Author: yolo_pinyato

Racial Bias in Drafting and Development: The NHL’s Black Quarterback Problem

yolo_pinyato NHL Topical Analysis, Prospects and Draft 9 Comments

Introduction

It is far from shocking that the National Hockey League has no peer among major American sports leagues in terms of racial homogeneity. Most estimates place the proportion of White players in the league in the range of 92-95%, far from comparable leagues like the National Football League, National Basketball Association and even Major League Baseball.

In the past year, the league celebrated an obscure but rather dubious milestone. If you combined all the faceoffs* taken by every Black player** in the NHL between 2008 and 2019, you would end up with 14,375 total faceoffs, or about 20 fewer than Golden Knights center Paul Stastny in that time frame (according to Hockey-reference.com). It was only in this past season that the total of the Black players overtook Stastny.

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The 2018 NHL Trade Value Rankings

yolo_pinyato For Fun, NHL League-Wide Analysis 1 Comment

Most years, the NHL trade deadline is basically the equivalent of an annual Y2K party: Much Ado About Nothing. The issue comes from the underlying inertia the permeates most of the league’s landscape.

The best players almost never switch teams in their prime (Seriously, who was the last top 10 player to leave their current team? Marian Hossa?)

Even when a trade does get made, there’s often no rhyme or reason to how it plays out. Sometimes you trade your team’s top disgruntled forward and get Seth Jones. Sometimes you get Adam Larsson.

So, to give the league’s decision makers a little kick in the butt, I’ve put together a trade model that identifies the trade value of every regular NHL player and determines what would be a fair return in a trade.

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: An analytical deep dive into the Vegas Expansion Draft

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Despite the aura of calm projected by Golden Knights owner Bill Foley, his nascent desert franchise is already on the clock. The recent announcement that the Oakland Raiders will be moving to Las Vegas in 2019, has already undermined Foley’s plan to be the only show in town. If the Golden Knights don’t win over the Vegas fanbase in relatively short order, it could prove almost impossible for hockey to get ever get a foothold in Sin City.

As a result, the team faced a variety of difficult decisions going into the 2017 expansion draft. On one hand, the team could try to win immediately with aging veterans like Eric Staal, which would allow them to establish a foothold in the market, but also put them at risk of years of mediocrity as older players lose their fights with Father Time. On the other hand, the team could tank in the hopes of finding stars at the top of the draft, but the resulting efforts could further exacerbate the fan bases preference for the incoming NFL juggernaut.

In order to evaluate the quality of the selections of GM George McPhee, I viewed each pick as a “trade” and applied prototype of a “Trade Machine” to look at each selection, given the choices available. For example, Vegas chose Clayton Stoner and Shea Theodore from the Ducks over Sami Vatanen, which means, in essence, the selection was a trade for Theodore and Stoner for Vatenen straight up. After looking at all 31 selections, I compared Vegas’ actual roster to one consisting of an optimal roster calculated using DTMAboutHeart’s GAR statistic. The results are below.

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