Month: October 2016

Hockey Graphs and Vancouver Canucks Co-Host Vancouver Hockey Analytics Conference 2017

Garret Hohl Conferences Leave a comment

 

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Hockey Graphs is excited to announce that we will be co-hosting the Vancouver Hockey Analytics Conference (#VanHAC) with the Vancouver Canucks along with HockeyData and Canucks Army.

Date: Saturday, March 11th, 2017

Location: Rogers Arena, Vancouver, Canada

Website: HockeyGraphs.com/VanHAC

The call for speakers is currently open with a deadline of January 10th, 2017.  See the website for more details or go here to submit your submission.  

Registration has yet to open as we tabulate the final costs to host the venue, among other factors. Check back here or on Twitter for more information when it will open. (Note: Expect participants to be capped at around 100 people.)

Watch the VanHAC page for updates as they are released!

Introducing the 2016 – 2017 Forechecking Project

Ryan Stimson Forechecking Data Leave a comment

Passing and Zone Entries are so last year.

When Corey Sznajder decided to track microstats for the upcoming season and began incorporating my passing concepts into his work on last season’s playoffs, I wondered if we really needed to track this season. Instead, Corey and I chatted a bit and decided the best use of everyone’s time would be if myself and the other passing project volunteers continued to work on last season*, with the hope that we can build a solid sample by the time Corey finishes the 2016 – 2017 season. Having two (nearly) full seasons of data would be excellent to have.

However, this also gave another idea to explore something we really haven’t done a lot of: forechecking.

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2016-17 Hockey Graphs Top 50 Players

omgitsdomi NHL League-Wide Analysis 4 Comments

Embed from Getty Images

Welcome to the second annual Hockey Graphs Top 50 Players in the NHL list.

The main reason I put this together last year (you can view that here) was as a basis for comparison against the other, more famous, top 50 players lists. The annual list is a season preview staple for TSN and THN and the rankings are usually slightly controversial. Both lists are created via a poll of various people inside hockey, who are generally very smart people, but who are also prone to old-school thinking with value sometimes being shaped by recency bias, reputation and a winning pedigree.

This list is a bit of the opposite as it comes from mostly outsiders, people who study and analyze the game in the public sphere. That’s not to say these are necessarily smarter people, they just approach the game from a different angle based mostly on underlying trends and numbers over more traditional stats and what is immediately seen on the ice.

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Just How Important is Quality of Competition? Very. Also, not much. It’s All Relative.

Ryan Stimson Exploring Context, NHL League-Wide Analysis, Practical Concerns 2 Comments

*This post is co-authored by DTMAboutHeart and Ryan Stimson*

Recently, the topic of Quality of Competition has been at the forefront of Hockey Twitter. This post hopes to articulate some of the nuance associated with Quality of Competition, as well as Quality of Teammate, metrics and how impactful they are. To do that, we will revisit methods outlined here by Eric Tulsky, namely splitting the competition and teammate quality by position and measuring the impact of each split. Ryan recently wrote about this at the NCAA level, but it has not been looked at with much rigor at the NHL level.

Both Quality of Competition and Quality of Teammates matter. They also don’t matter. It depends on the position and metric you’re looking at. All TOI data is 5v5 and from Corsica. Ryan had the game files of who was on the ice during each 5v5 shot from Micah Blake McCurdy, so that data was used as well. Also, thanks to Muneeb for feedback during this process. Thanks to all!

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Behind The Numbers: On the World Cup and Team Canada’s domination

Garret Hohl Behind the Numbers, Neutral Zone Analysis Leave a comment
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Team Canada won the cup. Team Canada went undefeated. They were the favourites going in, and they came out the winner. Not only did they win, but they went about it in dominant fashion. They rarely trailed and they controlled nearly every facet of the game.

It wouldn’t be surprising for many to hear that the team also dominated in the shots column… but they were not the most effective team in every aspect, which raises some interesting questions.

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