I guess I'm on a bit of a roll here, making charts about OT. I thought this was vaguely interesting too:

As you may well remember, I was not positive on the Jets picking Mark Scheifele 7th overall ahead of Sean Couturier (see cautionary tale #1, #2, #3 and #4.) Let's see how things shaped up a year forward:

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I like this plot - differing incentives:

This suggests that players start to get very sleepy around the middle of the second OT:

Since this article that mentions the "predictive analytics" used by Target Stores appeared in the NY Times Magazine, people have periodically asked me how well all of this stuff works. They're usually keying off this anecdote:

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I thought this was moderately interesting - 5-minute moving average over the last 25 years:

And the percentage of games still in progress:

We track Zone Starts on behindthenet.ca, and the impact they have on a player's stats seems to have registered with the media and some portion of the general public. But what to make of Zone Finishes? Here is individual season zone finish % plotted against zone start %:

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Tom Tango and I wrote this piece a while ago, but today seemed as good a day as any to post it.

START

1979 was a momentous year for professional hockey: safety finally trumped long-standing tradition, and National Hockey League President John Ziegler announced that helmets would be mandatory for all players entering the league. Since then, the best-of-seven Stanley Cup Finals have gone to a seventh and deciding game eight times. Notably absent from those eight games? Despite their status as another long-standing tradition in hockey, there were zero fights in these high-stakes matchups.

Nor have there been any fights in the final games of the Canada Cup, World Cup of Hockey or the Olympics. In international play, fighting leads to ejection, so it should come as no surprise that fights are almost non-existent.

But regardless of the punishment for fighting, high-quality games can occur with no fighting, nor threat of fighting. There’s no need to change the punishment system against fighting: we simply need to change the incentive system.

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Not just individual player stats and team stats, but also game-by-game stats:

e.g. LA-Vancouver, game 2: http://behindthenet.ca/charts/Shots_Playoffs_2011_30152.php

Unfortunately the pages that point to these suckers are down, so you'll have to familiarize yourselves with NHL.com game codes for the playoffs (301xx - ie 30151, 30152 for the LA-Van series)

Back in July, I asked you to project the final point totals in the Southeast division. And how did you - and Tom Awad's Vukota - do?

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Let's get a show of hands here...Who do you love in the West?

I'd be happy if things finished up the way they are now: LA in 3rd, San Jose in 7th and Phoenix 8th...

Faced with what must have been no ideas an hour before a deadline, Dave Feschuk watches one game then goes to the Mad Libs Book of Cliches to do a hatchet job on Dion Phaneuf in the Toronto Star today. Some highlights from the logical fallacies:

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Ok, I know this is off-topic, but I've been talking to a guy at work about Barcelona soccer and I decided to get back to running some soccer stats. Here's a link to the new stats site, at EPLtables.com. Let me know what you think.

Much has been made of the difference in the Jets' play at home and on the road: as of Saturday, at home, they're on a 111-point pace; on the road, just 63 points. Where does this rank since the lockout?

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Phil Birnbaum was pretty amazed by my piece about Dustin Brown's penalty-drawing performance and how much it has been worth to the LA Kings. Noted sports analyst and regressor-to-the-mean Mitchel Lichtman showed up to temper Phil's excitement:

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We had an NHL labor stoppage in 2005 and both NBA and NFL labor stoppages in 2011. The new CBAs locked in the players' share of total league revenues:

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The venerable @Woodguy55 asked me a question about the shots against portion of the quality of competition metric - remember that QualComp is the time-averaged shot differential of a player's opponents. I'll spare you the details of the analysis I did before getting to the answer that I'm going discuss next, but suffice to say that I needed to break the data down by home and road in order to answer his question. At which point, I wondered how last change impacts a player's quality of competition.

Before I get to that, let's get you situated with the leaderboard in home and road QualComp:

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This one's for all the haters who say that hockey is too violent.

Nocera is doing a great job illuminating the many ways that the NCAA exploits its athlete/employees. I'm amazed at the number of commenters on the piece who don't seem to understand that the mere fact that athletes receive a free education (or "education") does not mean that they are somehow fairly compensated. Pro sports have generally entered into agreements where 40-60% of revenue is shared with players aka employees. I don't know what the corresponding number is for NCAA football and basketball, but given the salaries that schools can pay coaches, I'm guessing it's well-below 10%.

Friend of the blog Rich Pollock asked me how rest affected a team's performance. I wrote about this long, long ago, but I only looked at individual stats and not at actual team shot rates. (I also looked at the impact of travel distance.)

First, let's look at the frequency of rest combinations:

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I'm traveling for work this week - bad timing given that the Canucks game is one of only four games the Jets play West of the Mississippi this year. I found out during today's all-day meeting that one of my co-workers from another office is from Vancouver. "Big Game Tonight,' he said, clearly trying to be friendly. "You're going down," I mouthed, clearly not.

Anyways, we had a dinner scheduled tonight that coincided exactly with the game tonight. When we got to the restaurant, horror of horrors, there was no TV. Way too classy. But I ended up sitting next to Vancouver guy, who dropped his phone down on the table and pulled up the game on it. I got to watch the entire game out of the corner of my eye and even briefly gloated when the Jets had the lead. And my co-worker was nice enough to not gloat when it all collapsed for the Jets - all he did was make stupid jokes about Kyle Wellwood.

All-in-all, a little touch of Canada to warm to cockles of my heart.

A couple of days ago, I saw this run past me on the Twitter: "The Blues are 32-0 when they score 3 or more goals." Now that sounds like a great record, but is it that out-of-the-ordinary? Here are the overall and regulation records when teams scored three or more goals in a game for 2005-06 to 2010-11:

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The MIT sports analytics conference is always on my birthday, and it just seemed like a sad way to spend it when they invited me to appear on the hockey analytics panel. That, and I'm way too cheap to drop $2k on a weekend trip to Boston. But everybody I know seems to be emailing me articles about Brian Burke's appearance this year, so I almost wish I'd gone. Almost.

David Staples has a transcript of what Burke had to say, and I actually find it pretty funny:

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I know I'm a month late on this, but the NBA's joke of an All-Star Game made me wonder when the NHL All-Star game went off the rails. Certainly, offensive levels skyrocketed in the early 1980s:

We see the same thing happen in the shot department:

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The 2010-11 Florida Panthers finished with 72 points and their off-season was dominated by stories of the team going bankrupt, moving and also failing to have enough salary on the books to meet the NHL's salary floor. That's not the story in 2011-12, however - with the Washington Capitals inexplicably weak, the Panthers are on pace for over 90 points and have spent a significant amount of time in 3rd place in the Eastern Conference as Southeast division leaders.

Dale Tallon retained only seven regular skaters from last year's roster; did he improve this team by 20+ points with his makeover? Let's look at the top-line numbers:

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I looked at this briefly last week, but I wanted to offer slightly more data. Here are team averages over the last four seasons in the last five minutes of regulation:

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I got a sneak peek at GOON earlier this week, and now that the film is released, my review is posted. This movie resonated with me for several reasons:

1) It's about gooning it up. As much as I'd like to see fight-first goons eliminated from hockey, I still feel nostalgia for the golden days of ridiculous brawls.

2) It's shot entirely in Winnipeg. And Portage and Brandon. They may pretend to be in Halifax or Quebec City, but it's so clearly not. They even shoot a scene in Kelekis restaurant; I've never been a fan of the place, but it's still a nice touch.

3) My friend's cousin wrote the movie. My friend is, of course, obsessed with Slap Shot - particularly the richness of Paul Newman's profanity - so as soon as this movie started, it was obvious where it came from.

Why else? Go read my review.

Ultimately, Stu Hackel wasn't asking for very much - for the most part, he wanted the NHL to post stats that it already tracks on its website, or possibly cut a finer slice of the stats that it already tracks. We think a little bigger here - there's significantly more data that the league could track that would help us understand the contributions various players make during the game.

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I just wanted to summarize and point you to all of the pieces in our ten-part series on potential NHL statistics...

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Stu's first request: "Time of possession. When you watch an NFL game, you’ll often get a graphic that shows which team has had the ball the most. (I’ve seen this during English Premiere League soccer games, too.) Yes, puck-possession time is hard to track when play gets scrambled, and in one-on-one battles. Sometimes no one has the puck. That’s fine. Just exclude those instances from the stat. You’ll still get a good handle on which teams are more skilled than others, and a team with a relatively low T.O.P. stat but lots of wins will be revealed as one that knows how to play well without the puck."

Stu's first request: "Attack zone time. It would be helpful to learn how much time teams spend in their opposition’s end. We used to hear a lot about attack zone time during power plays on various telecasts, but that seems to have vanished. It shouldn’t be restricted to just man advantage situations, however, and it would be a good indication of which club is able to more successfully impose its style on its foe."

I wanted to save something where we have some common ground with Stu for our last statistical category. For years, we've tried to reinforce that there is no statistic more important than possession in hockey. The irony is that the NHL essentially used to track both of these statistics (see example from 2001-02 season.) Vic Ferrari later found that zone time is a very good proxy for shot differential/Fenwick/Corsi (and vice-versa), which makes it, in turn, a very good predictor of future goal differential and future wins.

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Stu says: "Six-on-five situations. NHL stats do an excellent job of breaking down the game and ice time when play is 5-0n-5, 5-on-4, 4-on-4, 4-on-3 and so forth. But there are no stats for when a goalie has been pulled for an extra attacker on a delayed penalty and a 6-on-5, 6-on-4 or the ultra-rare 6-on-3 results. Pulling the goalie is not officially a power play, but it is something apart from the normal run of the game and worth exploring numerically."


There are some mistakes that arise from not sequestering empty net 6-on-5 time from 5-on-5 time (primarily a lot of minuses for top offensive players playing with an empty net), but so little of the game is played with an empty net that I don't think we can draw any conclusions about team-level skill:

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