NHL League-Wide Analysis

NHL League-Wide Analysis pieces are analyses that take evidence from across the league to identify trends.

Estimating Shot Assist Quantities for Skaters

loserpoints Data Analysis, NHL League-Wide Analysis, Passing Data 2 Comments

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Hockey fans and analysts have always appreciated the importance of passing. But until the passing project led by Ryan Stimson, we couldn’t quantify that importance. His work supported by a team of volunteers and other analysts has established that the passing sequence prior to a shot is a significant predictor of the likelihood of the shot becoming a goal. His work also showed that measuring shots and shot assists combined as shot contributions is a better predictor of future performance for both players and teams than shots alone.

Knowing that, the logical next step is to use passing data in analysis whenever possible. Unfortunately, the NHL does not provide passing data so it must be manually tracked by people like Corey Sznajder. Corey’s work is invaluable and I encourage you to support him but he’s only one person.

This article attempts to estimate a player’s quantity of shot assists in a given sample using publicly available data to help fill in gaps where tracked data doesn’t exist.

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Introducing Weighted Points Above Replacement – Part 2

EvolvingWild NHL League-Wide Analysis, Player Evaluation, Theory Leave a comment

In part 1, I laid out the basis for Weighted Points Above Average (wPAA). Now it’s time to change the baseline from average to replacement level. A lot has been written about replacement level, but I’ll try to summarize: replacement level is the performance we would expect to see from a player a team could easily sign or call up to “replace” or fill a vacancy. In theory it is the lowest tier NHL player.

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Introducing Weighted Points Above Replacement – Part 1

EvolvingWild NHL League-Wide Analysis, Player Evaluation, Theory Leave a comment

Aggregate statistics in sports have always fascinated me. I might go so far as to say my need to better understand how these metrics work is one of the reasons I became interested in sports statistics in the first place. I also feel the process of developing them raises an incredible number of important questions, especially with a sport like hockey. Rarely are these questions raised in a more succinct and blunt manner than when a new aggregate stat first emerges and people see how good Oscar Klefbom is.

These questions mainly focus on how to value, weight, and interpret the various metrics that are available. For instance, should we value primary points per 60 more than relative Corsi for/against? How much more? Is there a difference? What’s the difference? Should we use some sort of feeling or intuition to determine which stats we like best? How do we address the issue of different metrics being used in conjunction to evaluate players? There have been multiple attempts to “answer” these questions (and many others) in hockey – Tom Awad’s Goal Versus Threshold (GVT), Michael Schuckers and Jim Curro’s Total Hockey Rating (THoR), Hockey Reference’s Point Shares, War-On-Ice’s (A.C. Thomas and Sam Ventura) WAR/GAR model, Dom Galamini’s HERO Charts, Dom Luszczyszyn’s Game Score, and most recently Dawson Sprigings’ WAR/GAR model… (Emmanuel Perry is also in the process of constructing a WAR model that I’m very excited about).

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Who You Calling Weak? Draft Class Variance

Alex Novet Data Analysis, Draft, League Wide Report, NHL League-Wide Analysis Leave a comment

This year’s NHL draft class is weak. I don’t follow junior prospects closely, but that’s what I’ve heard from more knowledgeable sources. It’s a fair claim; Nolan Patrick and Nico Hischier seem talented but not among the game-changing talents that have recently been drafted first overall.

However, it’s harder to judge the draft class past the very top. Scouting is hard, especially for hundreds of prospects across the world. It’s possible that while there is no clear star in the draft class, the rest of the draft is as strong as ever.

That would have big implications for draft strategy. The conventional wisdom is that teams may trade more picks this year because they believe the weak draft class makes the picks less valuable. But if the draft is typical after the first few picks, that would be a poor use of assets.

We don’t yet know how well this year’s draft class will do in the NHL. But, we can use historical data to ask questions that establish expectations: how well does each draft class typically perform, and how much does this vary by year?

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FQG: Using Goals Above Replacement to Measure Injury Impact

loserpoints Friday Quick Graphs, NHL League-Wide Analysis 2 Comments
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Injuries are an inevitable part of the NHL. An 82 game schedule guarantees that all teams are going to deal with injuries during the season but not all teams deal with them equally. Quantifying the impact of injuries is difficult. The introduction of better individual player impact stats gives us some new tools with which to approach this concept. In particular, DTMAboutHeart‘s Goals Above Replacement stat seems a useful place to start because it allows for estimating how many goals above replacement a team loses while a player is injured.

All injury data in this post comes from NHL Injury Viz. GAR data comes via DTMAboutHeart. Games played data comes from Corsica and standings data is via Hockey-Reference.

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A New Look at Aging Curves for NHL Skaters (part 1)

EvolvingWild NHL League-Wide Analysis, Total Player Chart, WAR 3 Comments

How do NHL players age? When do they peak? How quickly do they decline? Questions about player aging in the NHL have been debated for years, and an incredible amount of research has already been done trying to answer these questions. Within the past 3 years, however, it seems a general consensus has been reached. Rob Vollman summarizes this quite well in his book Stat Shot: The Ultimate Guide to Hockey Analytics: “Most players hit their peak age by age 24 or 25 then decline gradually until age 30, at which point their performance can begin to tumble more noticeably with the risk of absolute collapse by age 34 or 35.”

The vast majority of this work has been done looking at points, goals, shot attempts, special teams, etc., but the release of Dawson Sprigings’ WAR (Wins Above Replacement) model gives us a new statistic from which we can derive value and, possibly, a new way to look at how NHL skaters age. It seems only natural that we’d revisit the NHL player aging question using this new model. If you’re unfamiliar with his WAR model, you can read all about it here.

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Strong and Weak Links: Talent Distribution within Teams

Alex Novet Conferences, NHL League-Wide Analysis, WAR 17 Comments

In the salary cap world, hockey is a game of resource allocation. Each team is given a set amount of money to acquire players. Consequently, hockey inevitably becomes about tradeoffs. When building a team, every dollar spent on one player is a dollar that can’t be used for another. There are certainly times when you can get a bargain, but you will always have to make decisions about spending priorities.

One frequent prioritization question is high-end quality vs. depth. How much should a team focus on the very top of its lineup vs. ensuring it has adequate depth? Should a team maximize its strengths or minimize its weaknesses?

This question is relevant to many front office decisions. The Bruins traded Tyler Seguin for several assets, and some argued that the Penguins should do the same with Evgeni Malkin to improve their depth. As Steven Stamkos approached free agency, many teams were deciding just how much they would be willing to pay him while knowing that signing him would inevitably come at a cost lower down the roster.

We can think through these tradeoffs by studying talent distribution within a team. If you hold total talent constant, is it better to have a team where everyone is equally talented, or one where a few elite players are trying to shelter a few terrible ones? We know from current Florida Panthers consultant Moneypuck that contending teams have at least one elite player, but to my knowledge, very little work has been done on the broader question of total team structure. This article mirrors my presentation at the Vancouver Hockey Analytics Conference 2017, at which I dug into talent inequality within teams to demonstrate:

  • Hockey is a strong link game, i.e., the team with the best player usually wins
  • Therefore, teams should prioritize acquiring the very best elite talent, even at the cost of having weaker depth than opponents
  • This is important for roster construction now and has the potential to become even more important as teams get better at assessing talent and market inefficiencies become less common

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Friday Quick Graphs: League Wide Report

loserpoints Friday Quick Graphs, NHL League-Wide Analysis Leave a comment
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The All-Star break is now in the past. The trade deadline is less than two weeks away. Teams across the NHL have a pretty good idea of who they are. They know their strengths and weaknesses. The possible outcomes for their seasons are narrowing. Some teams are already locked into playoff spots and only have to worry about positioning. Others will have to slowly accept the reality that this isn’t their year and consider how that impacts their approach at the deadline. This is a perfect time to take a high-level view of the league and look at each team using a series of simple metrics to help get a grasp on where all thirty teams are sitting.

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There’s No Secret to Protecting a Lead

Alex Novet NHL League-Wide Analysis, Practical Concerns, Predictions 16 Comments

I was born into a family of Islander fans, so I never had a chance to avoid the sadness that comes with that fandom. While Islander fans are sad for a lot of reasons, one constant complaint over the past several years has been their inability to protect a lead.

However, this is not a unique complaint of Islander fans alone. Fans of other teams have similar gripes. For example, the Leafs have been criticized this season on the same grounds. And here’s fellow Hockey Graphs write Asmae when I suggested doing some research on blown leads:

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So, are some teams particularly bad at holding leads? Asked another way, is keeping a lead a skill distinct from the rest of the team’s performance, or is it just a function of the team’s overall skill and luck?

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Coaching Analysis Part 2: Metropolitan Division

Conor T. coaching, League Wide Report, NHL League-Wide Analysis 1 Comment

Note: This is Part 2 of the series on coaching analysis. Part 1 is here.

In this post, I’ll do a brief review of each team’s coach history from the current Metropolitan Division. These graphs only show a team’s performance in 5v5 situations from 2005 to 2016. The vertical lines indicate when a season begins. The horizontal line shows the 50% mark, where a team would be if it had as many shots for as shots against. The bold line is a smoothed representation of the team’s shot percentage. The faded bands around the bold line indicate 95% confidence intervals. These intervals show the uncertainty around the smoothed estimation of the data.

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