With the season upon us, and multiple stat sites now hosting team and player fancystats, it is pretty tempting for a hockey fan (well, one who’s into fancystats) to try and check how his team is doing in possession in close situations – in other words, in Fenwick Close (alternatively, score adjusted fenwick). The problem with this, of course, is that the sample sizes are currently so small as to make the #s pretty meaningless – some teams have played as few as 3 games, so you can’t make any judgments based upon these numbers on their own.

But, as I mentioned on twitter, we can still try and take these numbers and make something out of them, using our prior knowledge of the NHL to make judgments. For example, I can look at current fenwick close #s and pretty confidently state “Buffalo is going to be a terrible terrible team” at this point, despite the sample size, given our prior knowledge of what the Sabres are. In other words, we can incorporate current fenwick close #s into a Bayesian Analysis.

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