%TSh

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.

NHL Defensemen and Shooting Contributions back to 1967-68

Benjamin Wendorf NHL League-Wide Analysis, Theory Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

File:Defenseman Ray Bourque 1979.jpg

Photo by Dave Stanley via Wikimedia Commons

I have kicked around this data in the past, most prominently in my theoretical post on offensive systems, but I really wanted to get further into the intricacies of defensemen and their historical place in team shooting (among other offensive contributions). By looking at how much a defenseman contributes to a team’s shot generation (expressed as a percentage of team shots in the games a player played, or %TSh), we can draw some interesting comparisons across NHL eras, but I haven’t yet explored how the role of the defenseman has (or hasn’t) evolved from the Expansion Era to the present, nor have I taken a look at some of the more exceptional defense shooting teams. Let me correct that now.

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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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Friday Quick Graphs: Shooting and Playmaking Contributions, 1967-68 through 2012-13

Benjamin Wendorf Friday Quick Graphs, NHL Topical Analysis Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve just finished a pretty massive dataset, so I’m geeking out a bit over what I can do with it. Just the beginning, above…this is the distribution of %TSh (player shots divided by estimated team shots in games they played) and %TA (same equation, but with assists) season performances, 20+ GP, from 1967-68 through 2012-13. Per recent arguments about Ovechkin, I’ve added lines showing where his best season (2008-09) and most recent full season (2012-13) fall on the list; his current season would fall approximately in the same place as last season.

Those of you who’ve been following me on Twitter know that I’ve put together a pretty substantial dataset, and I’ve been working through the data with a metric I’ve used for a while. %TSh is a player’s shots divided by his team’s estimated shot total in games they played (Team Shots / Team GP, multiplied by player GP). The measure gives us an idea of the player’s shooting contribution to the team’s offense. It moves outside the pesky variance of shooting percentage and gets closer to a stable indicator of offensive role. I’ve done the same with %TA, which is the same equation for assists. The reason for estimated team totals is we don’t yet have good macro-data on specific games that players played before 1987-88, but the metric runs essentially in lock-step with the real thing and I want to provide a useful, historical point of comparison. Doing this allows us to look 20 years further back.

The distribution above includes over 23,000 player seasons over 20 GP; the orange distribution is %TA, and black is %TSh. I used the marks to connect back to the previous week’s bizarre flame war over Ovechkin’s value and approach to the game; the top one shows Ovechkin’s peak year, 2008-09 (20%), which also happens to be the highest %TSh of all-time. The bottom mark is Ovechkin’s 2012-13 (16.3%), which I’m using because his current season is just slightly higher – it would be good for 16th best in NHL history.

I also did a second graph, wanting to look at the relationship of %TSh to %TA, to see just how much they ran together:

Related to the previous post, I decided to see if the relationship between TSh% and %TA was too close to tell me anything. %TSh is on the x-axis, and %TA is on the y. As you can see, they do run together, which is okay, because rebounds can result in assists for the shooter, and players with a lot of shots will generally be engaged in the offense in all ways. That being said, it’s not so close that they aren’t distinctive. The plot above does look scattered enough for these two metrics to tell us something apart from one another.

In the graph above, the x-axis is %TSh, and the y-axis %TA. Intuitively, these run together a fair amount, as shots create rebounds that can be counted as assists, and a player that shoots a lot is likely to be more heavily involved in the entire offense. That said, they don’t run nearly so close together as to render either measure moot. I think %TA can be a valuable counter-weight for assessing defensemen. Anyway, this is the tip of an enormous iceberg of data, so don’t be surprised to see me refer to and use %TSh and %TA again.

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

Benjamin Wendorf Friday Quick Graphs, NHL Topical Analysis Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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.

NHL Systems, NHL History, and Forward vs. Defense Shooting

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

Photo by “ravenswing” via Wikimedia Commons

“It’s a matter of systems,” “They don’t have a good system,” “There is no system there”…we hear phrases much like this frequently, and I wonder just how much weight we give the word “system” in a game that flows and relies on instinct and reflex. Teams have some kind of system, no doubt, but it’s funny how the actions of any kind of system pale in comparison to the number of times we notice the classic breakout, setting up of the zone, or cycle. What I’m trying to say is, might we be putting too much emphasis on system, when the results are not clearly resulting in different shot quality? Might we be overstating the role of something practiced for a couple of months, maybe a year or two, versus 15-30 years of playing experience, and all the instincts, common tactics, and reflexes?

In my mind, systems are important in-and-of themselves, because their organization principles are intuitive. Cover the man or take away the passing lanes, apply forecheck pressure or trap in the neutral zone…these base ideas probably need to be there to keep things from devolving into pickup hockey. And you all know that game, where everyone’s a superstar forward and nobody backchecks. Seriously, no wonder you guys can’t ever find two goalies.

Anyway, with my current treasure trove of game-by-game, player-by-player data going back to 1987-88 (thanks to Hockey Reference’s excellent Play Index), I wanted to see just how much the game has evolved since the late 1980s, particularly in regards to defensemen involvement in the offense. We already know that the difference in shots-for per team, per game is 30.4 in 1987-88 to 29.1, so not a heck of a lot has changed in shot generation, and the goals/game per team has changed drastically, from 3.71 in ’87-’88 to 2.75 today. This information alone should suggest we probably haven’t improved too much in regards to what we might call offensive systems. Has defensemen involvement increased, and driven the scoring down? Have teams attempted more forward involvement to improve scoring? Will Guy Boucher ever convince us he has the key to better offense again?

I took data from about 30,000 individual player performances in 1987-88 and about 26,000 in 2012-13; I compared the player’s shot totals to their team totals in those games and derived my %TSh, or percentage of team shots metric, previously used in my piece on Career Charting.

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NHL Career Charting: The Pre-BTN Era and What We Can Still Do With Historical Data

Benjamin Wendorf Career Chart, NHL League-Wide Analysis Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

File:BrendanShanahan.jpg

Photo by “IrisKawling”, via Wikimedia Commons

Hockey statistics have always been fairly historically limited; most of the so-called “fancy stats” have only been tracked (and easily track-able league-wide) back through the 2007-08 season. The prior years have a veil of fog over them, though there is fairly decent shot data going all the way back to the 1952-53 season (thanks to the Hockey Summary Project; I’ve been able to bring the data together), good game-by-game individual player data going back to 1987-88 (thanks to Hockey Reference via Dan Diamond & Associates), and gradually-improving TOI data going back to 1997-98 (thanks to NHL.com and Hockey Reference). Unfortunately, this has lead to a relative dearth of research into the years of the “Pre-BTN” Era, so-called because 2007-08 was the first year we received in-depth, league-wide data from Gabe Desjardins’ Behind the Net stats site and Vic Ferrari’s timeonice.com.

Having a background in history, and also having grown up as a fan of the league in this grey statistical era, I have spent the last couple years trying to compile and present statistics from the Pre-BTN Era in ways that can help provide a window into those years (and possibly inform our understanding of the present-day game). I’m somewhat indebted to Iain Fyffe, a guy who’s been doing similar yeoman’s work much longer than myself at Hockey Prospectus, though more recently he’s been sharing his work at his own site, Hockey Historysis.

The fact of the matter is that there is actually an enormous amount of information out there, and more importantly with graph work we can really do some interesting things. First case in-point is what I call “career charting;” essentially, charting a player’s shots in a game relative to their team’s shots in those same games. Using the metric %TSh, or percentage of team shots, this provides an interesting glimpse into player contributions, workload, and development in the Pre-BTN Era. Adding some artistic (and informational flourish), I present to you Pierre Turgeon:

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