Month: June 2014

How repeatable is performance in the Offensive, Defensive and Neutral Zones?

garik16 Neutral Zone Analysis Tags: , , Leave a comment

A few years back, Eric Tulsky (and others at Broad Street Hockey) pioneered the start of neutral zone tracking, or rather the tracking by individuals of every entry each team makes from the neutral zone into the offensive zone during a hockey game.  The idea of this tracking was simple:  Neutral Zone play is obviously important to winning a hockey game, but NHL-tracked statistics contain practically no way to measure neutral zone success overall.   Zone Entry tracking remedied that, by giving us both individual and on-ice measures of neutral zone performance.

An overall measure of neutral zone performance that we can find with zone entry tracking is called “Neutral Zone Fenwick.”  By using the average amount of Fenwick events resulting from each type of zone entry (Carry-in or Dump-in), we can create an estimate of what we’d expect a player’s Fenwick % to be with them on the ice based on the team’s neutral zone play with them on the ice.  In essence, this is a measure of a player’s neutral zone performance, helpfully done in a format that we’re already pretty familiar with – like normal Fenwick%, 50%=break even, above 50% = good, below = bad.

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How Are Players Affected Financially By Buy-Outs?

Jared Friday Quick Graphs Tags: Leave a comment

photocred Wikimedia Commons

I compiled the data for all the players bought out by their teams since the 2005 lock-out (excluding this year’s buy-out class) and examined how much of the the money lost to the buy-out they made back over the years that were bought out. When players are bought-out, they get a portion of their previous contract, and are given an opportunity to re-enter the free agent market. Potentially, they could end up a net winner from the process.

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How Do Teams Use Their Top Defensemen

Garret Hohl Exploring Context, NHL League-Wide Analysis Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

The following is a guest article written by Rob Vollman of Hockey Abstract and Hockey Prospectus fame. Enjoy!

Other than the goalie, a team’s top defensemen are arguably the most important players on the teams. Great ones like Nicklas Lidstrom, Scott Niedermayer and Chris Pronger can completely alter the outcome of an entire season almost single-handedly. Who were the top pairing defensemen this year, how will they used, and how effective were their teams when they were on the ice?
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The Futility of Predicting Playoff Series Goaltending

Emmanuel Perry Theory Tags: , , Leave a comment

Goaltending is a devilishly difficult thing to predict at the best of times. In smaller samples, even the most powerful forecasting tools fall victim to variance and luck. Playoff performances, and to a greater extent single series, represent such samples and we’re frustratingly inefficient at predicting them using traditional methods. I’m excluding more refined models such as @Garik16’s Marcels, which may very well do a better job of it. I compared regular season 5v5 Sv% over different intervals of time, both total and strictly on the road, for all playoff goalies over the past three seasons and how they matched up with playoff 5v5 Sv%. Here are the results:
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The Hartnell for Umberger + 4th Rounder Swap, and the Places a Bad Contract Puts You

Benjamin Wendorf NHL Topical Analysis Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

File:Scott Hartnell 2010-10-30a.jpg

Photo by “Rhys A.” via Wikimedia Commons

I had a great question from a good friend of mine, a Flyers fan, after the fervor died down from yesterday’s Scott Hartnell for R.J. Umberger and 4th round pick swap. He asked me:

“From what I’m getting from the advanced stats guys, it appears that the Blue Jackets robbed the Flyers blind yesterday by getting Hartnell for Umberger (a guy they were going to compliance buyout anyhow).

Is Umberger really this bad?”

The short answer is that Umberger is not very good; his With-or-Without-Yous (or WOWYs; where you compare Corsi when a player is with and without a teammate on the ice) suggest that nobody plays better with him than others, outside of maybe Ryan Johansen. Now, some of that is due to zone starts, as Umberger has been saddled with a lot of time in his own zone. Even so, three years of possession in your end 55%+ of the time is a little too consistent in its futility. I’d expect at least one year there where that figure lowered to 51 or 52% if he was showing some defensive abilities. He’s still an average player in the faceoff dot, but his offensive contributions are shrinking, and at 32 it’s hard to see them recovering much. Blue Jackets beat reporter Aaron Portzline noted the Jackets were contemplating buying him out of his $4.6m/year cap hit contract, which was moving into modified no-trade clause (NTC; player can specify a list of teams he’d be willing to be traded to) years.

The longer answer is that yes, Umberger is not good, but this trade is much more complicated than a player-for-player, or player-for-player-and-a-pick swap. A trade presumably always looks good enough from both sides’ perspectives in order to happen, so what were the incentives for Ron Hextall? Jarmo Kekalainen?

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How Will Joe Thornton Perform Through his Contract?

Jared Career Chart Tags: , 1 Comment

photocred Wikimedia Commons

Joe Thornton has been in the news a lot recently, with talk that the Sharks are looking to move him as part of what they are labeling a rebuild.

Thornton is elite. In the past five seasons, he’s tied with Corey Perry as the sixth best point accumulator in the league. The Sharks signed Thornton, who turns 35 within two weeks, to a three year contract with a cap-hit of $6.75 million back in January.

I’m sure any potential acquiring team is intensely interested in how Thornton may depreciate over the life of his contract.

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Evaluating Defensemen using their effect on both team and opponent Corsi%

Garret Hohl Exploring Context, NHL League-Wide Analysis, Theory 5 Comments

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Eric Tulsky has previously shown that defensemen have very little control over their opponents on-ice shooting percentages, by demonstrating the extremely low repeatability in the statistic. Recently, Travis Yost expanded on this revolutionary information with showing that on-ice save percentage repeatability is even lower when reducing the impact of goaltender skill level differences; which makes sense when a defender with Ondrej Pavelec is going to have a higher probability of repeating a low save percentage, much like the opposite would be true with Tuukka Rask behind them. This leaves a defender’s influence on shot metrics as their primary impact in improving the team’s chance in winning the game. Tyler Dellow then pushed it one step further by stating the best method of evaluation then is using a defenseman’s impact on a team’s Corsi%.

But, there is one other primary factor: how a defender impacts the opposition. The two are not exactly one in the same, even though they are related:

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Defensive defensemen are struggling in the playoffs

Garret Hohl NHL Topical Analysis Tags: , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

It has been said that a “stay-at-home” defensive defenseman’s value expands in the post season. The theory behind this supposes that the looser rules regarding physical force and obstruction play into these defender’s strengths. However, this is not always the case.

Thus far, we have seen some of the larger names in the business struggle in their roles.

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2013-14 Stanley Cup Preview

Garret Hohl NHL Topical Analysis Leave a comment
Untitled

40-60% is the normal typical spread in the NHL

Later today the Los Angeles Kings will be facing off against the New York Rangers. The Los Angeles Kings have been the heavy favourite both throughout the mainstream media and the fancystats blogger community, with talk of the Kings winning in 4 or 5 with ease.

Is this valid?

Let’s look together do some very surface level analysis.

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Does Shea Weber Deserve the Norris Trophy?

Andrew Exploring Context Tags: , , 3 Comments

Allow me to preface this article with the following: Shea Weber is one of the best defensemen in the world and a guy the Nashville Predators should hold on to long-term. Trading him is not the answer for a variety of reasons, and if this club evolves into a contender during the Peter Laviolette era, Weber will certainly be a huge reason for that success.

Now that we got that out of the way, I want to take a detailed look at Weber’s performance this year to see if he truly deserves the Norris Trophy. You may have noticed Nashville has been campaigning hard for its captain, who has been snubbed for this award on several occasions.

Naturally, many fans and fellow writers have echoed the Preds’ sentiments, but a lot of folks—even some outside of Boston and Chicago—refuse to jump on this bandwagon.

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