Scouting

Practical Concerns: Garret Sparks, Emotions & My New Favorite Hockey Movie

Jack.Han Developmental Curves, For Fun, Hockey Talk, Practical Concerns Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Garret Sparks of the Toronto Maple Leafs made history in his NHL debut after being drafted in the 7th round and working his way up from the ECHL. By all accounts, he did it on merit by maintaining a .924sv% since turning pro, including playing for .940 in the past two years in the minors.

He’s earned his big break, but in a way he is lucky to be playing for an organization which values performance and statistical trends as much as the Leafs. I’m not sure his story would have unfolded quite this way had he been born a couple of years earlier, or had he belonged to team which only tries out a young goalie if he’s over 6’5″. But we’ll get back to that.

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Practical Concerns: A better way to evaluate defensemen

Jack.Han Practical Concerns Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Credit: Michael Miller - Creative Commons

Credit: Michael Miller – Creative Commons

I was watching hockey a few nights when I heard NBC’s Pierre McGuire describe a rookie defenseman in glowing terms. It was the same kind of praise he used to shower upon Dion Phaneuf about 10 years ago, and this young player had very similar attributes to an early-20s Phaneuf: a huge frame, a huge slapshot, and a willingness to use both in equal measures.

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Practical Concerns: Supercharging the Eye Test with Microstats

Jack.Han Practical Concerns Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Analytically-minded hockey people, as a group, tend to dismiss the eye test as biased. There is, of course, some truth in that position. “What you see is not all there is.”

However, I think it would be misguided to look at traditional viewing-based scouting and saying that it just doesn’t work. We shouldn’t forget what makes a human being different – and, in some ways, better – than a machine.

There is no camera as versatile as the human eye, and there is no computer as sophisticated as the human brain. So instead of disempowering those tools, why not try to make them better?

Let’s go back to high school for a second.

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Why NHL Stats and Scouting Must Work Together

Benjamin Wendorf Theory Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

File:2006nhldraft-stage.jpg

Photo by Arnold C, via Wikimedia Commons

I think it’s fair to say that people familiar with hockey scouting and stats analysis know that there is a bit of a rift between the two (not unlike what exists in baseball). The former, as in baseball, has a long history as the standard in hockey analysis, being at-or-near the forefront of drafting, trading, and free agency decisions for teams. The latter is expanding its reach exponentially into league offices, and has many a pro-stats person questioning the abilities of scouts to analyze players (and vice versa). There are at least preliminary attempts to reach out, on the part of Corey Pronman at Hockey Prospectus (and ESPN), but scouting and stats analysis both have a lexicon, methods, and best practices, and devotees of one probably don’t have much time to develop proficiency in the other.

Yet, therein lies a problem and a solution. There is a common thread between these two groups, the desire to usefully analyze hockey players. They each have their own approach, but neither necessarily contain such complicated concepts that they cannot be read by a conscientious analyst. But most importantly, they have something to offer one another that could improve both areas of analysis.
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