“Bryz-warmup” by Arnold C. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.
This is the fifth part of a five part series. Check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 here. You can view the series both at Hockey-Graphs.com and APHockey.net.
To quickly recap what I’ve covered in the first four parts of this series, I have updated the work that’s been done on Pythagorean Expectations in hockey, and am looking to find out whether teams that have the best lead-protecting players are able to outperform those expectations consistently.
The first step is to figure out how to assess a player’s ability to protect leads. To do this, for every season, I isolated every player’s Corsi Against/60, Scoring Chances Against/60, Expected Goals Against/60 (courtesy of War-On-Ice) and Goals Against/60 when up a goal at even strength. I then found a team’s lead protecting ability for the year in question by weighting those statistics for each player by the amount of ice time they winded up playing that year. For players that didn’t meet a certain threshold, I gave them what I felt was a decent approximation of replacement level ability. For example, here was the expected lead protecting performance of the 2014-2015 Anaheim Ducks in each of those categories.
Now let’s look a little closer at our Pythagorean Expectation — derived through PythagenPuck.
Hockey Graphs 
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