Individual play is just as important as team play in the NHL. Two NHL trophies that are awarded each year to individuals are up for Pekka Rinne’s grab. The Vezina trophy goes to the best goalie in the league, while the Masterton Trophy goes to the player (not just goalie) who has played at the highest level and has overcome challenges.
I break down his chances to win over the competition over on TWH.
Read the full story here.
The Nashville Predators hit 100 points last night for just the fifth time in franchise history. They did so by getting to the net in weird ways and scored, what looked like, errant goals.
Read the full article here.
With new rules potentially on the horizon for the NHL, I take a look at how this might help or hurt the Nashville Predators over on the hockey writers dot com.
Read the full post here.
I put together a post comparing faceoff strength, goals, and game location for the Nashville Predators over at The Hockey Writers. The post, more my usual speed, shows that home ice at Bridgestone Arena seems to give a home-team advantage to scoring goals and an even bigger advantage to winning faceoffs.
Read the full post here.
My first post over at The Hockey Writers, a hockey commentary site, considers what might be in the Predators’ best interest going forward through the rest of the regular season. If the Predators value Lord Stanley over the President they might want to sit goalie Pekka Rinne for much of the final month of regular season hockey.
The full post is available here.
While “advanced statistics” are well-ensconced in the baseball world, they are still in fairly nascent stages in the faster-paced worlds of hockey and basketball. For two reasons, baseball is particularly well-suited for this so-called “advanced” analysis: 1) play essentially consists of discrete, one-on-one interactions and 2) a season is long enough to permit the accumulation of a statistically significant number of these interactions, from which meaningful trends can be derived. Hockey lacks both of these characteristics. It’s a fluid sport that rarely features isolated, one-on-one interactions, and numbers people say that the amount of compilable events during an NHL season, which is half as long as a MLB season, are too few to allow for statistical normalization. In other words, the sample size is too small.
Lee Panas’ book on advanced baseball statistics, Beyond Batting Average, which I began reading earlier this year, begins with the deceptively helpful reminder that “[w]ins and losses are indeed what matter.” Statistical data helps to understand why teams won or lost and whether and how they might win or lose in the future.
In the hockey world, advanced statistics, in general, aren’t too advanced just yet, at least when compared with the baseball sabermetric world. At present, the central concept is that, because goals– an obvious leading indicator of success (i.e., wins)– are too rare to be statistically useful, advanced hockey statistics orient themselves around possession. Because it is somewhat difficult, from a practical standpoint, to measure time of possession with useful precision, however, the leading metrics, known as Corsi and Fenwick, simply track those things a player and his team can do only when they possess the puck, which essentially amounts to shooting it.
If you prefer an expert with a more conversational style, here’s Grantland’s Sean McIndoe: Continue reading
At 37-8, the once-middling Atlanta Hawks have the second-best record in the NBA. If they beat Brooklyn tonight, they’ll match last season’s win total with more than two months to go in the regular season. Did anyone see this coming? Yes, last year’s Hawks snuck into the playoffs and nearly knocked off the top-seeded Indiana Pacers. And observers should have noted the significant number of games the Hawks’ top players missed due to injuries last season; a healthy team couldn’t help but be better. But this much better? The most important difference seems to be a new coach, former Greg Popovich understudy Mike Budenholzer, who knows how to utilize the players he has, and a group of players that is on board with and executing their brand of team-oriented basketball.
Indeed, as numerous writers have observed,* Atlanta is scoring more by passing more. They have the fourth-best field-goal percentage, and of those field goals they make, more than sixty percent of the two-pointers and nearly ninety-three percent of the threes are assisted. Both of those rates lead the NBA. Behind them: the equally high-flying Warriors, the only team with a better record (36-7).
The principle that passing, rather than isolation play, is the best way to generate good shooting in the NBA also seems to apply in the NHL, where new research indicates that teams generally score at a higher rate on assisted shots as compared to unassisted shots. When further breaking down the assisted shooting percentage into shots generated by one pass and shots generated by two passes, the difference between assisted and unassisted shooting percentage can be extreme. One example is the Florida Panthers, with an unassisted shooting percentage of about 5.5% and a two-pass assisted shooting percentage of nearly thirteen percent.
It probably shouldn’t be surprising that similar strategies would be similarly effective in generally similar sports (five active players per team engaged in free-flowing gameplay). With camera-driven player-tracking technology recently implemented in the NBA and on its way to the NHL, perhaps the rudimentary analogy set forth above can serve as a call for inter-sport collaboration between basketball and hockey analysts.
* Blogger code for, “I can’t find the article I previously read that made my precise point, so get ready for me to wave my hands over the raw data and hope you’ll buy the general premise.”
When the calendar turned to December, the last thing the Howe family expected was that they’d ever see their dad – Detroit Red Wings legend Gordie Howe – with a hockey stick in his hand again, scoring goals.
When Dr. Murray Howe was first contacted by the San Diego-based Stemedica Cell Technologies, he was like most people, suspicious of what they insisted their stem-cell treatments could do for his 86-year-old father, bed-ridden by a stroke, his mind addled by the onset of dementia.
“He pretty much had one foot in the grave at that point,” Murray Howe said. “He wasn’t really eating. He couldn’t stand under his own power. He wasn’t really talking.
“We just hated to see him in the condition he was in. We were thinking he maybe had two or three weeks to live.
“We just didn’t want him to be lying in a bed for the last three weeks of his life.”
After consulting with brothers Mark and Marty and sister Cathy, the Howes figured what did they have to lose? So they took Gordie from Lubbock, Texas, where he lives with Cathy, to Mexico for the treatments, which have not been approved in North America, and are astonished by the dramatic turnaround in their father’s condition.
“We were just completely blown away by his response (to the treatments),” Murray Howe said. “I’m still astonished.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in medicine.” … Read More
(via The Windsor Star)
We are headed back to Hockeytown this weekend to watch the Red Wings host the Nashville Predators on Saturday night. My first time at Joe Louis Arena, one year ago, was so great, and I can’t wait for this next visit.
Detroit and Nashville used to see a lot of each other when both played in the Western Conference’s stacked central division. They have fewer opportunities to square off since Detroit’s move to the Eastern Conference this year, though, so each meeting takes on greater importance. Continue reading
One of the important background dimensions to comparative baseball statistics is known as “park adjustments,” a set of corrective factors applied to account for the physical differences (e.g., outfield wall depth) between each park. Among American sports today, only Major League Baseball and NASCAR (and golf, I suppose) permit such structural variation between the competitive arenas themselves.
Professional hockey used to be in that group too. More than merely adjusting, adding, and subtracting lines on the ice to affect the flow of play, as the NHL continues to do (cf. the NBA three-point line), the rinks themselves used to be different sizes. League rules mandate a uniform rink size, but so-called “small rinks” persisted in the NHL as late as the 1980s and 1990s in Boston, Chicago, and Buffalo.
While hockey does not face the structural differences present in baseball, there still is a need to apply rink-by-rink statistical adjustments. That’s because the compiling of basic hockey statistics (e.g., shots, hits, turnovers) requires statisticians to make judgment calls to a more significant degree than in a discrete-event sport like baseball.
By way of limited background, the NHL collects basic gameplay statistics through a computer system known as the Real Time Scoring System (RTSS). A benefit of RTSS is that it aggregates and organizes data for analysis by teams, players, and fans. A vulnerability of RTSS is the subjectivity alluded to above that comes when human scorers track a fluid, dynamic sport like hockey.
While others have noted certain biases among the RTSS scorers at different rinks, a paper by Michael Schuckers and Brian Macdonald published earlier this month analyzes those discrepancies across a spread of core statistics and proposes a “Rink Effects” model that aims to do for subjective rink-to-rink differences in hockey scoring what park adjustments do for structural differences between baseball parks. Continue reading
ALDLAND 