Mario Lemieux

A Tank Battle in Pictures: Toronto Maple Leafs, Edmonton Oilers, Arizona Coyotes, & Buffalo Sabres in 2014-15

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Having just added the 2014-15 season to our historical comparison charts, now was a good time to revisit (as I promised in my posts here and here on Pittsburgh’s 1983-84 tank battle) this season’s battle between Arizona, Toronto, Edmonton, and Buffalo. To do this, I tracked the progression of each teams shots-for percentage across two periods (or 2pS%), a possession proxy I developed for historical data that can help us compare teams back to 1952. As you can see above, the perception of the tank battle among these four teams wasn’t quite accurate to their results; Edmonton and Buffalo did not seem to have a marked drop-off in the final quarter-season.

Arizona and Toronto, on the other hand, did noticeably drop, and in Arizona’s case to a level below the hapless Sabres. Ultimately, the fight was more to maintain their improved odds, because Buffalo managed to hold at rock bottom. As I asked when I wrote about the topic with Pittsburgh in mind, it still gives rise to an interesting question: is it more wrong to tank than to maintain a low level all year? In some cases, a team that’s already laid low doesn’t need to tank deliberately…but on the flip side, I suppose that team also assumes risk in losing support and fans by not appearing competitive all season.

How did the Coyotes and Maple Leafs compare to what I’ve christened the “gold standard” for tanks, the 1983-84 Pittsburgh Penguins’ tank for Mario Lemieux? Well, the nice thing is that the plus- and minus-one standard deviations in 2pS% were virtually identical in 1983-84 and 2014-15, so I didn’t have to tinker with them:

While Pittsburgh had probably the starkest, earliest drop-off, both Arizona and Toronto were able to reach the same kinds of lows by the end of the season. To their credit, while the Coyotes and Leafs were, at best, in the lower half of the league in possession, they certainly did their best in the race to the bottom. You could question the wisdom of this kind of thing, since Pittsburgh was guaranteed the top pick if they reached the cellar, while this year’s tanks were struggling for a higher probability.

The Greatest Tank Battle: Penguins vs. Devils, 1983-84

Benjamin Wendorf NHL League-Wide Analysis, NHL Topical Analysis Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
File:Mario Lemieux 1984.jpg

Mario Lemieux with Laval of the QMJHL in 1984; photo by http://www.lhjmq.qc.ca/ via Wikimedia Commons

What do you do when a 6’4″ QMJHL forward who scored 184 points in 66 games in his last underage season scores at a 282-point pace in his draft year? You tank — you tank as hard as you can. In the latter half of the 1983-84 season, the Pittsburgh Penguins and New Jersey Devils were in an unspoken, pitched battle for the bottom of the league and everybody knew it. While the Penguins would ultimately win out, sputtering to a 16-58-6 record (“good” for 38 points in the standings) to New Jersey’s 17-56-7 (41 points), the two teams were coming from distinctly different franchise backgrounds.

Using information from our new interactive charts, we can see what set these teams apart, and led them to take different paths in what turned out to be a pretty wild race to the cellar of the NHL.

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The Art of Tanking: The Pittsburgh Penguins in 1983-84

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While tanking is a hot topic in this year’s NHL, the act of tanking is as old as the idea of granting the worst teams a shot at the #1 pick in the draft. Case in-point: the 1983-84 Pittsburgh Penguins, routinely considered the most overt of tankers in NHL history. The graph above is just one example of their tank, and man is that bad. The yellow and grey lines indicate one standard deviation above and below league-average historical possession (using 2-Period Shot Percentage, or 2pS%, explained here). The blue line is a 20-game moving average (the orange is cumulative), and you’re seeing that right; a team close to the middle of the pack dropped nearly two standard deviations, or from near the top to near the bottom of the league. That graph, and all the ones below, are just some examples of the kind of tinkering you can do with our new interactive graphs, which I highly recommend you check out.

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

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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.

Why The Hockey News’ Ken Campbell is Wrong About Alex Ovechkin

Benjamin Wendorf NHL Topical Analysis Tags: , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

File:Defense.gov photo essay 080220-F-6684S-642.jpg

Photo by Adam M. Stump via Wikimedia Commons

You know, there was a time when I relished The Hockey News, and really any hockey writing I could get my hands on. I grew up in the sticks in Wisconsin, where you can’t find jack about hockey, and so to convince your parents to buy a THN magazine was a real treat. I’ve never forgotten that feeling, and I want those old reporting institutions to continue, but it isn’t going to happen with haphazard attempts at analysis like Ken Campbell’s piece on Ovechkin from today. In it, he tries to argue that Ovechkin is going to have the worst 50-goal season in NHL history because his plus-minus isn’t good. After the jump, let’s take a look at some of these gems.

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Friday Quick Graph: Season Stories Using % of Team Shots, Gretzky, Lemieux, Sheppard, and Simpson in 1987-88

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This takes the progressive, cumulative percentage of team shots from the graphs below and compares them to one another (to view the original charts: Simpson, Sheppard, Lemieux, Gretzky). It really establishes how greatly Lemieux mattered to the Penguins…Gretzky had plenty of teammates taking over the shots, especially as he was dinged up during the season and players like Messier and Kurri were helping carry the load (not to mention Simpson and his 43 goals in 59 games). Any surprise Lemieux was one season away from 85 goals and nearly 200 points? Any surprise Simpson was already coming down from what would prove to be a career year? Any surprise that Sheppard was moving towards a quality career? These %TSh charts can really lend to interesting seasonal and career narratives.

Part of the reason I like doing graph work is because a good graph (with a little bit of contextual knowledge) can tell a really interesting story. In the past, I’ve been a proponent of digging deeper into the historical data, and noted that even though we have less data of the pre-BTN era it doesn’t mean we can’t make some intriguing graphs. %TSh, or % of team shots (in the games a player participated), provides a great opportunity to do just that, not just in a player’s career (as I’ve done before) but also over the course of a season. In the graph above, I took two well-known players, Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky, and matched them to two (to the younger readers) lesser-known players from 1987-88, Ray Sheppard and Craig Simpson; I expressed their %TSh cumulatively, game-by-game. Craig Simpson, at the tender age of 20, was having the best year of his career (56 goals on an incredible 31.6% shooting percentage), but a trade to the Oilers mid-season would alter his offensive role for that season and into the future. Ray Sheppard, like Simpson very young (21), over the course of the season earned Ted Sator’s trust and responded with a 38-goal rookie season. Sheppard would go on to be a very good offensive player for about a decade.

Yet their lines relative to Gretzky and Lemieux also remind us that, for as good as they were, neither were driving the boat to the level of those legends (and probably wouldn’t). So you do get some perspective on what some of the best-of-the-best were doing. Lemieux, who was entering his prime, was literally carrying a middling Penguins team on his shoulders, and his ability to do that would bring him, in 1988-89, to convince people that Dan Quinn and Rob Brown were really good.

For frame of reference, in the BTN Era (2007-08 to present) only Ovechkin has been able to come close to the kind of shot volume Lemieux was demonstrating in 1987-88.