The Hockey Graphs Live Video Cast has its second episode tomorrow night at 9PM! We may be joined by additional members of the HG crew, and now we have an actual season – of more than one hockey league – to talk about! On the agenda for this cast:
Hope you can join us! Again, the cast will be live at : http://www.youtube.com/user/wraithlead8/live
For those who missed it, below is the archive from tonight’s Hockey Graphs Live Video Podcast #1, featuring Garik16, Ryan Stimson, Ben Wendorf, and DTMAboutHeart! We talked about the upcoming Rochester Institute of Technology Hockey Analytics Conference (RITHAC), Neutral Zone and Pass Tracking, and how we go forward with deciding what to track and what to look at with such data. Give us a listen and if you have any thoughts for what we should talk about next cast, please leave a comment!
This Tuesday at 9PM EST, we’ll be holding our first official Hockey Graphs live video podcast. This is a live event, so if you want to chat with some of the Hockey Graphs guys or ask some questions to us, you can do that and we’ll try and answer! (If you’re on mobile, you can chat via the youtube ap, apparently). And if you have some topics/questions you’d like us to discuss that you know of in advance, please feel free to leave a comment to this post and we’ll try to discuss in the actual live cast!
The stream will be featured here: http://www.youtube.com/user/wraithlead8/live
We did a preview stream for about an hour on Saturday, so you can see what that looked like below:
Hope to see you then!
This is the type of entry most likely to be made by a leading team – an odd man rush Carry-In against a d-man conceding the zone (the legendary Andrew MacDonald). Image courtesy of http://www.BroadStreetHockey.com
We know a decent amount about score effects in the game of hockey at this point. We know the obvious: teams play “conservatively” and shell up when leading and become more aggressive when trailing, resulting in the leading team taking less shots and the trailing team taking more.
Less obviously (at first glance anyhow), We also know that the leading team’s shooting % increases substantially when compared to when that same team is tied (Graph courtesy of new Hockey-Graphs writer Petbugs), while the trailing team’s shooting % either increases barely or stays the same as it does when tied.
As detailed earlier on this site this results in the trailing teams tending to score more than leading teams, especially in late.
But what we haven’t really detailed is some of the mechanics of “How” this happens. Some have suggested its because teams may change their systems with a lead or deficit. Others, such as Justin Bourne , have suggested the effect is mainly the result of psychological effects – no one wants to take the risky play when leading and possibly cause the opponent to get the tieing goal as a result of a risk, so players stop taking as many risks when leading even though the coach is preaching the same scheme. But little attention has been paid to seeing if any of these things are true, whether via a statistical analysis or via some systems breakdown.
So what I’m going to do in this post is attempt to break down how score effects change how the neutral zone is played. And by doing so, we can by extension, try to get a better picture of how the play in the other two zone is affected by score effects.
Hockey Graphs 
