Bobby Orr

Friday Quick Graph: Player Career Charting by Percentage of Team Shots, 1967-68 to 2012-13

Benjamin Wendorf Career Chart, Friday Quick Graphs, NHL League-Wide Analysis Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Embedding interactive graphs into blog posts, especially blogs with a narrow runner like ours, is frequently an awkward process. Just about the time things look good, you tinker with it and it looks bad. Nevertheless, I had a bunch of old data I put together, once upon a time, and I wanted to get it out there in a form that you could tinker with. Basically, in the past I have used the percentage of team shots in the games a player participated (%TSh; explanation here) as a way to capture a player’s contribution to the shot load; I also think it strongly implies a player’s involvement and contribution to team offense overall.

In the case of today’s graph, I took %TSh and looked at aging curves with a multitude of players from 1967-68 through 2012-13 (like I said, the data is a little old). I prepared this with a selected group of players available for the filter, the majority of whom are stronger, more familiar players of the years covered. I also included some players that struggled by the metric, for the sake of comparison. To filter, click on the “Name” bar, click on “Filter,” and let your imaginations run wild. Feel free to download if you wish.

Note: I believe I set the cut-off at 20 GP before I would record the point of data. It’s old. I’m old. We’re all getting older.

Gordie Howe vs. Bobby Orr vs. Wayne Gretzky vs. Sidney Crosby: Not Your Typical WOWY

Benjamin Wendorf NHL League-Wide Analysis Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments
Photo by "Djcz", via Wikimedia Commons

Photo by “Djcz”, via Wikimedia Commons

With or Without You analysis, often referred to as WOWY, frequently involves either comparing the performance of a team or particular players when a single player is and isn’t playing. While the approach is a risky one (sample size is a pretty big issue), it can actually be quite telling when you collect enough data.

The value of modern WOWY is that you can definitely get data from precisely the seconds a player played apart from the seconds they weren’t on the ice. Historical WOWY, on the other hand, cannot do much better than taking data from games a player played versus games they didn’t. To this end, then, I wanted to see if historical WOWY can tell us much of anything, and the best way to do that is to focus on players that are undisputed in their value. In this case, I went for WOWYs of the big guns, four of the best players across the eras of NHL history: Gordie Howe, Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky, Sidney Crosby.
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The Top “Young Guns” in NHL History

Benjamin Wendorf NHL League-Wide Analysis Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

File:Orr Trip.jpg

Photo by “Djcz” via Wikimedia Commons

I don’t think we engage the idea of the place in history that many of today’s best players hold, and I partly attribute that to the difficulty of finding points of comparison across generations. Simply using raw scoring data doesn’t do the best job because a.) everyone knows Gretzky wins, and b.) we know that scoring fluctuated drastically in the 1980s, and it wasn’t because all the best shooters and passers were playing then. With that in mind, I’ve stewed over ways to bring these different generations together, in such a way that we can be comfortable comparing them. It’s led me to build a couple of metrics that move a little bit away from the counting statistics (G, A, PTS) and towards some metrics that demonstrate a player’s share of their team’s results.

The two metrics I’m focusing on for these young guns both relate to offensive measures, but I think that generally they also allude to a player’s importance to play overall. I tend to agree with Vic Ferrari’s assertion (see his third comment here) that forwards and only a select number of defensemen play much of a role in driving offense, and recalling some of the player types implicated in Steve Burtch’s work over at Pension Plan Puppets on Shut-Down Index, I’d propose that players that drive possession (forwards and defense) more generally will return some signals in regards to shooting or playmaking. Whether that simply means, in the future, we’ll get more from simply looking at passes and shots (or robots will do the whole darn thing and save me the trouble), I can’t say. For now, though, I created %TSh, or percentage of team shots, which expresses the proportion of team shooting a player does (in games they played), and %TA, which does the same exercise with team assists. While the issue of whether this expresses positive possession players is ripe for debate, it’s indisputable that players strong in these metrics will be drivers of offense for their teams.

In that spirit, I wanted to delve into some nifty historical data; I’ve been able to go all the way back to 1967-68 with data on %TSh and %TA, and it returns some fascinating studies on NHL legends vis-à-vis today’s stars. For this piece, I’m focusing on the players that get everyone excited, so-called “young guns,” or players under 25 that have already demonstrated their ability at the top level. How do contemporary young guns measure up all-time?

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