Time (mins)	Corsi QoC
Giroux	Either	4.698	1379.317	0.839
Giroux	Neither	4.204	784.9	-0.456
Briere	Either	8.912	895.383	0.069
Briere	Neither	-0.775	1238.717	0.224
Hartnell	Either	2.674	987.267	-0.576
Hartnell	Neither	-1.230	1121.883	0.329
van Riemsdyk	Either	2.194	1148.467	0.528
van Riemsdyk	Neither	4.426	704.967	-0.169

Once again, we see that no matter the situation, each player was better with one of either Richards or Carter on the ice except for James van Reimsdyk whose data has a noticeable discrepancy in quality of competition. In order for the Flyers to remain one of the premier Stanley Cup contenders in the Eastern Conference, it is looking more and more like the big line of JVR, Claude Giroux and Jaromir Jagr is going to be asked to carry the mail against top-tier competition in the absence of Richards and Carter. These numbers seem to suggest that it is certainly possible, but we will have to wait until each plays an adequate number of contests before we can finally say whether Paul Holmgren’s plan will pay off in the long run. So far, the Flyers are off to an excellent start, but Giroux & Co. will have to keep up their play in the absence of what was one of the league's most formidable one-two punches up front.

Adjusting for Zone Starts: Zone Start Adjusted Corsi

2011-10-14T12:41:00.010-04:00

In a previous article I discussed zone starts and introduced a new approach to analyzing the effect of zone starts - breaking up performance by each type of ice time: offensive zone the first shift after the faceoff, offensive zone faceoff after a change, after a neutral-zone start, defensive-zone start after an on-the-fly change and the first shift after a defensive-zone faceoff. In this article, I will introduce a metric that adjusts for zone starts and a simplified metric that provides a good rule-of-thumb for you to use when looking at BTN.

Zone Start Adjusted Corsi

The idea is simple: take a player's ice time and use the league average Corsi for each type of start to determine what an average player's Corsi would be with the same ice time. Subtracting that off will give you how much he is above, or below, what the average player would get with his ice time. To see how this works, let's look at the poster child for zone-start adjustment, Manny Malhotra. Here is a chart summarizing Malhotra's time in each start, along with his Corsi numbers:

Manny Malhotra	Time (mins)	Corsi / 60
Ozone, first shift	55.2	48.913
Ozone, after change	170.8	-7.376
Neutral Zone	340.3	-6.524
Dzone, after change	142.3	-13.073
Dzone, first shift	178.7	-31.234
All Time	887.2	-9.265

Here are the league averages for each type of ice time:

League Average	Corsi / 60
Ozone, first shift	40.147
Ozone, after change	2.818
Neutral Zone	0
Dzone, after change	-2.818
Dzone, first shift	-40.147

Weighting by Malhotra's ice time gives us -5.496, meaning that if someone performing at the league-average level was given Mr. Malhotra's ice time he would have a Corsi of -5.496. To get Manny's Zone Start Adjusted Corsi we subtract that off, in other words add 5.496, to get -3.769.

A Rule of Thumb: Simplified Zone Start Adjusted Corsi

That's all well and good, but it would be nice to have something a little more portable. Even with all the data, I'd like to be able to just pull up BTN and get an idea how to adjust for a guy's Ozone%. To get something simpler, I recorded the Ozone% according to BTN for all of the players with at least 600 minutes of even-strength-goalies-on ice time and ran a regression to get the average adjustment for a given ozone%. Here is a scatter plot of the 508 players. The numbers on the x-axis represent how far off from 50% Ozone%, the y-axis is the size of the adjustment or the negative of what the average player would get with the same ice time:

As you can see, a simplified formula will come very close to the more complicated version above which forces us to look at the individual data. Any differences are based on how much time a player spends in the relatively neutral situations where he is jumping on the ice after a faceoff at either end. The result of this is a simple formula. To adjust for zone starts, multiply how many percentage points the player's Ozone% is from 50% by 0.18 and add or subtract accordingly. In formula, with Ozone% out of 100:

Simplified Zone Start Adjusted Corsi = Corsi/60 - (Ozone% - 50)*0.18

Another way to think about it is to add or subtract 1.8 for every 10 percentage points. So if you gave a guy with even zone starts 60% Ozone starts then we'd expect his Corsi rate to go up 1.8. If you put him in more defensive spots with just a 30% Ozone% then his Corsi will drop about 3.6.

Results:

I don't want to clutter it with a 900-row table, so I'll make a table with the top 25 and another with a few players of interest with particularly high or low Ozone%. Here is a google spreadsheet with all the Zone Start Adjusted Corsi stats from 2010-2011.

Rank	Player	Team	Pos	Zone Start Adjusted Corsi	Corsi	Time On Ice
1	Kyle Wellwood	SJS	F	22.125	22.203	462.1
2	Torrey Mitchell	SJS	F	18.504	18.336	791.9
3	Joe Pavelski	SJS	F	17.304	15.939	1039
4	Ryane Clowe	SJS	F	16.571	16.715	1148.7
5	Alexandre Picard	MTL	D	16.538	17.308	634.4
6	Mason Raymond	VAN	F	16.515	17.695	922.3
7	Ryan Kesler	VAN	F	16.509	16.588	1135.7
8	Brian Rafalski	DET	D	15.305	16.083	1033.4
9	Nikolay Zherdev	PHI	F	15.029	14.418	653.4
10	Justin Williams	LAK	F	14.843	14.717	1043.7
11	Evgeni Malkin	PIT	F	14.773	15.509	607.4
12	Sean Bergenheim	TBL	F	14.652	13.625	916
13	Tim Jackman	CGY	F	14.645	16.275	726.3
14	Viktor Stalberg	CHI	F	14.217	16.208	799.6
15	Pavel Datsyuk	DET	F	14.039	13.3	848.1
16	Logan Couture	SJS	F	13.743	14.078	1133.7
17	Alexander Steen	STL	F	13.722	14.48	1081.5
18	Jason Demers	SJS	D	13.685	13.591	1169.9
19	Mikael Backlund	CGY	F	13.376	14.034	761
20	Patrik Elias	NJD	F	13.275	13.306	1082.2
21	Mark Letestu	PIT	F	13.262	14.613	759.6
22	Tomas Holmstrom	DET	F	12.91	13.418	840.7
23	Chris Higgins	VAN	F	12.183	11.156	790.6
24	Brian Gionta	MTL	F	12.08	12.151	1185.1
25	Tyler Kennedy	PIT	F	11.813	12.581	996.8

People of interest:

Player	Team	Pos	Zone Start Adjusted Corsi	Corsi	Time On Ice
Henrik Sedin	VAN	F	7.185	11.803	1235.3
Patrick Kane	CHI	F	10.52	13.738	1139.9
Marian Gaborik	NYR	F	-7.194	-4.829	882.1
J-P Dumont	NSH	F	2.476	4.62	662.4
Ville Leino	PHI	F	-3.973	-2.187	1097.6
Manny Malhotra	VAN	F	-3.769	-9.265	887.2
Blair Betts	PHI	F	-15.221	-18.412	501.9
Steve Ott	DAL	F	-4.526	-8.346	1020.9
Jerred Smithson	NSH	F	-6.98	-10.442	965.3
Dave Bolland	CHI	F	-1.198	-3.2	806.3

Please Leave Feedback!

As this is my first effort in coming up with a new statistic, I would love some feedback on this. Does the methodology make sense? Is the Ozone% adjustment of .18 per percentage point pretty close to what you've been doing? Any and all comments appreciated.

The Driving Play Season Preview Rankings Are Revealed

2011-10-06T03:02:00.001-04:00

As the sun rises on what figures to be a classic NHL season, Matt and I figured that we'd post a table revealing each of our rankings. Without further adieu:

Team	Matt	Brent	Chase	Jared	Average	Rank	Team
Anaheim	25	20	19	24	22	1	Chicago
Boston	10	7	13	11	10.25	2	Vancouver
Buffalo	12	12	15	17	14	3	Washington
Calgary	17	18	18	15	17	4	Pittsburgh
Carolina	19	17	23	25	21	5	San Jose
Chicago	1	2	3	1	1.75	6	Detroit
Colorado	29	22	28	28	26.75	7	Los Angeles
Columbus	18	14	11	16	14.75	8	New Jersey
Dallas	27	30	24	22	25.75	9	Tampa Bay
Detroit	6	6	7	8	6.75	10	Montreal
Edmonton	30	24	30	30	28.5	11	Boston
Florida	26	23	25	23	24.25	12	Philadelphia
Los Angeles	7	13	4	6	7.5	13	Buffalo
Minnesota	20	28	22	29	24.75	14	Columbus
Montreal	8	10	10	10	9.5	15	NY Rangers
Nashville	15	19	16	13	15.75	16	Nashville
New Jersey	9	9	9	9	9	17	St. Louis
NY Rangers	14	15	12	18	14.75	18	Calgary
NY Islanders	28	21	26	27	25.5	19	Carolina
Ottawa	21	27	29	21	24.5	20	Anaheim
Philadelphia	11	11	14	12	12	21	Winnipeg
Phoenix	23	25	27	19	23.5	22	Phoenix
Pittsburgh	2	4	5	3	3.5	23	Florida
San Jose	5	5	6	4	5	24	Toronto
St. Louis	16	16	17	14	15.75	25	Ottawa
Tampa Bay	13	8	8	7	9	26	Minnesota
Toronto	24	26	21	26	24.25	27	NY Islanders
Vancouver	3	3	2	2	2.5	28	Dallas
Washington	4	1	1	5	2.75	29	Colorado
Winnipeg	22	29	20	20	22.75	30	Edmonton

Do you agree? How do you think the league will shake out? Feel free to copy and paste the following in the comments with your predictions:

Eastern Conference:

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.

Western Conference:

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.

Eastern Conference Playoffs:

1v8:
2v7:
3v6:
4v5:

Semifinals 1:
Semifinals 2:

ECF:

Western Conference Playoffs:

1v8:
2v7:
3v6:
4v5:

Semifinals 1:
Semifinals 2:

WCF:

Stanley Cup:

Driving Play Season Preview: Teams 3-1, The Stanley Cup Favorites

2011-10-05T00:34:00.002-04:00

3. Washington

Key Statistics:

Fenwick- 50.4%
Even Strength Shooting%- 7%
Even Strength Save%- .928

2010-2011 Review:

Washington's year last year was filled with up and downs. Most notable was their extended losing streak in December that provided some sweet Bruce Boudreau rants on '24/7'. After this lull however, the team played extremely well, finishing first in the Eastern Conference and second overall in total points. Unfortunately for Caps fans, the playoffs brought another early exit, as the Caps were swept in the Eastern Conference Semis, a series which was much closer than a sweep would indicate.

Offseason Changes:

Where do we start? George McPhee was a busy man this offseason, with resigning key players (Brooks Laich, Karl Alzner), fleecing teams in trades (Semyon Varlamov for a 1st round pick), signing elite goalies for a back-up's cap hit (Tomas Vokoun), and filling out the rest of his team with veteran players capable of playing tough minutes. The team added precious forward depth with the additions of Joel Ward, Troy Brouwer, and Jeff Halpern. They also bolstered their blueline with the addition of Roman Hamrlik. George McPhee took a team that was already very good and turned them into Stanley Cup favorites. The Capitals now have it all.

Key Questions for 2011-2012:

Will the Capitals be better territorially this year?

Last year the Capitals were a middle of the pack team territorially, though some of their signings are players capable of driving the play forward (Joel Ward, Troy Brouwer). It'll be interesting to see if this has any impact, as Ovechkin, Backstrom, and Semin are the only remaining forwards who can be counted on to control play.

Was last year's mediocre Power Play just variance or should it be a cause for concern?

After spending the last handful of years with one of the league's best power plays, last year's Capitals saw their success with the man advantage dwindle, posting the NHL's 16th best Power Play. Was this bad coaching or bad luck? Either way, if these problems creep back up it could be a problem, as Washington probably has less margin for error here given their relative weakness at even strength.

2. Vancouver

Key Statistics:

Fenwick- 53.9%
Even Strength Shooting%- 8.2%
Even Strength Save%- .939

2010-2011 Review:

Vancouver was the class of the NHL last year, earning 117 points on their way to winning the President's Trophy. Their postseason nearly ended in disaster before Alex Burrows scored an OT winner in Game 7 of the first round, and from there they handled Nashville and San Jose en route to their first Stanley Cup Finals appearance since 1994. The rest, as they say, is history, as Tim Thomas and the Bruins won the final two games of the series as Vancouver began to burn.

Offseason Changes:

Mike Gillis (correctly) resisted the temptation to overreact, as nearly all of their regulars return, with Christian Ehrhoff as the only key piece to leave. Marco Sturm was their most notable endeavor in UFA. Most of the offseason work came with re-signing their own players, as Kevin Bieksa, Max Lapierre, Jannik Hansen, Sami Salo, and Andrew Alberts all re-upped this summer.

Key Questions for 2011-2012:

Is Vancouver deep enough along the blueline?

This is slightly nitty, as Vancouver is clearly an elite team, but one chink in the armor is their depth along the blueline, especially after nothing was done to replace the departure of Christian Ehrhoff. If Vancouver runs into injuries which is a possibility given the history of Sami Salo and (to a lesser extent) Kevin Bieksa, there could be issues, as giving big minutes to players like Andrew Alberts and Aaron Rome is a recipe for disaster. Keith Ballard returning to form is essential.

1. Chicago

Key Statistics:

Fenwick- 54%

Even Strength Shooting%- 6.5%

Even Strength Save%- .919

2010-2011 Review:

Last season was a disappointment for the Blackhawks. Coming off a Stanley Cup and the ensuing cap hell, Chicago was really hamstrung with last year's lineup, and it showed, as players such as Fernando Pisani, Jack Skille, Jake Dowell, Nick Boynton, and Jassen Cullimore all played substantial minutes at various points throughout the season. The team got better later on after adding Chris Campoli and Michael Frolik, but still needed a lot of luck to even make the playoffs. Chicago ended up losing in 7 games to the eventual Western Conference champions.

Offseason Changes:

The Hawks FO was not shy this summer, as they moved two key cogs from the 09-10 cup run on draft night, sending Troy Brouwer to the Washington Capitals for a 1st round pick. Later that night they moved Brian Campbell to the Florida Panthers for Rostislav Olesz. The money freed from the Campbell deal was quickly put into use, as the Blackhawks then acquired and signed Steve Montador, and on July 1st, signed Andrew Brunette, Jamal Mayers, Daniel Carcillo, and Sean O'Donnell. Sami Lepisto was also signed later in the Summer.

Key Questions for 2011-2012:

Did the Blackhawks do enough to replace Brian Campbell?

While the Campbell move was a huge win from a cap management perspective, it left the Blackhawks with a huge hole on defense. The Hawks brass continues to insist that Nick Leddy is indeed ready to fill the void, but that obviously remains to be seen. Campbell played a huge role for the Blackhawks, one that was often under appreciated by certain types of Hawks fans. Chicago's possession game is predicated on quick transitions from the defensive zone to the offensive zone. Losing his skating and his offensive skills will be hard to replace. The depth should be better than last year, but the Blackhawks could find themselves in trouble if Leddy doesn't take a step forward.

Driving Play Power Rankings from 30 to 1:

30. Edmonton

29. Colorado

28. Dallas

27. New York Islanders

26. Minnesota

25. Ottawa

24. Toronto

23. Florida

22. Phoenix

21. Winnipeg

20. Anaheim

19. Carolina

18. Calgary

17. St. Louis

16. Nashville

15. New York Rangers

14. Columbus

13. Buffalo

12. Philadelphia

11. Boston

10. Montreal

9. Tampa Bay

8. New Jersey

7. Los Angeles

6. Detroit

5. Pittsburgh

4. San Jose

3. Washington

2. Vancouver

1. Chicago

Driving Play Season Preview: Teams 6-4, The Second Tier Elites

2011-10-03T13:18:00.004-04:00

6. Detroit Red Wings

Key Statistics:

Fenwick- 53.6%

Even Strength Shooting%-8.5%

Even Strength Save%-.922

2010-2011 Summary

Once again, Detroit was near the top of the league in both territorial play and in points, all this despite losing 26 games from Pavel Datsyuk, 13 games from Dan Cleary, 19 games from Brian Rafalski, and 15 games from Brad Stuart. Detroit got decent enough goaltending, as well as good years from all of their supplemental pieces. They simply ran into a slightly better team in the playoffs.

Offseason Changes

The only major move made this summer was the retirement of Brian Rafalski and his subsequent replacement with Ian White. As Triumph and I chronicled, this was a definite upgrade for Detroit. White is a superior player who comes at less than half the price. The saved cap space didn’t really come into play in further offseason moves, though it also gives Detroit a cushion if they needed to make an in-season move.

Key Questions for 2011-2012

Is Detroit deep enough along the blueline?

While Detroit features a formidable top 4, I believe there are legitimate concerns past that point, especially in the event of injury. Jonathan Ericsson took a big step backward last year, and Jakub Kindl has shown little to give the impression that he wouldn’t be overmatched playing heavy minutes. Other than that, I think forecasting Detroit’s success is pretty straightforward. This is largely the same team as years past, and every NHL fan can understand what that means.

5. Pittsburgh Penguins

Key Statistics

Fenwick- 54.3%

Even Strength Shooting%-6.8%

Even Strength Save%-.929

2010-2011 Summary

In a word: injuries. Pittsburgh’s two best players spent significant time on Injured Reserve, with Evgeni Malkin missing nearly 40 games with various knee injuries and Sidney Crosby missing 41 games after noted headhunter David Steckel viciously ran Crosby in the Winter Classic.* The Penguins still managed to put together a good season, even finishing first in the league in Fenwick, but the ability to consistently put pucks in the net was glaringly obvious. Thanks to a great season from Marc-Andre Fleury, Pittsburgh was able to remain relevant, finishing with 106 points.

Offseason Changes

Pittsburgh lost two bottom-6 forwards to division rivals with Mike Rupp’s departure to the Rangers and Max Talbot’s move to Philadelphia. Outside of that, their roster will generally look the same as last year, with the most major addition coming with the signing of veteran winger Steve Sullivan.

Key Questions for 2011-2012

At what point can we expect Sidney Crosby to return?

Crosby has already been ruled out of the season opener, which while not a good sign is still not the end of the world assuming Malkin and Staal remain healthy. But still, the team needs him in the line-up. A Crosby-less Penguins team still makes the playoff, but #87 is the difference between an elite team and a team that makes it as a bottom seed before losing in the first round.

Should Evgeni Malkin move to wing?

This only happens if Crosby is healthy, but is a move I think should be made (and is a move a few of us on this blog have talked about for a while). Malkin’s contributions at Even Strength have fallen each of the last few seasons. He’s never been great at faceoffs, and center depth (again, assuming Crosby’s health) isn’t much of an issue for Pittsburgh, and I believe the lightened responsibility could help bring his game back to where it was in 2008.

* - Don’t worry, I’m only joking.

4. San Jose Sharks

Key Statistics from 2010-2011

Fenwick- 53.7%

Even Strength Shooting%-7.2%

Even Strength Save%-.942

2010-2011 Summary

The Sharks had a pretty boring year last year (I mean this in a good way), as they won another Pacific Division title and again came within one postseason round of the Stanley Cup Finals. San Jose’s biggest story last year was the emergence of Logan Couture, who centered what was San Jose’s best line for most of the year, and whose presence ultimately made Devin Setoguchi expendable (more on this later).

Offseason Changes

Outside of Washington, San Jose had the busiest summer of any of the NHL’s elites. The offseason bonanza began on Draft Day, with Doug Wilson sending Devin Setoguchi, top prospect Charlie Coyle, and a 2011 1^st round pick to the Minnesota Wild for Brent Burns. This was the first of two blockbusters between the Sharks and Wild, as the two teams swapped All-Star wingers, with the Sharks sending Dany Heatley and receiving Martin Havlat. The Sharks also signed Michal Handzus, ostensibly to play the role of 3^rd line center.

Key Questions for 2011-2012

How will Joe Pavelski do on the wing and whom will he play with?

Logan Couture’s rise gave Doug Wilson the flexibility to move a top 6 winger in Devin Setoguchi, primarily because he had another top 6 forward who was then being used on the 3^rd line. I think it’ll be interesting to see what (if any) impact this has on Pavelski’s game. I also think it’ll be interesting to see what line he plays with, though this will obviously change throughout the year.

Were last year’s troubles on the PK just an aberration or a legitimate cause for concern?

Known in previous years for having one of the league’s best kills, San Jose had an uncharacteristically bad year on the PK. Michal Handzus should help up front, and Colin White and Brent Burns should help on the back end, but it still remains to be seen if that is enough, especially with the departure of Jamal Mayers and Scott Nichol.

The final 3 will be posted tomorrow morning.

Here is a recap of our rankings to date:

30. Edmonton

29. Colorado

28. Dallas

27. New York Islanders

26. Minnesota

25. Ottawa

24. Toronto

23. Florida

22. Phoenix

21. Winnipeg

20. Anaheim

19. Carolina

18. Calgary

17. St. Louis

16. Nashville

15. New York Rangers

14. Columbus

13. Buffalo

12. Philadelphia

11. Boston

10. Montreal

9. Tampa Bay

8. New Jersey

7. Los Angeles

6. Detroit

5. Pittsburgh*

4. San Jose

* - With Sidney Crosby

On The Problem With Corsi Rel

2011-10-03T12:32:00.000-04:00

Advanced hockey statistics are in their infancy. There's a lot about the game that is going ignored or being glossed over in the hockey numbers community, and we're still years behind others sports. I've seen the baseball community make tremendous strides in the five or so years that I've been aware of sabermetrics. The sabermetrics overview book Baseball Between The Numbers, published around 2006, contains many notions that are outdated - we just know more about the game now. I also used to be a fan of the site Football Outsiders, until I saw that too many of their articles took logical leaps based on less-than-solid evidence. I certainly didn't have the answers to the questions they were posing, but I sure as hell didn't believe in their answers. We can get only so far with statistics that remove certain aspects of play and focus on others. All this preamble leads up to the point of this article: Corsi Rel is a flawed statistic. That doesn't mean we should reject it outright, but it does mean that we have to be careful when using it. (All numbers in this post courtesy of behindthenet.ca, except where indicated).

Examples of where Corsi Rel can lead us astray:

A. A poor territorial team

Let's take the Islanders, who according to Vic Ferrari's Time On Ice script, were 46.5% Fenwick in all even strength situations this year. We know they were driven back a lot. This is going to create a problem if we just look at one player's Corsi Rel with his Zone Start, because a player may have a positive Corsi Rel with a below 50% Zone Start - these two things together are assumed to indicate skill.

The other issue with the Islanders is their atrocious 4th line. Trevor Gillies had a woeful 26.4% Fenwick. Expressed in Corsi/60, he was -52.07. These horrendous results are going to skew all the Islanders' Corsi Rel numbers, because they pull down the team's total Corsi by a not-insignificant amount.

B. A team with lots of injuries

Take the Islanders again, where no defenseman played more than 64 games for the team. They also had lots of players going in and out of the lineup at forward - 10 forwards played 42 or fewer games last season for the Isles. Perhaps I'm just unclear on the meaning of Corsi Rel, but as I understand it, it compares a player's results to the players who are also on the team when he is playing. Depending on what lineup the team is icing, it may give a skewed picture, especially if that lineup is particularly worse or better than the lineup the team 'typically' puts out.

C. An excellent team

This is basically A reversed. A team like the 2009-10 Chicago Blackhawks, which featured 11 players with above a 50% zone start and most players with out of this world Corsi production, could make things look ridiculous. For instance, Dustin Byfuglien had a -5.4 Corsi Rel that year, but he had a 10.1 Corsi On. He was still probably an excellent bottom-6 forward, despite the negative Corsi Rel on a great team.

D. Quality of Competition

My colleague JaredL helpfully pointed this out, and I think he wrote it so well that I won't even change it: "Corsi Rel tends to exacerbate usage issues. If a player plays against tough competition then that means his team's competition when he's off the ice is going to be easier. That makes it a double whammy - his Corsi On takes a hit because of the tough competition and his Corsi Off gets a boost because of the weaker competition. The same thing applies to O-Zone Starts."

E. What are we really measuring, anyway?

We've mentioned before the thought experiment where we consider two hockey teams playing against one another with static lines - line A goes against line A of the other team, line B vs. line B and so forth. We know that hockey is a more fluid game than that - teams match up different lines against different lines, whether by chance or by choice, and players move around on lines due to injury and performance. Regardless, what exactly does the first line have to do with the fourth line? How much influence does the third line's play have on the first line? Corsi Rel assumes that that relationship is particularly meaningful.

I'm certainly not smart enough to synthesize Zone Start, Quality of Teammates and Competition, as well as Corsi, into one statistic that would comprehensively define territorial play. I'm hoping for that day soon. Until that day comes, we will be stuck with Corsi Rel - it's far from perfect, but in some ways it's still the best we've got.

Driving Play Season Preview: 10-7, The Near-Elite

2011-10-02T19:15:00.002-04:00

Sorry about the delay, everybody. I didn't realize that I had a previous engagement with a baseball game in South Philadelphia yesterday. Without further adieu, here are teams 10 through 7 on our countdown as promised.

10. Montreal Canadiens

Last Season’s Results:

5-on-5 Fenwick/Corsi %: 52.7/51.7
5-on-5 SF/60 (NHL Rank): 31.6 (7)
5-on-5 SA/60 (NHL Rank): 30.0 (16)
PP SF/60 (NHL Rank): 53.6 (9)
SH SA/60 (NHL Rank): 48.5 (10)

The Montreal Canadiens’ results from last season are interesting to say the least. Despite sporting very good possession numbers, the Habs were ranked 22nd in the league in scoring, shooting only 7.0% at even strength. On the defensive side of the puck, Montreal was a middle-of-the-pack team in allowing shots but solid play from Carey Price helped propel them to the 6th seed in the Eastern Conference. Montreal would meet division rival Boston in the first round, and like this commercial, the series wouldn’t disappoint. Boston would squeak out a 4-3 OT win in game 7 and advance to the second round.

Offseason Changes:

Montreal wasn’t very active this offseason, but they were able to shake up their personnel without handcuffing themselves against the salary cap. They let James Wisniewski, Roman Hamrlik, and Jeff Halpern walk to free agency and awarded Erik Cole a new 4 year, $18 million contract. They also re-signed Andrei Markov to a 3-year deal, hoping that he can stay healthy and give that defensive unit a much-needed spark.

Season Outlook:

Montreal is another team that looks very similar to the one we last saw in April. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – they were very good at controlling the play against their opponents last season. If Andrei Markov can give them any semblance of a healthy season and P.K. Subban continues to improve, Montreal has a chance to challenge the top half of the standings in the Eastern Conference.

9. Tampa Bay Lightning

Last Season’s Results:

5-on-5 Fenwick/Corsi %: 52.2/50.7
5-on-5 SF/60 (NHL Rank): 31.5 (8)
5-on-5 SA/60 (NHL Rank): 27.3 (3)
PP SF/60 (NHL Rank): 50.0 (13)
SH SA/60 (NHL Rank): 46.0 (4)

Tampa Bay was perhaps the surprise team of the Eastern Conference last season. GM Steve Yzerman had a busy offseason re-tooling the lightning in 2010, and his first season in the front office saw his team improve from 12th to 5th in the standings. Tampa had above-average to elite totals in just about every category except one – goaltending. Yzerman would of course infuse the team with a much-needed upgrade mid-season, acquiring the ageless Dwayne Roloson from the Islanders. The Bolts would prevail against both Pittsburgh and Washington before losing the 7th game of the Eastern Conference Finals to the Boston Bruins.

Offseason Changes:

Tampa is another team that remains largely unchanged from a season ago which certainly is not a bad thing. The Bolts signed forward Ryan Shannon to a 1-year, no risk contract and also added Matt Gilroy and Tom Pyatt. They managed to re-sign core contributors Steven Stamkos and Teddy Purcell to multi-year contracts while Dwayne Roloson agreed to come back for at least one more shot at winning the Stanley Cup.

Season Outlook:

Considering that this team finished 12th in the standings just two seasons ago, it is quite remarkable how tremendous of a job Steve Yzerman has done re-tooling the franchise. It will be interesting to see how Dwayne Roloson performs during a full-season of play for the Lightning, though whatever he can give them figures to be an improvement over the Mike Smith/Dan Ellis tandem of last season. Tampa seems to have all the pieces in place to challenge for a division title, though unseating the Washington Capitals atop the Southeast will be a tall task.

8. New Jersey Devils

Last Season’s Results:

5-on-5 Fenwick/Corsi %: 53.3/53.8
5-on-5 SF/60 (NHL Rank): 28.0 (24)
5-on-5 SA/60 (NHL Rank): 25.8 (1)
PP SF/60 (NHL Rank): 49.6 (14)
SH SA/60 (NHL Rank): 43.0 (2)

Another of the teams with the most peculiar results from last season is the New Jersey Devils. They were an elite possession team, and boasted the least shots allowed per 60 minutes average in the NHL. Though they near the bottom in generating shots, they still managed to average a positive shot differential without Zach Parise for a majority of the season. At the end of the day, poor goaltending from Martin Brodeur and a 6.7% shooting percentage at even strength hurt their bottom line on the scoreboard. After a late-season surge, the Devils would finish 11th in the East and miss out on the playoffs.

Offseason Changes:

I’ll fix this broken record that keeps reporting little to no offseason movement sooner or later. This offseason was more about retention in New Jersey, as they re-signed Zach Parise to a 1-year, $6 million contract and brought back Andy Greene for the price of $12 million over 4 years. Thanks to their poor finish last season, the Devils were able to select Adam Larsson 4th overall giving the team a very good defensive prospect.

Season Outlook:

I think I speak for all of my co-authors when I say that we will be very surprised if the Devils repeat their performance from a season ago. Adding a healthy Zach Parise to a cast that performed amongst the NHL’s elite in controlling the play last season means that the offense will receive a luxurious boost up front. The biggest question New Jersey figures to face is goaltending. If Martin Brodeur shows us more of the same from last season, don’t be surprised if Johan Hedberg is eventually given the reigns. Barring another set of unforeseen setbacks, the Devils will definitely be in the mix in the Atlantic Division.

7. Los Angeles Kings

Last Season’s Results:

5-on-5 Fenwick/Corsi %: 50.8/52.0
5-on-5 SF/60 (NHL Rank): 27.9 (26)
5-on-5 SA/60 (NHL Rank): 27.9 (6)
PP SF/60 (NHL Rank): 50.4 (12)
SH SA/60 (NHL Rank): 48.1 (9)

The Los Angeles Kings made the playoffs as the 7th seed in the Western Conference last season, sporting a below-average offense, very good defense and slightly above-average goaltending. The Kings would draw a first round match-up with the San Jose Sharks, but would fall short to the Pacific Division Champions in six games. In the end, the Kings just could not overcome losing superstar center Anze Kopitar(rrrrrrrggggghhhhhh) to a broken ankle near the end of the season.

Offseason Changes:

Finally, some moves to report on! The Kings acquired center Mike Richards from Philadelphia for Brayden Schenn, Wayne Simmonds and a second-round draft pick. They also signed Richards’ former partner in crime Simon Gagne to a 2-year contract, adding both offensive and defensive depth up front. Franchise cornerstone Drew Doughty recently agreed to an 8-year, $56 million contract, keeping intact what was a very good defensive unit a season ago.

Season Outlook:

Though a few of my fellow bloggers disagree, I think L.A. is ready to take the next step. They should certainly contend for a Pacific Division title this season, as Mike Richards and Simon Gagne figure to give them added tough-minutes help up front. Jonathan Quick might be the only thing standing in their way as he will need to improve in order for Los Angeles to truly be in the conversation with the league’s elite.

Matt will lead us to the promised land, taking us from number six through one on the countdown. Our list so far:

30. Edmonton
29. Colorado
28. Dallas
27. NY Islanders
26. Minnesota
25. Ottawa
24. Toronto
23. Florida
22. Phoenix
21. Winnipeg
20. Anaheim
19. Carolina
18. Calgary
17. St. Louis
16. Nashville
15. New York Rangers
14. Columbus
13. Buffalo
12. Philadelphia
11. Boston
10. Montreal Canadiens
9. Tampa Bay Lightning
8. New Jersey Devils
7. Los Angeles Kings

Driving Play Season Preview: 15-11, The Contendahhhs

2011-09-29T11:34:00.003-04:00

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Brendan Shanahan suspension video to continue the Driving Play season previews for teams 15 through 11 in our countdown. I was assigned the ‘playoff’ tier of our rankings, consisting of teams who should have legitimate claims to playoff positioning come April.

Just as a quick refresher – I’ve listed a few basic stats that I like to use when evaluating teams as a whole. Each team’s Corsi and Fenwick percentages with the score tied at even strength will come first, followed by their shots for and shots against per 60 minutes at even strength. Finally, their special teams will play be accounted for with SF/60 numbers on the power play and SA/60 numbers on the penalty kill. All numbers are courtesy of Behind The Net, except the Corsi and Fenwick percentages which are courtesy of Time on Ice.

15. New York Rangers

Last Season’s Results:

5-on-5 Fenwick/Corsi %: 48.9/47.8
5-on-5 SF/60 (NHL Rank): 29.2 (20)
5-on-5 SA/60 (NHL Rank): 29.2 (11)
PP SF/60 (NHL Rank): 48.6 (16)
SH SA/60 (NHL Rank): 49.0 (11)

The Rangers slipped into the playoffs as the 8th seed in the Eastern Conference last year, due in most part to stellar goaltending, above-average defense and a fairly average offense. Their possession numbers weren’t anything special, and when push came to shove they just couldn’t manage to control the play against #1 seeded Washington, losing in five games.

Offseason Changes:

The Rangers landed C Brad Richards via free agency in the offseason with the hope that he can take their offense to the next level. The only problem with that is, Brad Richards doesn’t really seem to be a player who is carrying the play forward on his own at even strength. He was given fairly easy ice time in Dallas last season, yet he failed to put up a positive Corsi ON score despite a favorable zone start. On the power play, Richards should help the Rangers generate more scoring chances and improve what was a mediocre unit a season ago.

Season Outlook:

In order for the Rangers to take that next step, they needed a forward who could carry the play forward in some capacity at 5-on-5. Unfortunately, Brad Richards can’t. Will he be able to improve the power play scoring enough to have the same effect? Probably not, considering there’s so much luck that comes in to play with PP data. The Richards effect will most likely be negligible as the Rangers figure to be fighting for one of the final three playoff spots in the East.

14. Columbus Blue Jackets

Last Season’s Results:

5-on-5 Fenwick/Corsi %: 50.8/50.1
5-on-5 SF/60 (NHL Rank): 29.5 (18)
5-on-5 SA/60 (NHL Rank): 28.9 (10)
PP SF/60 (NHL Rank): 53.7 (8)
SH SA/60 (NHL Rank): 53.4 (24)

The Blue Jackets finished 13th in the West last season, despite having fairly average possession numbers and an above-average defense. Their main problems were found in their below average offense and terrible goaltending. The Jackets also suffered from a bit of bad luck, shooting just 7.9% at even strength.

Offseason Changes:

Columbus GM Scott Howson wasn’t afraid to shake things up this offseason, trading for Jeff Carter in exchange for Jakub Voracek and two draft picks. Howson also signed defenseman James Wisnewski to a 6-year/$33 million contract in an attempt to shore up both his blue-line and power play. He imported Vinny Prospal from New York to help the team's secondary scoring, a move that has a bit of upside considering Carter’s added tough-minutes production. Columbus' lineup up front should definitely be able to improve their shooting totals from a year ago.

Season Outlook:

There seems to be at least one surprise team to make it to the playoffs every April, and we’re casting this role to the Columbus Blue Jackets. Jeff Carter gives the Jackets an elite forward to complement both Rick Nash and the rest of their secondary scoring. If Steve Mason can somehow figure out how to stop a puck or two, Columbus will be a legitimate playoff team.

13. Buffalo Sabres

Last Season’s Results:

5-on-5 Fenwick/Corsi %: 51.7/50.9
5-on-5 SF/60 (NHL Rank): 32.3 (3)
5-on-5 SA/60 (NHL Rank): 29.6 (14)
PP SF/60 (NHL Rank): 55.3 (6)
SH SA/60 (NHL Rank): 50.9 (16)

Buffalo finished 7th in the East last season and boasted one of the league’s most prolific attacks at generating shots. Unfortunately, a 7.8% shooting percentage at even strength is going to hinder that a bit. Still, Buffalo’s offensive numbers were above average, while their defensive totals fell more toward the middle of the pack. Ryan Miller & Co. gave the Sabres fairly solid play between the pipes, providing Buffalo what it needed to be a playoff team.

Offseason Changes:

Let’s get one thing clear – these aren’t the same Sabres we saw at the end of last season. In a move that proved new Sabres ownership was serious about ~~burning~~ spending money, they signed Ville Leino to a 6 year, $27 million contract. They also imported Christian Ehrhoff (10 years, $40 million*) and Robyn Regehr (peanuts to Calgary) from Western Canada in an effort to shore up their blue-line. While the Regehr move probably figures to be the best of these three major changes, backing up the truck for two soft-minute players might not give this team the boost that the front office is hoping for.

*Not a typo.

Season Outlook:

While they may not be allocating their money in the most optimal fashion, Buffalo certainly didn’t make itself any worse with their offseason moves. If Tyler Myers continues to get better, a Regehr type shutdown player should improve their defense from a season ago. As long as they can stay relatively healthy, this team certainly lays claim to legitimate playoff aspirations.

12. Philadelphia Flyers

Last Season’s Results:

5-on-5 Fenwick/Corsi %: 52.0/51.6
5-on-5 SF/60 (NHL Rank): 31.6 (6)
5-on-5 SA/60 (NHL Rank): 30.3 (18)
PP SF/60 (NHL Rank): 46.1 (26)
SH SA/60 (NHL Rank): 42.9 (1)

Last season saw the Philadelphia Flyers burst out of the gate to the best record in the NHL on the heels of a surprising Stanley Cup Finals run a season before. Problem was, Chris Pronger went down with a hand injury soon thereafter and the Flyers weren’t the same team without him. They would struggle mightily in his absence, nearly losing the Atlantic Division lead to Pittsburgh by the end of the season. In the end, the Flyers would prevail as the #2 seed and go on to face Buffalo in the first round. After erasing a 3-2 series deficit to the Sabres, they moved on to the second round where I seem to have lost all memory of what happened. How strange.

Offseason Changes:

Who would have thought a hand injury could have triggered so much disaster? In a reactionary move to whatever it was that happened against the Boston Bruins, the Flyers traded captain Mike Richards to Los Angeles and Jeff Carter to Columbus. In addition to the infusion of youth that he received back in the trades (Brayden Schenn, Wayne Simmonds, Jakub Voracek, and Sean Coutirier), GM Paul Holmgren also awarded new contracts to former Penguins Jaromir Jagr and Maxime Talbot, and steady D-man Andreas Lilja. He was also quick to make good on his opportunity to sign Ilya Bryzgalov for a small fee, perhaps the Flyers’ cornerstone move of the 2011 offseason.

Season Outlook:

Losing Richards and Carter is a big deal for this team. Some of the Flyers’ new talent is promising, but there are a lot of question marks going into the season. It is still unclear how some of the rookies (and veterans) on the roster will be able to hold up during such a long season. Richards and Carter played an important role on both offense and defense, and it may be a few years until Schenn, Simmonds, Voracek, Couturier & Co. are able to fully replace what the Flyers lost. Unfortunately, Bryzgalov also figures to only be a slight improvement over Sergei Bobrovsky from last season. For now, they’ll most likely make the playoffs in the bottom half of the East.

11. Boston Bruins

Last Season’s Results:

5-on-5 Fenwick/Corsi %: 50.4/50.7
5-on-5 SF/60 (NHL Rank): 32.4 (2)
5-on-5 SA/60 (NHL Rank): 32.1 (29)
PP SF/60 (NHL Rank): 50.7 (11)
SH SA/60 (NHL Rank): 52.9 (23)

Boston made the playoffs as the Northeast Division Champions sporting a very good offense, terrible defense and stellar goaltending. As they progressed through the playoffs, their ability to put the puck in the net held true as Tim Thomas cemented one of the greatest seasons by a goaltender in recent memory. The Bruins would capture the Stanley Cup in 7 games over the Vancouver Canucks.

Offseason Changes:

Not too much to report on here. Fake-shot master Tomas Kaberle jumped ship to Carolina, and in to replace him is Joe Corvo, acquired from the Hurricanes for a 4th round draft pick. The team also signed Benoit Pouliot to a 1-year contract to help replace the departed Michael Ryder and retired Mark Recchi. Corvo should provide a slight improvement over Kaberle, but this team looks fairly identical to the one that lifted the Cup in June.

Season Outlook:

The only problem with the team that lifted the Cup in June is that it wasn’t very good defensively. That doesn’t figure to change, so Tim Thomas and Tukka Rask will be asked to stop quite a few pucks this season. If Thomas can keep playing like Dominik Hasek, this team has a good chance to repeat. Problem is, while Thomas may be a very good goalie I’m skeptical he has another all-time great season in him. Boston should be a solid middle-of-the-pack playoff team in the East.

I’ll be back with teams 10 through 7 on ~~Saturday~~ Sunday! Our list so far:

30. Edmonton
29. Colorado
28. Dallas
27. NY Islanders
26. Minnesota
25. Ottawa
24. Toronto
23. Florida
22. Phoenix
21. Winnipeg
20. Anaheim
19. Carolina
18. Calgary
17. St. Louis
16. Nashville
15. New York Rangers
14. Columbus Blue Jackets
13. Buffalo Sabres
12. Philadelphia Flyers
11. Boston Bruins

Projecting Steven Stamkos's Goals

2011-09-27T00:36:00.010-04:00

"I've made a huge mistake" - GOB

In a recent article on the role of luck and skill in shooting percentage, I used Steven Stamkos as an example of a player who shot for a very high percentage last season and who should see his goal tally drop this year as a result. Why I didn't choose Corey Porey, I have no idea. I don't play fantasy hockey, but I looked over a few projections and noticed that they all had Stamkos over 50 goals. Since I suggested he'd have a drop from the 45 he made last year, it seems like a deeper look at is in order.

To forecast Stamkos's goals for this season, I am using a method many others have used - finding comparable players to see how their numbers changed. For comparable players, I took all players that had a 40+ goal season at or below age 20. My source for this list is hockey-reference.com. There are a couple guys that fizzled out and some current players we'll have to wait on, but this is an elite list: Brian Bellows, Rob Brown, Jimmy Carson, Wayne Gretzky, Dale Hawerchuk, Ilya Kovalchuk, Pierre Larouche, Mario Lemieux, Eric Lindros, Rick Martin, Rick Nash, Owen Nolan, Alex Ovechkin, Barry Pederson, Luc Robitaille, Geoff Sanderson, Craig Simpson, Tony Tanti, Pierre Turgeon and Sylvain Turgeon.

Because Stamkos is about to start his age-21 season, I will forecast his goal total by looking at the relationship between goals per game for the above players for the seasons where they were 20 or younger and the season where they were 21*. Fortunately, there is a strong relationship, as you can see in the graph below:

Let's pause for a second to marvel at that 92-goal season for Gretzky. I left it zoomed out so you can see just how amazing that was. The other outlier was Mario Lemieux scoring 54 goals in only 63 games.

The regression spits out this equation:

GPG21 = 0.0362 + 1.0019*GPG1820

where GPG21 is the goals per game in the age-21 season and GPG1820 is the total average goals per game for all seasons where the player was younger. Notice how close the coefficient is to 1. That tells us that typically there is a direct relationship between average goals per game before 21 and at 21. The average difference between two guys is almost exactly the same the season they turn 21 and their careers to that point. Because that coefficient is very close to 1, we can see that the average elite young goalscorer improves by about 0.036 goals per game in his age-21 season. So if a guy only played full seasons, we'd expect him to score about 3 more goals than his career average for all years before age 21.

Thus far Stamkos has scored 119 goals in 243 games, or 0.49 goals per game. Using the above formula, this forecasts him at 43.2 goals for next year, a small drop from last season but up from his career average of just under 40 goals per season.

You might argue that Stamkos has improved a lot since his rookie season - he only scored 25 goals his rookie year and has put up 51 and 45 the last two. To look into that, I used the same methodology but only used the seasons where the player was 19 or 20 to forecast the year 21 season. The downside of this method jumped out - dropping that first season makes the earlier data far less descriptive and predictive of the 21-year-old season. Here's a graph:

While they look similar, you can see that there is less of an up-and-right pattern. The R^2 is 0.125 for this regression and was 0.292 for averaging all three seasons. So instead of explaining 29% of the variation in goal scoring at age 21, the average of the previous two seasons only accounts for 12.5% of it. So for that reason, I don't put as much stock into this regression. This forecast puts Stamkos at 49 goals this season.

Conclusion

Like most forecasts, it's all messy and things change when you tweak the model a bit or change the group of comparables. I didn't include it, but I changed the comparable group to be all players who scored at least 80 goals before age 21, which excludes several of the above names and includes Crosby, Trevor Linden and Steve Yzerman. That model also came out with a prediction of about 43 goals. While I think the first model above is the best, his rookie year Stamkos both took substantially fewer shots - 181 compared to 297 in 2009-2010 and 272 last seasons and his shooting percentage was substantially down - 12.7% compared to 17.2% and 16.5%. There is some reason to think that first year should be given less weight.

I think somewhere in between the two predictions is best and something very close to last year's 45 should be expected. This is an expectation, it's definitely possible that he could go on a tear and get over 50 and about as likely that he scores below 40, especially with injuries possible even for a guy with few injury problems.

* ages as defined by hockey-reference - the age the player is on February 1st of the season. Ilya Kovalchuk would have been 21 the year of the lockout so I used the season after for his count. Rick Nash turned 20 the season of the lockout so I shifted everything back a year for him as well.

Driving Play Season Preview: 16-19, The Almost Average

2011-09-26T11:31:00.006-04:00

And we keep rolling on. Here is my writeup for teams 20-22, with a description of the stats I'm using, here are Triumph's on teams 23-26 and 27-30.

#19: Carolina Hurricanes
Initial thought: Can the Canes draw their way into the playoffs?

Stats:
5-on-5 Fen%/Corsi%: 47.3%/48.8%
PDO: 1.005
PP%: 15.9% (24th)
PK%: 81.2% (20th)
Ozone Faceoff Shift Corsi Rate: 35.763 (21st)
Dzone Faceoff Shift Corsi Rate: -42.514 (19th)

2010-2011 Summary:
In a word: mediocre. Carolina was somewhere below average but not horrible in pretty much every category last year. They did get some decent play out of Cam Ward in goal, who had the 12th highest 5-on-5 save percentage among starters, according to BTN. As has been the case for the last several years, they drew a lot of penalties, so expect that to continue.

Offseason moves:
In what worked out like a trade, the Canes signed Tomáš Kaberle who was at Boston and then traded Joe Corvo to the Bruins for a 2012 fourth-round draft pick. Shutdownline covered this well here and here. I personally think Kaberle will be a bit more of an upgrade on the PP than Corey Sznajder suggests in those articles, mainly because he's put up slightly better numbers than Corvo with worse teammates. That said, I do agree that it's not likely to be a massive jump. Something to keep in mind is that because Carolina draws so many penalties, a small improvement there would lead to more goals than it would for other teams.

They will make the playoffs if...
Skinner is able to build on his rookie season. Here's shutdownline's projection for Skinner, which is quite detailed and covers his great rookie year very well. I'm inclined to agree that a drop in his raw scoring numbers should be expected since he shot lights out. To be honest this is more for down the road, but if Staal can keep producing in relatively tough minutes and Skinner can make the second line a big scoring threat then that will make the Canes a tough matchup.

Conclusion:
I don't like the Canes' chances of making the playoffs this year. Last year they finished just two points back from the Rangers, but all of us expect for New Jersey to be much improved this year. They definitely have a shot though, particularly if they improve on the power play and maintain their secondary scoring.

#18: Calgary Flames
Initial thought: How much weight can Iggy carry on his back year after year?

Stats:
5-on-5 Fen%/Corsi%: 52.4%/51.6%
PDO: 0.998
PP%: 19.5% (8th)
PK%: 81.2% (21st)
Ozone Faceoff Shift Corsi Rate: 48.551 (5th)
Dzone Faceoff Shift Corsi Rate: -49.905 (26th)

2010-2011 Summary:
Calgary were good in possession and on the power play. So how did they miss the playoffs? They were not very good defensively, whether 5-on-5 or on the penalty kill, and Kiprusoff was simply not good enough. He was 23rd at 5-on-5 save percentage among starting goalies and 26th best when his team was down a man, courtesy of BTN. Getting back to team 5-on-5 performance, the gap following each type of faceoff is remarkable. The Flames were devastating on faceoffs in their offensive zone but every bit that bad in their own zone.

Offseason moves:
In line with most teams, the Flames didn't do much in the offseason. Other than going after Brad Richards, which they were rumored to have done, I suppose they didn't have a lot of options. Even Florida thinks the Bouwmeester and Kiprusoff contracts are awful.

They will make the playoffs if...
Iginla can keep it up. Iggy provided the biggest assist by a Canadian since World War II and has put up very impressive numbers well into his thirties. At 34 we would expect a dropoff sometime soon. The Flames finished 3 points out of the playoffs a year ago and should be in the mix this year.

Conclusion:
Right now Capgeek tells me that the Flames have $3.6M in cap space. I think this will give us a preview of their long-term plans. They had been more than willing to shell out the cash, so we could definitely see a trade or two during the season to help them make the playoffs. On the flip side, there are rumors and suggestions that Calgary will soon be in rebuilding mode, in which case they will likely sit on it and maybe even be sellers at the deadline. I think a lot will rest on how they come out of the gate.

#17: St. Louis Blues
Initial thought: Feel free to make your own pun.

Stats:
5-on-5 Fen%/Corsi%: 52.4%/52.2%
PDO: 0.993
PP%: 18.6% (10th)
PK%: 81.7% (18th)
Ozone Faceoff Shift Corsi Rate: 41.963 (15th)
Dzone Faceoff Shift Corsi Rate: -36.241 (12th)

2010-2011 Summary:
St. Louis is one of these teams where the numbers just don't seem to add up. Their possession numbers were good, they were good on the power play and close to average on the penalty kill. They did have goaltending problems - Halak finished 22nd among starting goalies at 5-on-5 save percentage and 20th 4-on-5. What really killed them was the third lowest 5-on-5 shooting percentage in the league. I think we can expect that go to up this year. Another factor is faceoffs. The Blues were third worst in the league in faceoff win %. This lead to their merely decent faceoff-shift numbers; they were best in the league once a substitution had been made following both offensive-zone and defensive-zone faceoffs.

Offseason Moves:
There weren't a lot of interesting moves. Not a lot to say about the Blues signing vets Arnott and Langenbrunner to one-year deals. Next year things get far more interesting. St. Louis will have Chris Stewart, TJ Oshie, Barret Jackman and Carlo Colaiacovo all come up for resigning. The former two will be restricted free agents. Early last season they were able to extend Backes, we'll see if they can keep their core together since they have some decent young talent.

They will make the playoffs if...
they shoot better. Something close to league average gets them in.

Conclusion:
St. Louis is a really interesting team when you look at how they're perceived by different types of fans and analysts. They had the lion's share of possession but mediocre scoring results. According to TOI, at even strength they broke even scoring (167-167) but outshot their opponents by 161 shots (1989-1828). Looking at individuals with 40 or more games, they have 6 with a 5-on-5 Corsi rate higher than +10 (BTN) but David Backes was their only 30-goal scorer with 31. I think we'll see an improvement in their shooting numbers that will put them well into the mix for a playoff spot despite finishing 10 points back a year ago.

#16: Nashville Predators
Initial thought: Can't lose if you don't concede.

Stats:
5-on-5 Fen%/Corsi%: 48.1%/48.9%
PDO: 1.015
PP%: 15.2% (26th)
PK%: 84.9% (5th)
Ozone Faceoff Shift Corsi Rate: 33.555 (24th)
Dzone Faceoff Shift Corsi Rate: -44.536 (12th)

2010-2011 Summary:
It may surprise you to learn that Nashville had a better goal differential last year than Detroit - +25 to +20. They did it the old-school way with top quality defense and goaltending. Why that is considered old-school I have no idea since all the old games I've ever seen featured awful defending and worse goaltending. In any case, the Preds allowed the second fewest goals in the league, had dominant penalty killing and Rinne was the best goalie other than Tim Thomas. He was second among starters in save percentage both 5-on-5 and 4-on-5. Offensively, Nashville were far from spectacular.

Offseason Moves:
The biggest offseason thing was the Shea Weber arbitration deal. I don't think $7.5M was fair, but I don't think it'll make a big difference for this season. It is, however, a bad omen for the future. Unless Poile can get ownership to open the checkbook, it's going to be tough to keep this group together. Weber will come up as an RFA again next year, as will Kostitsyn, Wilson, Geoffrion and O'Reilly. Tootoo and Weber's defense partner Suter and, perhaps most importantly Rinne will become unrestricted free agents. It'll be interesting to see what happens with all those contracts and if Nashville is willing to spend close to the cap.

They will make the playoffs if...
they keep it up. I like Nashville for the playoffs. If Rinne pulls a Thomas in the postseason they could even make a deep run, but I think they'll need to improve offensively to be a real threat.

Conclusion:
Not a lot more to say about the Preds so I'll use this space to give a shoutout to ontheforecheck, one of my favorite blogs.

That's all I've got. Chase is up next with #7-15.

Our list so far:
30. Edmonton
29. Colorado
28. Dallas
27. NY Islanders
26. Minnesota
25. Ottawa
24. Toronto
23. Florida
22. Phoenix
21. Winnipeg
20. Anaheim
19. Carolina
18. Calgary
17. St. Louis
16. Nashville

Driving Play Season Preview: 20-22, The Mediocre

2011-09-25T19:13:00.004-04:00

And we're back, slogging our way through the Driving Play season preview. I got what could be called the playoff bubble teams. I'd prefer to think of them as the guy in your apartment building that plays his guitar all the time - not good enough to be impress you but, unlike the guy in your dorm that played his guitar all the time, not awful enough to be impressively bad.

To the surprise of no one, I am taking a nerdy approach. For each of these previews, I'll give the team's Fenwick and Corsi percentage, power play and penalty kill percentage, and Corsi rate for the first shift following a faceoff at each end. Fenwick/Corsi percentage is the percent of shots, including missed shots and for Corsi blocked shots, taken by them. 50%, taking as many shots as your opponents, is average. PP% and PK% are the usual stats. PDO is a measure of luck. It's the sum of shooting percentage and save percentage, in this case I'm using all even strength. Ozone/Dzone faceoff shift Corsi are two new stats I've been working on. They're the Corsi rate for the time between the faceoff and the first player leaving the ice. Here's a link to a fuller description.

GET ON WITH IT

#22: Phoenix Coyotes
Initial thought: Please move to Portland somehow.

Stats:
5-on-5 Fen%/Corsi%: 49.5%/50.3%
PDO: 1.009
PP%: 15.9% (23rd)
PK%: 78.4% (26th)
Ozone Faceoff Shift Corsi Rate: 41.97 (14th)
Dzone Faceoff Shift Corsi Rate: -35.628 (10th)

2010-2011 Summary:
Last year Phoenix was a little-above average 5-on-5. They split possession pretty evenly with their opponents and got good enough goaltending from Ilya Bryzgalov to make the Flyers go insane, which Chase covered quite well from the Flyers' perspective here, here and will do again in an article he's said would be up in a few days for the last three weeks. Special teams were a problem all the way around. Last year they were actually better with a man advantage than they had been the last few years, having finished third from the bottom in PP% for both the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 seasons.

It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em:
Bryzgalov wasn't coming back so the biggest move that didn't make itself was trading Lee Stempniak for Daymond Langkow. Scott Reynolds at Copper and Blue argued that it was a good, risk-reducing move for the Flames. I think it was a good deal for Phoenix, but definitely risky. As noted in that article, Langkow's possession numbers have been good but his scoring has taken a dive as he's aged. The risk is that on top of aging, he missed all but 4 games last year with neck and spinal cord damage suffered at the end of the 2009-2010 season. If he can get back to driving play, that'll look like a steal for Phoenix but there's some chance they traded a decent winger for very little.

They'll make the playoffs if...
they get some decent goaltending. Doing some research for this preview, I found an article on the coming Phoenix goalie battle that started "When the Coyotes signed goaltender Mike Smith during the off-season, some assumed the starting job was his to lose." Him?

Conclusion

I rated Phoenix 19th, while my colleagues' average put them 25th. This is probably because I don't value the goalie position as much as most. They've got a decent group of skaters with the potential to be even better if Langkow can produce. Like a lot of teams in this group, I wouldn't be surprised to see them comfortably in the playoffs or well out of the hunt.

#21: Winnipeg Jets
Initial thought: Meet the new Jets. Same as the old Jets?

2009-2010 Stats
5-on-5 Fen%/Corsi%: 49.9%/48.8%
PDO: 99.1%
PP%: 18.3% (12th)
PK%: 77.5% (27th)
Ozone Faceoff Shift Corsi Rate: 33.431 (25th)
Dzone Faceoff Shift Corsi Rate: -60.533 (30th)

2010-2011 Summary:
Last year, the ~~Thrashers~~ Jets were a team of two halves. Triumph covered this quite well here. The short of it is that in the first half or so of the season, Atlanta did quite well by goal-differential standards but their possession numbers weren't good. In the second half they picked up their possession numbers but their goals went negative. Goaltending was mixed as Chris Mason was bad but Ondrej Pavelec did well. All signs pointed to a team closer to average than most people realized, but a little below.

It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em:
Normally I'd talk about a big offseason move but Winnipeg really didn't make any that jump out. The biggest change is probably bringing in Claude Noël as head coach. Noël has a decent amount of experience coaching hockey, including professional hockey, including professional hockey in Winnipeg but has only been head coach in the NHL for 24 games for Columbus in 2009-2010. The highlight of his resume is leading the Milwaukee Admirals to their lone Calder Cup in 2004. He spent last season in Winnipeg as head coach of the Moose. I don't think it's too high in terms of risk or reward.

They'll make the playoffs if...
they play like they did in the second half of last season but the shots go in like they did in the first half. See above. To be honest I don't like Winnipeg's chances. Of the teams above them last season, they are better than Toronto and about even with Carolina but far below New Jersey, and all the playoff teams. They'll need a lot of bounces to go their way.

Conclusion

I will like the Jets' chances better if and when they move to the West. At the risk of opening a can of worms, I think the West is stronger near the top but has a weaker group of teams fighting for those last few spots. Something I'm going to be watching for is home-ice advantage. The atmosphere at MTS Centre should be amazing and the Jets will benefit from their opponents often coming in from a long trip. Given Winnipeg's tough travel themselves, I think we'll see a big difference between home and away results.

#20: Anaheim Ducks
Initial thought: There are 10 teams worse than them? Wait, they finished in the top 10 overall last year?

2009-2010 Stats
5-on-5 Fen%/Corsi%: 45.3%/44.5%
PDO: 100.6%
PP%: 23.5% (3rd)
PK%: 81.3% (19th)
Ozone Faceoff Shift Corsi Rate: 31.991 (27th)
Dzone Faceoff Shift Corsi Rate: -56.561 (29th)

2010-2011 Summary:
I'll start with the positive. Anaheim had one of the best power-play units in the league. Despite Corey Perry's 50-goal season, Teemu Selanne actually led the way with 16 PP goals. This does not appear to be a fluke; they finished 5th in PP% the previous two seasons and last year they were second in 5-on-4 shots for rate, according to BTN. 5-on-5 the Ducks were just dreadful.

It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em:
I was trying to decide which trade with the Oilers to write about - giving up Sutton for Foster or a 2013 second-round pick for Cogliano. Then I fell asleep.

They'll make the playoffs if...
they start, shall we say, drawing penalties like the Hurricanes. Another factor is the health of Jonas Hiller. He has been quite good over the last few seasons but missed a lot of last season with vertigo. He played well his first preseason game against the Canucks but it remains to be seen whether he can maintain his health or relapses like Lucille 2. Elite goaltending and power play should get them in.

Conclusion:
Anaheim are an interesting case for something Matt brought up and we'll be working on. They have top goaltending but terrible possession numbers 5-on-5. Add to that a top PP and an argument could be made for them being anywhere from the top 15 to one of the worst teams. I rated them 24th, for what little it's worth. Despite that low ranking, I think they are the only team in the group I'm writing on that has a shot to make a deep run in the playoffs if it all goes well for them at the right time.

Coming Tomorrow: 19-16

JaredL's Principles For Evaluating Roster Decisions

2011-09-22T14:20:00.001-04:00

Now that the long part of the summer is over, hopefully along with all the horrible news stories, training camps are open and preseason games have started, a lot of the focus goes to roster decisions. This includes who should make the team and who should be shipped back down to the minors, what the best line and defense combinations are, who should play on the power play and penalty kill, which lines should get the offensive starts and who should get the tough minutes. In the style of fellow Driving Play author Triumph, who wrote on evaluating prospects, I humbly present my principles for evaluating the decisions made by the coach and front office of your favorite team.

You'll see that as I go on a lot of these principles will be focused versions or combinations of previous ones. I'm trying to convey not only particular ideas but what I feel is a good overall thought process.

Principle #1: It's Complicated!

Hockey is not an easy sport to analyze. A lot of the things we love about the game make it tough - the game flows instead of being chopped up into individual plays, substitution and coaching adjustments happen on the fly, there are many different styles of play, there are a million different hockey skills and most of them can't be isolated or measured and luck is a big enough factor that in a few minutes or even several games just about anything can happen. Other than a penalty shot, nothing is isolated to just one player so teamwork is very important; players must complement each other and be able to work well together. On top of all this, the players get tired much more quickly than in other sports so that puts more limitations on what a coach can do with his lines.

I'm not saying these things make it impossible to analyze, far from it. We can offer a lot of insight on what coaches and GMs should do. We certainly have and will continue to criticize what we feel are bad decisions and at some point we might even get around to offering praise. These problems are very difficult so we should expect even the brightest hockey minds to make mistakes. Also, the level of complexity could make what we on the outside think is a blunder a smart move for reasons we don't know about.

Principle #2: Keep Tradeoffs in Mind

Perhaps I should have titled this there is only so much ice time to go around. One reason for the complexity I discussed above is that there are tradeoffs all over the place. If your coach goes from rolling lines to focusing on matchups then his guys aren't going to be quite as fresh, or at least their rest time won't be as regular. If you give your top line more starts in the offensive zone then that's fewer Ozone starts for the other lines. Your favorite gritty young player earning a spot on the fourth line means someone else is getting dropped to the minors. Putting your second-best scorer on the same line as your top guy lessens your scoring depth. Separating them means your top line won't be as powerful.

Every single roster decision is riddled with tradeoffs. They are unavoidable. You can't only consider the benefits of making a change but must consider the drawbacks as well. More on how to do that below.

Principle #3: Beware of Unintended Consequences

Principle #2 was about there only being so much ice time to go around. This is the other side of that coin - someone has to take up every kind of ice time. In addition to the tradeoffs I talked about above you have to think up a level. If you give your top guys more Ozone faceoffs not only does that mean that there are fewer of those to go around, but they are also not going to be able to take as many Dzone faceoffs so the rest of the team will have to take more of those. You can't have the Sedin line getting 3 faceoffs in the offensive zone for every 1 they take in their own end without the other lines taking worse starts than average - most of it being Malhotra with the ratio reversed. Kane can't get all those easy minutes without someone else picking up the slack and taking on the toughs - in this case Bolland and Hossa.

Principle #4: Be Reasonable!

Especially with matchups and zone starts, there are limits. With matchups, you have very little control in your away games. Beyond that there is the rest issue plus the opponents are only going to put their worst guys out there for so long. You can't give a line nothing but easy minutes, at least in the regular season. You can't give a line nothing but tough minutes, either. The same goes for zone starts. Sometimes two or even three lines are dead tired and you have to put the fresh one out there no matter where the faceoff is.

There is only so far you can go.

Principle #5: Cater to Sensitive Players

In an earlier draft I had a bunch of econ jargon but it was a Catch-22; it would only be understandable if you were already familiar with the concepts. You didn't, but if you feel like you missed out on something here's a link to the wikipedia page on comparative advantage.

So you realize it's complicated, have kept tradeoffs in mind, are considering unintended consequences and are reasonable. How should you make the case that X should get more Ozone starts, with Y picking up the extra Dzone starts or Z should face the toughs with W getting protected minutes? The answer is that you should pander to the sensitive players. In other words, you want to give the players where zone starts or quality of competition matters the most the easier minutes.

Put differently, whichever group has the largest gap in performance between easy and tough competition or after starts in the offensive zone and defensive zone should get the more sheltered time. I'm big on number crunching, but it's still a better way to think about divvying up the time if you just use the eyeball test and your own intuition. The key is to focus on the relative importance of each situation for the players, not in absolutes.

Principle #6: Context Matters

The last few were mostly about line usage, but when evaluating personnel decisions remember to take context into account. Maybe the fourth liner you think was good for nothing and should get the drop actually did well, fourth-line well at least, but faced tough opposition or spent a lot of time in his own zone. It is especially important to look into context stats for fringe players because their starts and especially Qualcomp numbers can be more extreme due to the small sample sizes. According to BTN, of players with 40 or more games Nicklas Grossman had the highest 5-on-5 Corsi QoC last season facing opponents with an average Corsi rate of 1.742. If we drop the games-played requirement to 10 then there were 8 players that faced tougher competition on average than Mr. Grossman, led by Petr Prucha at 3.259.

Principle #7: This Season Isn't Last Season

A lot changes from season to season. In addition to personnel changes, players age and their offseason workouts or time at the Byfuget table can mean big differences in productivity and style from one year to the next. Be especially cautious projecting young players, old players, players coming off injury, players moving to a new team and, I suppose, players who had their linemates/defensive partner leave town. I made this mistake myself in an offhand comment in this article when I said that we should expect Stamkos's stats to take a hit this season. I'm not completely backing off from that statement, look for a post projecting his goal tally in the near future, but I certainly should have thought about it more.

Conclusion

Using the above principles you will not always reach the right conclusion. Sometimes players perform above expectation. That's true for you, your GM and coach as well as your favorite bloggers. Sometimes what we expected of a player is flat out wrong or for some other reason we make bad judgments. While it doesn't guarantee that you get the right answer, the principles above should help your thought process, improve how you look at these sorts of decisions and make you more likely to get it right.

A Thought Experiment about Goaltending, Fenwick, and Lineup Construction

2011-09-21T00:59:00.004-04:00

Before I go any further, I must note that this piece is an introduction, and to be honest, I don't quite know exactly where it will go. I do know that I'd like you, the readers, to give any input in the comments, as this topic will certainly be revisited in the future.

One of my favorite elements of NHL analysis is looking at line-up construction in the context of the salary cap. My favorite team, the Blackhawks, are like a number of other teams in that they will almost always spend to the externally imposed cap, but frankly, this analysis can extend to every team in the league, as they will almost always be working with internally imposed constraints.

The question is simple: What is the best way to put together a line-up that can consistently compete to win a championship?

Here is where Fenwick and Goaltending come into play, to illustrate my point, I ask these questions below:

What is the lower bound of goalie performance for a team with legitimate Stanley Cup aspirations? Is it saving 87% of shots? 88%? 89%?

What about Fenwick (puck possession)? Is it 44%? 46%? 48%?

Spending big money on a goaltender likely comes at the expense of signing better skaters. What is the optimal solution? Is it the team that has a goalie saving 90.5% of Even Strength shots but has a Fenwick of 55% more likely to win a Cup than the team that has a goalie saving 93% of Even Strength shots but gets crushed territorially, only managing to Fenwick 46%?

While we can safely assume that there is a correlation between salary and ability in goaltenders, we cannot escape the reality that dollars are fixed, and money spent on goaltenders cannot be spent on skaters. This makes it difficult for teams that spend large chunks of salary on goalies to build teams that dominate at even strength. There are exceptions to this to the first rule, both in terms of mediocre goalies making big money (Cam Ward), elite goalies making back-up money (Tomas Vokoun, though this is only one year), and in terms of teams who have managed to build a team with excellent goaltending and excellent puck possession (Montreal and Vancouver come to mind), but by and large, teams that spend big money on their goaltenders put themselves at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to competing for a Stanley Cup.

My position is that goaltending, like rebounding in basketball, doesn't matter until it matters. That is to say it is not as important as say, winning at even strength. I recognize that this is a controversial position, and I hope that this opens up some discussion. I will come back to this with more data throughout the season, but right now I want to limit this to a philosophical discussion.

Boston showed us last year that a team can be mediocre 5v5 and still win a cup, so long as the goaltending is on point, but there are few who peg them as favorites to repeat, which is pretty telling when we consider that most of their team will return. People generally recognize, whether it is conscious or not, that relying so heavily on your netminder is not a recipe for success over multi-year timeframes.

Winning at even strength is important, but are we in the statistics world overrating its importance? Is it as important as having a world-beater between the pipes? How does a rising cap change this picture?

Let us know your thoughts, we believe this is a pretty interesting topic.

Driving Play Season Preview - Teams 26-23 - The Not-Quite-So-Bad-As-The-Oilers

2011-09-19T11:40:00.001-04:00

The Driving Play Season Preview continues.

#26 Minnesota Wild

Overall Game Plan: I have absolutely no idea. I think GM Chuck Fletcher is trying to put together a winning team, but I'm not sure how he plans to do that.

Why They Stink: 43.7% Fenwick with the score tied. How they were ever in the playoff race at all last season, I don't know. Great goaltending and riding the luck train, I suppose.

Good Idea(s): Trading Brent Burns, an expiring contract, for an NHL player, a legitimate prospect, and picks.

Bad Idea(s): Continuing to trade with San Jose, who fleeced them in the Heatley for Havlat trade.

Closing Remarks: The Minnesota Wild are easily the most boring team in the league. They have some solid tough minute players, but they are deficient in skill players all over the roster. One has to think that Fletcher's deal of Brent Burns signals that he'll be around for longer, because it's doubtful that a GM on the hot seat would trade his best player for mostly future considerations.

#25: Ottawa Senators

Overall Game Plan: A rebuild. Somehow GM Bryan Murray, who oversaw his team falling apart due to free agent defections, poor drafting, and poor trading, is still around to try to pick up the pieces. There are some excellent pieces here, but there are also giant holes which Murray did not even try to fill.

Why They Stink: Most of the reason last season was goaltending, but with G Craig Anderson, they should be better in that department. The problem is they sloughed off much of their talent at last year's trade deadline. Depth is Ottawa's main issue - they could be okay if they stay largely healthy, but there's a thin line between Ottawa contending for a playoff spot and Ottawa being down here with the Andy Dufresne crowd.

Good Idea(s): Signing Zenon Konopka to be a 4th line center, I guess? Acquiring Nikita Filatov for a 3rd round pick is a no risk move.

Bad Idea(s): That GM Bryan Murray has not resigned his post in shame.

Closing Remarks: The Senators have some pieces in place for a good team in the next 5 years. Erik Karlsson is a legitimate offensive star. Still, it could very well get worse before it gets better.

#24: Toronto Maple Leafs

Overall Game Plan: I think GM Brian Burke wants to make the playoffs this year. There's certainly the makings of a good team here, but the organizational depth is still woeful. If the club stays healthy, it could exceed this projection by a lot, but if a few injuries hit at the same time, the team will be down to the dregs quickly.

Why They Stink: 44.4% Fenwick with the score tied isn't going to cut it. There's some young players that should hopefully improve that number, but I don't see it cracking 50% this year.

Good Idea(s): Signing Tim Connolly to be the 2nd line center - even if he plays 60 games, he will likely be worth it. Dealing for Franson and Lombardi was also a shrewd, big-market GM move.

Bad Idea(s): Striking out on all the major free agents. Toronto desperately needed an upgrade that did not come.

Closing Remarks: The Leafs are slowly getting better. Next year, they might even have most of their own draft picks! Burke has been able to make some solid smaller moves, but that Kessel deal has gone about as wrong as it could go. I'm not sure how much longer the powers that be are going to let Burke flop around in this quarter of the standings, especially while he advertises that he is putting his team at a competitive disadvantage with his feelings on front-loaded contracts.

#23: Florida Panthers

Overall Game Plan: GM Dale Tallon had as much cap space as anyone's ever had in this league. He basically had a clean slate. He did about as poor a job as possible filling that space, largely signing average players to bloated contracts. I don't have a clue what this team's game plan is.

Why They Stink: I'm not sure, because honestly, nothing that happened last year matters at all with this team. There's 10 new players in their starting lineup.

Good Idea(s): Using Rosti Olesz to get Brian Campbell, who has a big-time contract that they probably wouldn't've been able to sign on their own.

Bad Idea(s): Not getting anything more out of Chicago than the Campbell contract in that deal. Oh, and signing 8 UFAs.

Closing Remarks: If Florida had signed some of these players for less money and backloaded their deals, they might've been able to deal some of these UFAs away. As it stands now, they're going to have to be unloading them if and when some of these prospects ever make their way to the NHL. Tallon should have used his cap space to acquire undesirable contracts while picking up picks and prospects for that service. Instead, it appears he will have blown his shot to build a real winner in Florida.

Rankings to date:

30. Edmonton

29. Colorado

28. Dallas

27. New York Islanders

26. Minnesota

25. Ottawa

24. Toronto

23. Florida

22-1. TO BE CONTINUED, by Jared

Driving Play Season Preview - Teams 30-27 - A Journey Through The NHL Underworld

2011-09-15T12:06:00.000-04:00

If you read hockey blogs, you'll no doubt come upon a deluge of season previews. We bloggers can't wait for the season to begin, so we write endless articles about line combinations and roster battles and people who have to prove themselves, etc. Me, I'm not a fan; most of those articles won't be worth the paper they're not printed on by the time the season actually rolls around. Still, we here at Driving Play exist to serve you, the reader, and your insatiable demand for season previews. So we decided to informally rank the teams 1-30, based on where we think they will end up at the conclusion of the coming season. If our rankings turn out poorly, we will be outed as frauds, the blog reviled as a sham built on number juggling and self-congratulatory nonsense. I, however, think we will be lauded as visionaries, our predictions making economists blush in shame and weathermen agape with fear and envy. So without further pomp, I give you the Driving Play Season Preview.

I got assigned to write about the worst teams, since I am far more giving of my contempt than of my praise. If you're a fan of these teams, I am sorry for what follows. But I will be frank, and by frank, I mean, you know, devastating.

30. Edmonton Oilers

Overall Game Plan: GM Steve Tambellini and company's overall team-building plan seems to be much like Andy Dufresne's - crawl through a river of excrement to reach freedom, or in this case, a Stanley Cup. While it may or may not work, you've got to admire his willingness to stick to the plan. The Oilers should be picking in the top 5 (again) in next year's entry draft.

Reason They Stink: A 45.6% Fenwick with the score tied isn't very good. Neither is the league's worst penalty kill. They also continue to employ Nikolai Khabibulin as a starting goaltender despite his .890 save percentage and league-leading loss total the previous year.

Was it Ren and Stimpy that had the 'Good Idea, Bad Idea' gag? I think so. Whatever the case, I will do this for each team I look at - I will look at a good idea they've had this off-season, and a bad idea.

Good Idea(s): Signing veteran Eric Belanger as a third-line center to take faceoffs and kill penalties. Belanger's exactly the sort of player they've failed to retain in Edmonton.

Bad Idea(s): Signing defenseman Cam Barker to do anything. Barker's been a terrible player for years, and it can only be his status as a 3rd overall pick in 2004 and his 40 point season in 2009 that keeps a team like Edmonton thinking he's worth a roster spot.

Closing Remarks: Incidentally, I ranked Edmonton 24th best, whereas all my colleagues ranked them 30th. I don't know if that's because I've absorbed dangerous levels of optimism from the Oilogosphere, or I just think that Taylor Hall is a really good player. Whatever the case, this team will be bad.

29. Colorado Avalanche

Overall Game Plan: GM Greg Sherman traded his first round pick this season, so he must think that this team is playoff-bound. Common sense seems to disagree, as this team is dangerously young and largely without star players. Sherman may think that the Avs' 2009-10 playoff berth was earned and that 2010-11's poor result was a fluke, but he'd be wrong about both things.

Why They Stink: 47.4% Fenwick with the score tied isn't very good. Their defense is no-name and bad. While they're set at center with Duchene, Stastny, and McClement, there isn't very much around them to make the club better.

Good Idea(s): Trading for a young franchise goalie. Goalies can boost a mediocre team into the playoffs. Varlamov may be an elite goaltender.

Bad Idea(s): Dealing a 1st and 2nd round pick to acquire said goalie. Other bad ideas include not doing anything of note this off-season, besides signing tough-minute D Jan Hejda to a 4 year contract.

Closing Remarks: Yet again, my colleagues disagree with me - I have Colorado as the 22nd best team, merely based on Varlamov and the strength at center. I also think they'll make some in-season moves to bolster the team. Still, the most likely outcome for this season is a playoff miss and the end of Greg Sherman as Colorado GM.

28. Dallas Stars

Overall Game Plan: Who knows? They retained Brad Richards and even added Jamie Langenbrunner in a futile attempt to make the playoffs last season. Brad Richards then skipped town, as expected. Also, they're apparently declaring bankruptcy. Dallas doesn't have many prospects and they're not a good team - they might be entering a tailspin like the ones Edmonton and Colorado are beginning to pull themselves out of.

Why They Stink: 46.6% Fenwick with the score tied isn't going to win many games, unless you get obscenely lucky, as the Stars did for the first half of last season.

Good Idea(s): Signing Michael Ryder isn't a bad move; he can still put the puck in the net.

Bad Idea(s): Signing Adam Pardy for 2 years and 2 mil per? Signing Sheldon Souray to a one-way contract after he wasn't doing well in the AHL? These contracts don't have much risk, but they sure don't seem to have much upside, either.

Closing Remarks: Kari Lehtonen is a good goaltender, and if the team can stay healthy, they might be able to ward off total collapse. Still, without Brad Richards and with nothing at all to replace him, I suspect it's going to be a long winter for the Dallas Stars.

#27: New York Islanders

Overall Game Plan: Build from within. The team boasts an impressive young forward corps, and some of their younger defensemen are underrated. GM Garth Snow has tried desperately to attract a marquee free agent, but has had no luck. The future is looking bright for the Islanders, and I just stole that line from the last 15 years' worth of season preview writing on the Islanders.

Why They Stink: 46.1% Fenwick with the score tied, plus Rick Dipietro's horrendous .886 save percentage adds up to being one of the worst teams in the league. Again.

Good Idea(s): Signing Matt Moulson, John Tavares, Kyle Okposo, and Michael Grabner to long-term contract extensions. I don't think the Islanders will regret any of these deals.

Bad Idea(s): Maintaining the three headed awfulness at netminder - Evgeni Nabokov, who is hopefully average, Al Montoya, who has to prove last year's solid performance wasn't a fluke (it probably was), and Rick DiPietro, who is well below average and signed for 10 more seasons.

Closing Remarks: The Islanders have the pieces in place for a prosperous future. They just have to not undermine that future by panicking when one of their prospects doesn't quite develop the way they want him to. The team may not be on Long Island when it finally gets good, but I do think that this version of the Islanders will actually become a playoff team in 2 or 3 years.

Coming soon: Teams 26-23

On Zone Starts - Team Situational Stats

2011-09-08T23:12:00.006-04:00

Here are the team situational stats. For more information see the original article.

Ozone, faceoff shift - the most recent faceoff was in the team's offensive zone. All players that were on the ice for the faceoff remain on the ice.

Rank	Team	Corsi/60
1	PHI	54.228
2	T.B	51.08
3	VAN	49.815
4	BOS	48.759
5	CGY	48.441
6	DET	46.786
7	BUF	45.822
8	L.A	45.387
9	NYR	44.161
10	S.J	42.515
11	WSH	42.389
12	COL	42.381
13	MTL	42.069
14	PHX	41.97
15	STL	41.963
16	CBJ	41.268
17	PIT	40.983
18	OTT	38.66
19	FLA	38.103
20	CHI	36.331
21	CAR	35.763
22	N.J	35.138
23	TOR	33.567
24	NSH	33.555
25	WPG	33.431
26	NYI	33.14
27	ANA	31.991
28	DAL	30.702
29	MIN	28.032
30	EDM	20.284

Ozone, on-the-fly - the most recent faceoff was in the team's offensive zone. At least one player who was on the ice for that faceoff has left.

Rank	Team	Corsi/60
1	STL	13.715
2	DET	11.981
3	CHI	11.927
4	S.J	11.322
5	VAN	9.631
6	N.J	7.863
7	WPG	7.033
8	BOS	6.542
9	T.B	5.909
10	PIT	4.99
11	BUF	4.653
12	CGY	4.295
13	PHX	4.086
14	L.A	4.053
15	CAR	2.664
16	OTT	2.457
17	MTL	2.193
18	FLA	2.062
19	NSH	1.123
20	WSH	1.062
21	TOR	0.147
22	CBJ	-0.606
23	EDM	-1.617
24	DAL	-2.016
25	COL	-2.887
26	PHI	-3.068
27	NYR	-3.263
28	MIN	-7.285
29	NYI	-8.869
30	ANA	-12.004

Neutral Zone - the most recent faceoff took place in the neutral zone.

Rank	Team	Corsi/60
1	DET	8.91
2	S.J	8.122
3	PIT	6.662
4	CGY	6.402
5	CHI	5.329
6	WSH	5.32
7	MTL	4.566
8	T.B	3.503
9	FLA	2.949
10	VAN	2.817
11	N.J	2.453
12	PHX	1.373
13	L.A	1.234
14	BUF	0.774
15	CBJ	0.545
16	BOS	0.038
17	STL	-1.229
18	WPG	-1.438
19	CAR	-1.656
20	NYR	-1.69
21	NSH	-1.703
22	PHI	-3.096
23	DAL	-3.323
24	OTT	-3.735
25	MIN	-5.621
26	EDM	-5.945
27	TOR	-5.955
28	NYI	-6.438
29	ANA	-8.643
30	COL	-9.949

Dzone, on-the-fly - the most recent faceoff was in the team's defensive zone. At least one player who was on the ice for that faceoff has left.

Rank	Team	Corsi/60
1	STL	6.676
2	S.J	5.267
3	CHI	5.073
4	PIT	3.967
5	L.A	1.756
6	T.B	1.725
7	VAN	1.537
8	WSH	0.711
9	N.J	0.564
10	DET	0.326
11	OTT	-0.234
12	CBJ	-0.746
13	NSH	-1.143
14	WPG	-1.893
15	TOR	-2.502
16	CGY	-2.646
17	PHI	-3.433
18	MTL	-3.687
19	BOS	-4.026
20	FLA	-4.537
21	PHX	-4.809
22	BUF	-5.957
23	COL	-5.962
24	NYR	-6.533
25	DAL	-6.778
26	CAR	-6.989
27	EDM	-8.336
28	NYI	-8.625
29	MIN	-14.866
30	ANA	-17.406

Dzone, faceoff shift - the most recent faceoff was in the team's defensive zone. All players that were on the ice for the faceoff remain there.

Rank	Team	Corsi/60
1	N.J	-24.725
2	CBJ	-28.026
3	PIT	-28.448
4	MTL	-29.541
5	S.J	-29.619
6	L.A	-30.262
7	DET	-32.495
8	BOS	-34.246
9	FLA	-35.538
10	PHX	-35.628
11	VAN	-35.931
12	STL	-36.241
13	OTT	-37.688
14	T.B	-38.08
15	CHI	-39.613
16	WSH	-40.122
17	COL	-42.147
18	PHI	-42.258
19	CAR	-42.514
20	BUF	-42.67
21	DAL	-44.144
22	MIN	-44.151
23	NSH	-44.536
24	NYR	-46.649
25	TOR	-49.143
26	CGY	-49.905
27	NYI	-50.559
28	EDM	-51.105
29	ANA	-56.561
30	WPG	-60.533

Here is a table giving the rankings for each team in the 5 categories:

Team	O-first	O-fly	Neutral	D-fly	D-first
ANA	27	30	29	30	29
BOS	4	8	16	19	8
BUF	7	11	14	22	20
CAR	21	15	19	26	19
CBJ	16	22	15	12	2
CGY	5	12	4	16	26
CHI	20	3	5	3	15
COL	12	25	30	23	17
DAL	28	24	23	25	21
DET	6	2	1	10	7
EDM	30	23	26	27	28
FLA	19	18	9	20	9
L.A	8	14	13	5	6
MIN	29	28	25	29	22
MTL	13	17	7	18	4
N.J	22	6	11	9	1
NSH	24	19	21	13	23
NYI	26	29	28	28	27
NYR	9	27	20	24	24
OTT	18	16	24	11	13
PHI	1	26	22	17	18
PHX	14	13	12	21	10
PIT	17	10	3	4	3
S.J	10	4	2	2	5
STL	15	1	17	1	12
T.B	2	9	8	6	14
TOR	23	21	27	15	25
VAN	3	5	10	7	11
WPG	25	7	18	14	30
WSH	11	20	6	8	16

On Zone Starts

2011-09-08T22:40:00.008-04:00

How valuable are offensive-zone faceoffs? How much should we adjust the Sedins' stats to take into account that they take three faceoffs in the offensive zone for every one at the other end? Are coaches using their guys effectively, or should they almost turn them into specialists like Vigneault does in Vancouver? Is it better for a coach to focus on zone starts, matchups or just roll lines to keep his guys fresh and the best playing the most?

These are just a few of the many, many questions that relate to zone starts that come up in hockey analysis. We'll put off dealing with most of those until later, this article will be more of a broad discussion and introduction to what I feel is a novel approach that we'll be using a lot.

The Data

I'm going to start with team stats. This is pretty strange because zone starts aren't a team issue. A team that has more offensive-zone starts than defensive has earned them; good zone starts aren't just handed down to the team by some suit. In contrast, a player only reaps what he sows, as it were, if he or a teammate ices the puck or possibly after a very short shift. Most faceoffs are taken with fresh players that were on the bench when the stoppage occurred. Despite that, using team stats is a good place to start because we can get a pretty good idea how the location of the most recent faceoff affects results.

The data come from a common source: NHL play-by-play and roster reports. In this case, I am using every game available for the 2010-2011 regular season. As usual, it's even strength with both goalies on the ice. Using the roster reports, which say when each player was on the ice during the game, I isolated these 5 situations:

Ozone, first shift - the most recent faceoff was in the team's offensive zone. All players that were on the ice for the faceoff remain on the ice.

Ozone, on-the-fly - the most recent faceoff was in the team's offensive zone. At least one player who was on the ice for that faceoff has left.

Neutral Zone - the most recent faceoff took place in the neutral zone.

Dzone, on-the-fly - the most recent faceoff was in the team's defensive zone. At least one player who was on the ice for that faceoff has left.

Dzone, first shift - the most recent faceoff was in the team's defensive zone. All players that were on the ice for the faceoff remain there.

To clarify, once any of the original faceoff guys have left the ice the rest of the time before the next stoppage is in the on-the-fly category. So the faceoff shift is only that first shift, even if later it so happens that the 10 skaters that were on the ice are out there together.

Note: I have separated out the team results to keep this post about the general concepts. If you want to see how good your team is in each situation, you can find that here.

Ice Time and Goals

Let's take a look at how much time was spent and how many goals were scored on average in each situation. This will give us a very rough idea how important faceoffs are in the offensive or defensive zone.

Situation	Ice Time	%	Goals	%
Ozone, first shift	452.5	11.4%	21.2	13.8%
Ozone, on-the-fly	765.1	19.3%	32.3	21.0%
Neutral	1538.9	38.7%	54	35.1%
Dzone, on-the-fly	765.1	19.3%	34.8	22.7%
Dzone, first shift	452.5	11.4%	11.4	7.4%
Total	3974.1	100%	153.6	100%

The first thing I noticed is that the first shift only accounts for about 37% of the ice time following a faceoff at either end. Part of that is that I'm being very strict defining the first shift; it would increase if I allowed for one guy to leave the ice, for example. In any case, you might wonder why we focus so much on who is on the ice for a faceoff when so much of a player's ice time after an ozone/dzone faceoff started with him jumping onto the ice.

The goals columns give you a pretty strong hint. Look at the second and fourth rows. Following a faceoff outside the neutral zone, once a change was made more goals were scored by the team that took the faceoff in their defensive zone! We'll later see that this is likely just due to random chance, but it seems clear that if you come on in an on-the-fly change it's more like a neutral-zone start than being on for a faceoff at either end.

Corsi

Let's look at the average team Corsi rate for each situation. I use the average team rate for each situation so we don't have the endogeneity effect I wrote poorly about a couple months ago. In other words, if we simply averaged out all the ice time we'd overestimate how important it is to be in the offensive zone because good teams tend to get more faceoffs in the offensive zone than bad teams so we'd be lumping in team quality with ozone-faceoff value.

Situation	Corsi/60
Ozone, first shift	39.957
Ozone, on-the-fly	2.603
Neutral	0.019
Dzone, on-the-fly	-2.784
Dzone, first shift	-40.103

Here you can see how much having a faceoff in the good zone helps your team out territorially. I'm sure that there is an effect didn't surprise you, but suspect how large it is might have. It's also interesting to note that this almost completely goes away once the first change happens. This shouldn't be a surprise either, teams don't change without the puck leaving the zone, but one might have expected more of a ripple effect. The most common way to change lines is to dump the puck and give the other team possession, albeit starting behind their own net. It does not appear that being able to breakout the Flying V gives you much of an edge.

This is a nice segue back to why we should care so much more about who is actually on for the faceoff and not just ice time afterward. Let's exaggerate and suppose that Henrik Sedin and Manny Malhotra spend the same amount of post-offensive-zone-faceoff time on the ice but Hank's is all first-shift time while Manny doesn't take a single offensive-zone faceoff. Sedin's ozone time will be extremely favorable, and Malhotra's only slightly so. In this extreme scenario we would need to adjust Sedin's stats a lot to take his type of ice time accurately into account. Being out there on the faceoff in front of their goalie is over 15 times as favorable as jumping on the ice after.

Conclusion: More To Come

When I thought of this method of separating out the ice time, I did a little fist pump. While I don't think this, or really any metric, will blow everything else away it seems like a good way to analyze zone starts and give us better insight into player value and coaching decisions. We will be using this and related methods a lot in the future, especially the coming weeks leading up to the season. Coming down the pipe is a new player metric to adjust for zone starts. We'll also do in-depth analysis on zone starts for the two teams that focus the most on them: the recently rivalrous Vancouver Canucks and Chicago Blackhawks. Are Vigneault and Quenneville outsmarting the rest of the league or is it a case of fancy coaching syndrome? If you ask nicely, we could probably do something similar for your favorite team, or even your favourite team.

Here is a link to the team data.

Luck, Skill and Sample Size in Playoff Shooting Percentage

2011-09-07T17:28:00.001-04:00

In a discussion on a message board about my previous article on luck and skill in shooting percentage, someone asked about the numbers for the playoffs. The average series runs a little under 6 games. That makes the entire playoffs pretty close to a quarter of a season for the teams that make the Cup finals. Here are the numbers for how often the team that shoots at a higher percentage (about 7th best in the league) outshoots the team that is bad at shooting (~7th worst in the league):

Time period	Number of Shots	A scores more	B scores more	Goals scored equal	A > B Significant	B > A significant
Four Games	96	51%	38.1%	10.9%	7.4%	3.9%
Five Games	120	51.9%	38.7%	9.4%	7.6%	3.8%
Six Games	144	54.1%	37.5%	8.4%	7.8%	3.4%
Seven Games	168	55.4%	36.6%	8%	7.9%	3.1%
Second Round	274	57.4%	36.6%	6%	9%	3.1%
Conference Finals	411	60.5%	34.6%	4.9%	9.4%	2.7%
Stanley Cup Finals	548	62.9%	33.1%	4%	10.7%	1.9%

Something worth noting is that on average this gap in shooting from good to bad is worth a little less than a goal (0.88 goals) per series. Despite that, the team with less shooting talent still has between a 35% and 40% chance to get more goals at even strength in a series if they get the same number of shots, and another 8-10% shot at breaking even. The bounces don't always even out. That leaves a lot of room for luck, creating more shots and special teams.