Sunday Night Links (6/24)

Welcome to the first installment of Sunday Night Links, a new feature here where we list a few articles we find noteworthy from the previous week.  Discussion is obviously encouraged, and if there's something you want to add, feel free to drop us a line either here or on Twitter.

Without further ado:

• On Jordan Staal and Brandon Sutter (Canes Country)
• Thoughts on the First Round (Hockey Prospectus)
• Ray Shero's Big Plans (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)
• JVR and Burke (Globe and Mail
• Bobby Ryan, Rick Nash, and the Anti-Ray Shero (Puck Daddy)

What has been most interesting to me is the next chapter in the ongoing Rick Nash saga, and how Ray Shero's handling of Jordan Staal is an example of a general manager who understands asset management and how to maximize value in an awkward situation.  Howson's intransigence has cost his team a substantial amount of value, and his decision to pass on moving him at the deadline has just been matched in stupidity by the decision to wait until July. 

On the Blue Jackets' Struggling Power Play

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.

A Voracek and Nash Follow Up

Once again I find myself writing an article on the Flyers. I'm not, as Jackets Cannon somewhat offensively suggests, a Philly Blogger. In fact, the Flyers sit just above the Iceland Junior Goodwill team in the as-yet-unpublished hockey teams JaredL likes rankings. When I started looking into Voracek's stats for Chase's series on the Flyers offseason self destruction moves (part 1, part 2), I was quite surprised, especially at how his numbers compared to the much more famous Rick Nash. After I posted my initial article, the not only literate but astute readers at broadstreet (I kid, I kid) raised some valid points: I didn't consider teammate and zone-start effects. I will address those here.

Teammates

With teammates, we have the same pattern over and over. Every forward that played at least 60 minutes with each of Voracek and Nash, excluding time spent with both of them together, did better with Voracek than Nash. Typically Nash faced much tougher competition, but it seems that the gap is large enough that we can say that Voracek did better. For defensemen, the pattern is pretty much the same, with Tyutin as the exception.

Here are two charts with the results. The first column gives the teammate in question, the second whether the row corresponds to Voracek or Nash being on the ice, the third is the overall Corsi and the fourth how many minutes the player and Voracek/Nash were on the ice together. You should focus on the fifth, giving the Corsi rate. The last column is provided to give some extra context. It gives the average Corsi quality of competition, according to BTN.

Forwards:

Player	With	Corsi	Time	Rate	Corsi QoC
Vermette	Voracek	63	309.1	12.23	0.346
Vermette	Nash	-23	976.2	-1.414	1.607
Brassard	Voracek	24	827.1	1.741	0.711
Brassard	Nash	-15	218.5	-4.118	0.85
Huselius	Voracek	15	133.1	6.762	0.053
Huselius	Nash	40	869.1	2.761	1.126
Umberger	Voracek	-3	620	-0.29	0.649
Umberger	Nash	-14	427.2	-1.966	1.414
Pahlsson	Voracek	-20	101.2	-11.854	2.733
Pahlsson	Nash	-20	78.8	-15.232	1.726
None of Above	Voracek	8	71.3	6.732	1.09
None of Above	Nash	-14	39	-21.538	0.515

Defensemen:

Player	With	Corsi	Time	Rate	Corsi QoC
Stralman	Voracek	30	426.8	4.217	1.432
Stralman	Nash	19	458.4	2.487	1.718
Tyutin	Voracek	12	461.6	1.56	1.191
Tyutin	Nash	36	578.9	3.731	1.706
Hejda	Voracek	-14	347.4	-2.418	0.987
Hejda	Nash	-88	501.3	-10.532	1.267
Russell	Voracek	61	440.1	8.317	-0.417
Russell	Nash	-6	334.1	-1.078	0.511
Methot	Voracek	-10	346.8	-1.73	0.895
Methot	Nash	-36	368.5	-5.862	0.767
Commodore	Voracek	-17	248.1	-4.111	2.23
Commodore	Nash	-43	278	-9.281	2.752
Roy	Voracek	12	123.1	5.851	-0.873
Roy	Nash	9	120.3	4.489	0.744

Zones

For zone-start analysis, the obvious first place to look is at balanced Corsi by the Philly bloggers over at broadstreet. Here are their balanced corsis from each of the last two seasons, the total and average, weighted by 5-on-5 TOI:

Year	Voracek	Nash
2009-2010	-5.12	-2.09
2010-2011	0.75	-1.66
Total	-4.37	-3.75
Weighted Avg.	-2.109	-1.882

This might lead one to conclude that zone starts completely make up this difference. There is, however, a problem. While I really like balanced Corsi as a metric, a drawback is that players with different starts are compared to different players. They had very similar zone starts in 2010-2011, which makes sense because they were often linemates. In 2009-2010, Voracek had an Ozone% of 54.5% compared to 49.8% for Nash. It's always very difficult to say because getting more offensive-zone starts leads to better numbers, but I suspect Voracek's group of comparable players to be better than Nash's.

I'll take a different approach from the Broadstreet guys and Bettman's Nightmare and Gabe from arcticicehockey. Instead of doing something more complicated, I'll just look at how each did when the most recent faceoff was in the offensive zone, neutral zone and defensive zone. I'll be introducing a fancy new metric based on this idea in the next few days, so consider this a sneak peek. This metric isn't perfect, but I think it's a solid indicator of how good a guy is in each zone.

Almost every player in the league has a negative Corsi when they are on the ice during or following a defensive-zone faceoff. Cutting your losses is the name of the game. Here is a chart with the Jackets' Corsi stats with both Voracek and Nash on the ice, one of them and neither when the most recent faceoff was in their defensive zone.

Defensive Zone	Corsi	Time	Rate	Corsi QoC
Both	-23	221.8	-6.223	0.955
Voracek	-58	427	-8.151	1.073
Nash	-136	464.8	-17.555	1.65
Neither	-466	1267.8	-22.055	0.739

You can see that Voracek appears to be substantially better than Nash in his own end. Given that the difference is so large, it seems likely that Columbus could have improved by giving Voracek more defensive-zone starts.

Here's how they did following neutral-zone starts:

Neutral Zone	Corsi	Time	Rate	Corsi QoC
Both	14	274.5	3.061	0.119
Voracek	-16	564.4	-1.701	0.87
Nash	-53	580.3	-5.48	1.549
Neither	-76	1650.1	-2.763	0.488

This comes very close to matching the overall numbers. We have Voracek nearly 4 Corsi shots better per 60 minutes, but not facing as tough competition.

Here is the attacking end:

Offensive Zone	Corsi	Time	Rate	Corsi QoC
Both	68	217	18.8	0.608
Voracek	139	429.7	19.41	0.347
Nash	128	462.1	16.62	0.717
Neither	289	1266.5	13.691	0.267

The gap here is much smaller. Actually, given the other numbers I suspect that if we looked only at offensive-zone play then Nash's numbers would be better despite facing tougher competition. Remember that the above includes time well after a faceoff. If he's better than Nash in the other two zones then Voracek will put up better Corsi figures when they jump on the ice after an offensive-zone faceoff but with the puck elsewhere.

To that end, here is a table giving their Corsi stats within a minute of an offensive-zone faceoff:

Recent Offensive Zone	Corsi	Time	Rate	Corsi QoC
Both	71	156.1	27.293	0.158
Voracek	88	263.6	20.032	0.308
Nash	110	312.9	21.094	0.73
Neither	369	754.4	29.348	0.16

I didn't include the same for the defensive zone because it is very similar to the overall. To be honest, that Columbus did best when neither were on the ice according to this measure makes me uneasy. I think a lot of that may be due to faceoffs; cutting it to within a minute of the faceoff means it's tough to get something positive to count if you lose the faceoff or even win it but not cleanly. As I said, this is all a work in progress.

Conclusion

If I've done my job at all with the writing, a picture has emerged. Voracek appears to be more than capable of carrying the load, particularly in the defensive and neutral zones. His offensive numbers are not as strong. For further evidence of that, his points percentage is not very good. This indicates that he's mainly relying on teammates to convert possession in the offensive zone into goals. The Flyers would do well to put him with a scorer like Giroux or Briere.

In the next few days I'll post a full list of performance after each type of faceoff for every player in the league last year.

Part I.V: The Aftermath... Jakub Voracek and Rick Nash WOWY Analysis

Chase asked me to do some number crunching on Voracek. To be honest, I found the results surprising. The numbers indicate that Voracek is highly underrated and was a great pickup. It appears that he, not Rick Nash, was Driving Play at even strength in Columbus.

Here is how Columbus did at even strength with both goalies in net with both Nash and Voracek on the ice, one of them on and neither of them:

2010-2011 ES	Corsi	Time (mins)	Corsi/60	OppCorsi
Both	67	690.2	5.824	0.499
Nash only	-6	405.1	-0.889	-0.136
Voracek only	71	414.3	10.283	0.399
Neither	-11	2453.9	-0.269	0.214

It surprised me that in the 20 periods worth of ice time he was without Voracek, the guy with the sixth most shots taken in the league (including PP) was negative, albeit slightly. It's too small of a sample to take the exact numbers seriously, but it's interesting to note that when Voracek was off the ice not only was Nash a negative-Corsi player but Columbus actually did better without him than with him. Voracek, on the other hand, did quite well without Nash. He did so against tougher competition.

This pattern also held if you look only at situations where the score was tied:

2010-2011 tied	Corsi	Time	Corsi/60	OppCorsi
Both	55	256.9	12.844	0.192
Nash	-13	155.3	-5.023	0.002
Voracek	15	140.5	6.408	0.66
Neither	-52	946.9	-3.295	0.021

Let's expand the sample by throwing in 2009-2010, when they spent more time apart. Here's all 5-on-5 minutes:

2009-2011	Corsi	Time (mins)	Corsi/60	OppCorsi
Both	59	713.2	4.963	0.528
Nash only	-61	1507.2	-2.428	1.325
Voracek only	65	1421.1	2.744	0.773
Neither	-253	4184.4	-3.628	0.497

and when the score was tied:

2009-2011 Tied	Corsi	Time (mins)	Corsi/60	OppCorsi
Both	55	262.8	12.559	0.265
Nash	-20	584	-2.055	1.439
Voracek	34	508.9	4.009	0.646
Neither	-164	1585.8	-6.205	0.468

Nash had tougher competition in his time without Voracek than vice versa, but Voracek's numbers are far better. I'll write a lot more on quality of competition later and come up with something more precise, but according to my rough calculations it looks like Voracek was somewhere between 4 and 4.5 Corsi shots better per 60 when you take the tougher opposition into account. Maybe a little higher if you only look at tied-score minutes.

Before the flood of angry emails from Jackets' fans comes in, I'd like to point out that this is all for 5-on-5 play. It appears that Nash was carrying the water on the Power Play, maybe the fans yelling "SHOOT" for the entire damn power play are smarter than we think, and he also played about 19% of Columbus' PK time. In both cases, the Jackets had better Corsi numbers when he was on the ice than off.

Expect Voracek to play a big role for the Flyers at 5-on-5 this season.