The vast majority of scientific research has indicated that people with growth mindsets tend to be higher-achieving than those with fixed mindsets. Growth-oriented people are the ones who are more interested in furthering their education, or picking up a new hobby, or getting out of their comfort zones to experience new things.
This piece is co-authored between DTMAboutHeart and asmean.
Introduction
Expected goals models have been developed in a number of sports to better predict future performance. For sports like hockey and soccer where goals are inherently random and scarce, expected goals models proved to be particularly useful at predicting future scoring. This is because they take into account shot attempts, which are better predictors of a team and player’s performance than goal totals alone.
A notable example is Brian Macdonald’s expected goals model dating back to 2012, which used shot differentials (Corsi, Fenwick) and other variables like faceoffs, zone starts and hits. Important developments have been made since then in regards to the predictive value of those variables, particularly those pertaining to shot quality.
Shot quality has been the subject of spirited debate despite evidence suggesting that it plays an important role in predicting goals. The evidence shows that shot characteristics like distance and angle can significantly influence the probability of a certain shot resulting in a goal. Previous attempts to account for shot quality in an expected goals model format have been conducted by Alan Ryder, see here and here.
In Part I, an updated expected goals (xG) model will be presented that accounts for shot quality and a number of other variables. Part II will deal with testing the performance of xG against previous models like score-adjusted Corsi and goals percentage.
5v5 shots, Senators +3% at Jets. pic.twitter.com/xemFFKZ6e1
— Micah Blake McCurdy (@IneffectiveMath) September 30, 2015
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
A couple days ago, Micah Blake McCurdy made his first step towards The Great Unknown. It’s a decision hanging on a number of questions we always ask ourselves in the analytics community: What is my work worth to me? What is my work worth to others? For as much time as my spend on it, how can I make sure my work means something, and my time rewarded? How do I make sure my work stays exactly that: mine?
For the past decade, a number of powerful minds have navigated The Great Unknown, finding that apprehensive teams were only willing to commit peanuts and, on rare occasions, real salaried work after a partnership of a couple years. What made The Great Unknown even more of a mystery was the disappearance of sites, and data, and “stats” groups peddling other people’s work (usually in poor or incorrect fashion), and the discovery by some stats analysts that teams had been tracking data in ways that were curious, tedious, unhelpful. When the so-called Summer of Analytics occurred, The Great Unknown had the curtain pulled back a little bit: we started knowing who was getting hired where. But that peek exposed the still-immense uncertainty of the work available with some teams, and opened a new area of intrigue: analytics writing.
So why is what Micah is doing so important?
Rhys Jessop and Garret Hohl talk about what’s new at Hockey-Graphs, the league’s new 3-on-3 overtime format, and Central Scoutings preseason release.
A few days ago, James Mirtle of the Globe and Mail brought up one of the first significant shifts in tactics under the Mike Babcock regime in Toronto.
Parenteau playing as fourth forward on Leafs PP and scores. New look for Toronto man advantage, run by assistant coach Jim Hiller.
— James Mirtle (@mirtle) September 21, 2015
While the change may be surprising to some fans, particularly given the lack of depth in the Leafs forward corps, it shouldn’t be altogether unexpected.
“Alex Ovechkin2” by Keith Allison. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.
I don’t know if we’ll ever see a power play quite like that of this decade’s Washington Capitals. We can’t attach a firm date to it because it could extend as far as the end of Alex Ovechkin’s career at this rate, but we know that its peak of power began with the hiring of Adam Oates as Caps head coach back in 2012. Oates had run a successful 1-3-1 power play for the New Jersey Devils with Ilya Kovalchuk as his trigger-man, but nothing even close to the heights he managed to achieve with the man advantage in his two seasons in DC. Barry Trotz, to his credit, has kept the same formation — what’s that old adage about things that ain’t broke? — with only minor tweaks, and last year the power play continued to succeed.
Now there’s a lot to discuss about the formation and its success — I like to think of the Caps’ PP as a work of art more than anything else — but for the sake of this post I’m going to focus in on Alex Ovechkin. Never has there been a more criticized future first-ballot Hall of Famer, nor arguably a more controversial elite goal scorer. It should already be a given that Ovechkin is the best power play goal scorer of all time — he sits fifth overall in PPG/g despite playing in a significantly lower scoring era than his contemporaries like Mike Bossy and Mario Lemieux — but I would argue by the time he retires, he will also likely be the greatest goal scorer of all time period. It’s the man advantage recently, in the latter stages of Ovechkin’s goal scoring peak, that has been the sniper’s bread and butter. Since Oates brought the 1-3-1 to town, Ovi has scored 48% of his goals on the power play, compared to 33% prior to that. He scored 25 power play goals last year, six ahead of the next highest total in Joe Pavelski’s 19. You have to go back another five to reach the player who is in third — Claude Giroux with 14 — indicating how great of a season the Sharks’ center/winger had, but that’s a story for another day.
Welcome to Sunday Notes, where we try to rehash important developments occurring on Hockey Graphs and elsewhere in the CORSI twitter league in less than 500 words. I’m sorry if we forgot about your post, or misconstrued what you said. We don’t care. Don’t @ us. Just do better next time. – asmean
Should all players be treated the same? Probably not.
A very experienced NHL coach once said something to the effect of:
“The most difficult players to coach are those in the middle of your lineup. Your best players will always be your best, and your depth players are usually just happy to be there. Catering to the second and third liners is the toughest thing, because they’ll often have a different opinion of themselves than you.”
When I first heard this, I thought it made a lot of sense from a psychological point of view. In every team I’ve been a part of, there were three groups of players: those who were on the powerplay, those who wanted to get on the powerplay, and those who know they’ll never be on the powerplay. Usually the second group experiences the most friction with the coaching staff, and I am speaking from personal experience.
Rhys and Garret return for another season of the Hockey Graphs podcast. Come listen as they talk about the Penticton YoungStars tournament, preseason, and what’s new at the Hockey Graphs Website.
Photo by Michael Wifall, via Wikimedia Commons; altered by author
From the outset, I want to say the Player’s Tribune, conceptually, is a wonderful thing. To have players guest post or answer questions without the emotions of a post-game presser or rigid formality of a journalist interview provides great insight to their personalities. And just like anybody we’d encounter in daily life, they say things we agree with, things we don’t agree with, or things we might’ve worded differently. Take, for instance, today’s “Mailbag” with Paul Bissonnette. A majority of the interview, which were questions from readers, were your general enforcer interview questions: best fight, worst fight, scary fight, do you like to fight, etc.
But then there was this final question, which I can only assume came from Mark Spector:
Bissonnette’s response, his longest of the interview, was chock full of wrong, with plenty of right on the side.
Hockey Graphs 
