Horcoff - Penner - Hemsky

There has been much conversation over the past year regarding this line. Derek Zona has shown, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that when they played together at even strength last season they got terrific results to go along with terrific underlying numbers.

So if you had any of these three guys in your hockey pool, you were justified in screaming at your telelvision whenever MacTavish broke up the line, which was most of the time. That's been established, I think.

The question is, how much were the other lines hurt by having most of the forward talent on one line? More specifically, we want to know the effect on the team as a whole.

To do this I wrote a script to go through the NHL.com time on ice sheets and find the games that Penner played most of his EV icetime with Horcoff and Hemsky. If that happened, the game's EV tied-score data was dumped into bin #1. If that didn't happen, and both Hemsky and Horcoff played in the game ... then the game's EV tied-score data was dumped into bin #2.

THE OILER TEAM RESULT:
In the games with Penner-Horcoff-Hemsky as the top unit:
48.5% of the EV tied-score shots were owned by the Oilers.
48.9% of the EV scoring chances were owned by the Oilers.

In other games (83 and 10 both on the game roster):
48.0% of the EV tied-score shots were owned by the Oilers.
47.7% of the EV scoring chances were owned by the Oilers.

So MacTavish's decision to keep Penner off the top unit, probably due in part due to his personal distaste for Dustin, seems to have had a small detrimental effect on the play of the team as a whole. Not a hell of a lot, but more than I was expecting. And, going by some of the commentary that I have read on the subject, considerably less than a lot of Oiler fans were expecting I'm sure.

With the top line loaded up or not, this was just a slightly below average skating team at even strength last year. Shuffling players around the lineup in different ways only accomplishes so much.

UPDATE: I've added scoring chances as well and, following RiversQ's comment, it appears that we should expect shift in scoring chance percentage of greater than 1.1% (the amount that happened) about 6 times in 10 by chance alone. So the the impact on the team of playing Horcoff-Penner-Hemsky as a line is so small, in terms of scoring chances, that we can't see it through the noise. It may have even had a neagtive effect on the team's chances of winning.

More on Dubious NHL Shot Counting

Following up on the 'Shots On Net' post below, this is a chart showing the NHL's most dubious shot counters from the 08/09 season. Click to enlarge. Calgary and Edmonton are fringe qualifiers, but they are teams of interest around here, so I included them. All this information is for when the game is tied at even strength, to try and minize the noise.


By way of example, for Calgary:

On home ice the Flames NHL scorer recorded 50.5% of the Flames' shots-directed-at-net (Corsi) as shots on goal. And he recorded 58% for the opponent's shots/Corsi.

On the road, the aggregate totals of the NHL scorers in other rinks show the Flames with 53% shots/Corsi. And their opponents with a 61% shots/Corsi.

That's shown as a red line. The angle of the line indicates his home team bias. The nearer 45 degrees, the less that home team bias is indicated. So it looks like the person that the NHL employs to track shots-on-goal is a bit of a hard marker. But he's the same way for both teams playing on Saddledome ice. The shot bias is fairly significant. Some back of the envelope sums suggests a .004 or so hit on Kipper's save%.

The scorer at Rexall sees the game the same way as the Flames marker. The Toronto shot tracker is an extreme version of the same.

The Chicago scorer is the polar opposite, everything looks like a shot to this cat. But at least he seems fair to both teams.

The Buffalo and Tampa Bay counters show extreme home bias, they are flattering their goalies in a pretty significant way. I don't know how much .005 or .010 difference in save percentage matters come contract negotiation time, but it looks to me like befriending the shot tracker would be very worthwhile for an NHL goalie and his agent.

The Montreal guy/girl is tough when it comes to counting a Habs shot as being "on net", but he softens up when the other team's shoot the puck. I hope that the Canadiens goalies appreciate that.

Of course there is surely a lot of noise in here, teams like EDM and CGY may well just be coincidence, or at least the magnitude might be considerably less. The others though ... those are madass swings. Maybe somebody will look at past seasons and see if these tendencies persist.

Just generally, I think it is wiser to use shots% or shot ratio, instead of shots+/-, when looking at teams like CGY, EDM and CHI.

Outshooting in Toronto

Gabe Desjardins recently listed the five worst teams that outshot their opponents in the history of the modern NHL. He ranked the post lockout Leafs as #2 on that list.

It's worth looking into why that happened, beyond the obvious (poor goaltending and PK, shooters who couldn't finish, bad luck). How the hell did the Leafs manage to outshoot their opponents at even strength last season?

Teams play differently when they are leading than when they are trailing. We saw that in the third period of game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals. With the two goal deficit Detroit was pressing and taking more risks, Pittsburgh was sitting back and playing safe hockey. Now obviously this strategy would have been disasterous for the Penguins if they had played the whole game that way, they got badly out-chanced in the third period, and even more badly outshot (7 to 1) and territorially dominated (22 to 3 in terms of Corsi). They did manage a couple of odd man rushes, capitalizing on Detroit's risky tactics, but they didn't score on either, only got a chance off of one if my memory is right.

The most likely outcome of that period, given Bylsma's tactics, was 1-0 for Detroit, which is what happened. And that's fine, because they had the two goal cushion.

During a Hockey Night In Canada broadcast, late in a game in which the Oilers held a one goal lead, Marc Crawford remarked that they should play a bit more conservative because of the score "the third forward should stay above the puck". I should freaking hope so. Hitchcock would have the third forward so high in that situation that he wouldn't have been able to read the advertising on the boards behind the net. Clearly there is a difference in the way that coaches have their teams play to the score.

So lets look at the breakdown for the Leafs last season.

Overall, at even strength and with both team's goalies on the ice, they fired 1968 shots at the other teams goalies and their netminders faced 1916 shots. So they owned 50.7% of the shots taken at even strength.

=================================

At EV when the score was TIED:
656 shots for, 705 shots against.
48.2% of the shots. (About the same as the Oilers, and the Leafs play in a weaker conference).

At EV when the Leafs were TRAILING BY ONE GOAL on the scoreboard:
364 shots for, 314 shots against.
53.7% of the shots.

At EV when the Leafs were TRAILING BY TWO OR MORE GOALS on the scoreboard:
445 shots for, 359 shots against.
55.3% of the shots.

At EV when the Leafs were LEADING on the scoreboard:
503 shots for, 538 shots against.
48.3% of the shots.

=================================

So, the Leafs overall even strength shot totals, for and against, are not an indication of a good skating team. Rather they are a reflection of the fact that they:
1. Didn't play to the score at all when they had the lead.
2. Trailed in hockey games a lot more often than they were leading.

That might have something to do with Wilson's philosophy, we didn't see that in San Jose though. More likely it speaks to a team that had no notions of being competitive, starting right from training camp. If we look at the teams this year that are out of the playoffs and are selling at the trade deadline ... for the rest of the year they'll all probably stop playing to the score. Both by eye and by the numbers.

The Problem With "Shots on Net"

Shots on net is a terrific statistic, especially at the NHL level. We know that as early as the 1980s that the big three of Roger Neilson's "second generation stats" for individual players were:

• ice time
• scoring chances
• shots on net[Team]

All broken down by situation, of course (5v4PP, 5v5, EN, etc).

So, after a game against the Oilers in 1989, Lindy Ruff would get a postgame scorecard showing his ice time in different situations, how the scoring chances fell when he was out there, the scoring chances for which he was more responsible, etc. He'd also get a grade for shots-on-net[NYR] and shots-on-net[EDM], again by situation. There would be a whack of other information on there as well. You don' have to be particularly clever to start noticing patterns.

The question is, why use shots on net instead of shots AT net. Or put another way, Corsi+ & - or Shots + & -?

Intuitively you would think that Corsi would be the better indicator of territorial advantage in a single game, or any small sample, like a playoff series. To illustrate that; in the first game of the season the Oilers widely outshot the Flames, but only narrowly outchanced them and narrowly outCorsied them. The Flames missed the net a lot with their chances. Simple as that. Still, some players are far better at getting their shots through on net than other guys, and surely that has value, and that player is more likely to aid in territorial advantage than a guy whose shots tend to whistle wide or get blocked a lot more.

On a team level, they are bunched closely together in terms of "ability to get shots through". Shots+ divided by corsi+. But clearly there are different abilities at the team level as well. The strange thing is that teams who tend to get shots through also had a strong tendency to see the opponents do the same against them. That's completely counterintuitive, so I checked just using data from when the score in the game was tied ... still there.

The relationship, by way of Pearson Correlation, r=.43. Coincidence is unlikely, and though it seems that 90% of callers to sports talk radio are amateur psychologists, I personally find it hard to believe that the ability of one team to get their shots through is having an impact on the ability of the opposition to do the same at the other end of the ice. So before we start digging into the VMM (Vulcan Mind Meld) effect of two teams, we should look for a boring, rational explanation.

The terrific JLikens showed us that there is very measurable home recording bias in 'shots on goal', at least when you look at a large enough time frame. This even though surely some of the scorers have changed over the years.

That's understandable. I'm sure I could find a video clip of a shot at net where the shooter tried to fire it through the defenders legs, the puck glanced off of the Dman's shin pad and then the goalie snagged it with a high glove save. Was it a save or was it going wide? If you think it was wide is it a block or a miss? We could run a poll and get a spread of results from readers here, and we could find another similar clip and do the same. It's likely that the same folks would repeat their opinions.

The one thing we would all agree on, however, is that the puck was shot AT net. So let's look at just the road games.

ON THE ROAD:

On the road the Oilers got 43% of their shots through onto the net at EV when the score was tied. Their opponents got 45% through. The league average is 45%.

Now do the same for the other 29 teams and plot it out. Completely random. If you can see a trend you probably should get a CAT scan. r=.03, which is closer to zero than you would expect from two random sets of 30 numbers.

AT HOME:

On Rexall ice the Oilers got 2.5% more of their shots through, so did their opponents.

The scatter plot for all 30 teams on home ice is below. Click to enlarge, you should be able to read the team names with some effort.


The pattern is obvious, there is a Pearson correlation of r=.70.

The wildly generous scorer is from Chicago. This creates the illusion that Chicago was/is a shot-happy team. In truth, in terms of total shots AT net in the games (for both teams combined), they were nearly spot on the same as the Oilers. The difference is that the Hawks play a lot more in the offensive end of the rink than the Oilers do.

I hope that the coaching staff and management of the team you cheer for realizes this. The management of the team I cheer for recently signed Khabibulin to a big ticket deal and more recently educated the local media on how Quenneville's Blackhawks rack up gaudy shot totals because "they just shoot from anywhere".

The Puck Has To Be Somewhere

There is much talk about high event and low event players around the Oilogosphere. In truth there isn't much in it beyond coincidence driven by on-ice shooting and save percentages. That's why it is so volatile from season to season. Below is a chart with total shots on net that happened when a skater was on the ice at even strength last season, this for guys who played a regular shift. These numbers come from Behind The Net and display the Western Conference only. Click to enlarge. The numbers on the bottom of the chart are the total number of shots directed at net (by either team) per hour at 5v5 hockey, we'll call that 'Total Corsi Rate' for short.



Better players tend to be higher event for sure, just not by a lot. If we filtered out team effects, especially the way that teams played to the score, and also removed the last few seconds of ice time after a penalty expired, and accounted for the fact that some players start their shifts less in the neutral zone than others ... well this group would be even more tightly bunched. Some teams are a touch more shot happy as well, that contributes to the spread, just not as much as most of us imagined. Certainly much, much less than Pat Quinn imagines (unless he was blowing smoke earlier to try and make us believe that the Oilers really weren't getting outplayed and outchanced as badly as it seemed).

The Eastern Conference plays a more wide open, and generally more entertaining, brand of hockey. Their results are also tightly bunched, but shifted to the right.

The "highest event" Oiler by this metric is Ethan Moreau at 114 Total Corsi Rate.
He's just a couple of players away from Henrik Zetterberg who clocks in with a 113 score, and well clear of Rick Nash at 105.

Moreau also led the team in personal shots rate, but had a tragic Corsi +/- of -182, the worst on the team of the regular forwards, on a per game basis. There seems to be a pervasive line of reasoning amongst Oiler fans that players who aren't getting many shots just aren't shooting enough. In fact players who are shooting too much, especially from bad angles (outside the dots) are doing nothing to help their team out shoot the opposition. The opposite in fact. The puck just ends back up in their own end again.

And while a player like Cogliano doesn't get many shots, largely that's because he's playing way too much in his own end of the rink. Adding a guy like Moreau, who shoots a lot, to his line might seem like a fix on the surface, but it will just make things worse. The Total Corsi Rate is a persistent thing, it will stay about the same. The difference will be that even more of those shots at net in the game will be coming towards the Oiler goalie.

Good players tend to play more in the offensive end of the rink and to generate more chances, so their Corsi almost always looks good. And that tends to result in more shots for themselves as well. But the reverse is not true. i.e. Good EV hockey players, the type that really help you win, generally get a lot of shots at net at EV. But players that get a tonne of shots at net at EV are not necessarily the type that really help you win hockey games.

Jokinen and O'Sullivan are two of last year's poster children for the phenomenon. I think both are good NHL players, albeit overpaid. I'm not criticizing them personally. But if you rate players by the number of shots on (or at) net that they personally register ... you'll overpay for this type of player. Tambellini pursued Jokinen aggressively at the deadline according to Mahoney, before being outbid by Sutter. And he was successful in landing O'Sullivan. I have this horrible feeling that Tambellini plays hockey video games, by the way.

I'm not meaning to pile on. The Oilers are ravaged with injury and sickness right now, and they had terrible roster depth to begin with. When/if their best players get fit and find their games again, the Oilers will win some games. For me, the big picture is more concerning.

Clutch, Baby!

In this post, I intend to use reason in order to make you believe in clutch hitting ability in major league baseball. Seriously.


Bill James, who is quite famous in the world of baseball, is an engaging writer and a critical thinker. Nobody has done more to get baseball fans thinking, though I doubt he lists math as one of his strengths. In 2004 he wrote a terrific article in The Baseball Research Journal which I stumbled across on Monday, I highly recommend it. Essentially he's questioning the validity of some of the methods used by most of the mathy baseball analysts of the world. If you consider his audience ... that takes some stones.

Not surprisingly, this piece generated a lot of commentary. Dr Jim Albert, who I think is the best baseball writer out there, chimed in as well. He offered fair, detailed and reasonable comments on James' article. The thrust of it:

"Although I agree with James’ general conclusions, unfortunately I think that he is unclear and sometimes wrong in some of his statements about chance variation."

There is a peculiar formality in the way that these baseball cats talk to each other on the internet, bless them.

After that the conversation drifts into a wandering discussion regarding the presence of clutch hitting in baseball. Prolific baseball writer Phil Birnbaum doesn't believe in clutch hitting ability at all, and he gathered a whack of clutch hitting stats to make his case. He used Late Inning Pressure Situations (LIPS) to define a clutch at-bat (AB). And he defined the clutchness as the difference in batting averages between LIPS ABs and all other ABs. So if a guy batted .340 in Late Inning Pressure Situations and .300 in other ABs, his clutchness result would be +.040. Easy as beans. That makes sense to me, so I'm going to use Phil's data and definitions for my kick at the clutchness cat, thats the LIPS and non-LIPS ABs and hits for 16 seasons. I'll sum each player's results from each season, so I'll be working with one set of clutch data for each of 553 MLB hitters.


THE MODEL:

Imagine that there was an enormous balls-up at the Elias Sports Bureau. A disgruntled employee has falsified the LIPS batting averages for all players. He's kept the number of LIPS and non-LIPS ABs the same for everyone, and he's kept the total number of hits the same for everyone. But every time a customer downloads data, the hits are sprinkled over the LIPS and non-LIPS ABs completely randomly. So in 1974 Ron Cey still had 491 non-LIPS ABs, 123 LIPS ABs and 114 total hits ... but every time I access the Elias data those hits get shuffled into the LIPS and non-LIPS ABs. The first time I check I see that Ron Cey was the clutchiest of the clutchy in 1974, I check an hour later and he was a disgraceful choker in 1974. What the hell?

I keep downloading sets of this random data, the same stuff Phil compiled. Every time it's different, and by the time I realize what's going on I've downloaded and saved a whopping 1000 sets of random data. This isn't much of a stretch by the way, I'm not a quick study.

As I have these 1000 random seasons and also the real clutch data, I may as well make use of them. I plot out a bunch of them as histograms (that's just a bar chart, each bar covers a range of clutch averages, such as -.040 to -.035). The result is always a squiggly bell shape. Not too exciting. The actual clutch histogram is also a squiggly bell shape. To be expected, the universe is a squiggly place. It's also a little off centre, LIPS ABs probably come against better pitching a shade more often than not. It also looks like the bell lists to the right a bit, we'll call that left skewed.

It turns out that the actual data is spread out wider than the vast majority of the random seasons. Wider than 931 of them, in fact, using variance as the measuring stick.

Variance is a simple measure. If, using all the data for these 16 seasons, Ron Cey has a clutchness of +.020, and the overall league average is -.005, then he is is .025 points from average. Square that ( .025 x .025. ), then the same for everyone. Take the average of the whole bunch.

Σ(abs(x-x_o)/n is similar to variance, we just don't square the differences. We have to make sure they are all positive numbers though.

Σ(abs(x-x_o)³)/n is as above, except we don't square the differences, we cube them. Again, we have to make sure they are all positive numbers.

Using Jim Albert's equation from the article above. The sum of variances of luck and ability distributions equals the variance of the actual distribution.

Therefore:
Hitting clutchness, as defined by Phil Birnbaum and using his data, was 10.4% skill and 89.6% luck.

That strikes me as a naive assumption though, nature probably hasn't been kind enough to distribute clutch ability in Gaussian (Normal Distribution) fashion throughout the rosters of MLB.

We can build our own model for ability, parlay it through the luck distribution (the average of the 1000 random seasons) and see how close we come to the actual, or observed, distribution that Phil provided.

Trial 1: Assume that most hitters have no clutch or choking qualities. Apply .010 of added clutchness to 100 random hitters. Deduct .010 of clutchness from 100 random hitters. Run 1000 simulations.
Result: It's an improvement over the assumption that no clutch ability exists, this by all three measures above, but not enough. We need to bump it up a bit more.

Trial 2: Same as trial 1 but crank it up to .020 points added or deducted to clutchness.
Result: It's an improvement over Trial 1 by all three measures above, we're getting close to the 50th percentile by all three measures above. But still not enough. We need to bump it up just a shade more.

Trial 3: Same as trial 2 but crank it up to .025 points added or deducted to clutchness.
Result: Now we've gone much too far. In around the 35th percentile range for the three measures I'm using.

Trial 4: Let's try .022 as an adjustment.
Result: Ah, that's the stuff. The result we create with the model matches all three measure are very closely. All measures would rank close to 500th when compared to the 1000 random seasons.

That's all that I have done. No more or less. From here out it's straightforward though, we can refine the ability distribution to give a perfect result if we try. I wouldn't bother at this point, though. Firstly because my implementation here was a bit heavy handed, clutchness should be added into the ability distribution in a different way. Secondly because the difference between the actual data and the random data could still be the product of randomness. Or, equally likely, clutch ability is larger than I'm indicating here. Randomness is the essence of the universe, after all. Best to run the same procedure on several different sets of data, methinks. We're still painting with a big brush at this point.

* I may well have made a mistake along the way, either in logic or in coding, so please do not use this information for the purpose of wagering.

* None of the 1000 sample seasons resulted in a wider spread of results by all three measurements (absolute average difference from the mean, average squared difference from the mean and average absolute cubed difference from the mean) than the actual results, though this may be due in part to the fact that overall the players averaged a -.0057 clutchness. I don't suspect that is fatal, but this offset does escape the Lutheran philosophy of the model.

Oiler Team Scoring Chances and Reasonable Expectations for 09/10

Since all points in the standings are derived from scoring goals and all goals emanate from scoring chances, the New York Rangers coaching staff emphasizes the ability to create scoring chances.

Kevin Leonard, NYR Database Designer, c.1992

I like rolling averages, it smooths out the bumps in the season that are caused by tough stretches of the schedule or puck luck. This spring I posted a few items on the Oilers' scoring chances, all concerned the individual player on-ice scoring chances. This post is the first looking at the team totals.

"ScoringChance%" is he percentage of the total even strength scoring chances in the game that were owned by the Oilers. So if, over twenty games, the Oilers racked up 200 EV scoring chances, and the opposition tallied 300 EV scoring chances ... then the Oilers would lay claim to 40% of the scoring chances over the stretch (200 of 500).

"Corsi%" is calculated using the same reasoning, as is EV "Goals%".

Corsi% is our best guess at the extent of territorial advantage held by the Oilers in the previous 20 games.


I think it speaks for itself. Here is an enlargement of the 40% to 60% band:


So, quite clearly Corsi% (or any of the shots metrics for that matter) ends up giving us a clear indication of scoring chance percentage. Using 20 game rolling averages as above, they are almost on top of one another.

On the year as a whole:
ScoringChance% = 47.7%
Corsi% = 47.8%
Goals% = 51.0%

The Oilers got a bit fortunate with the shooting/save percentages, mostly due to the fact that Roloson had a terrific year at even strength. (In fairness, that gets balanced out a bit by some bad puck luck on the PK, in a fairer universe the 0809 Oiler penalty kill would not have been nightmarish, merely terrible).

The Goals% (yellow line) may look volatile, but EV goals are rare birds in NHL, so it always will be similarly wiggly for all teams in all years. If you drew a straight red line at 51.0%, then coloured in the spaces in between the yellow curve and that red line, filled them in with black dots (Jim Albert's BLACKstat) then the black area would represent the streakiness or inconsistency of the Oiler Goals%. And in 753 of 1000 parallel universes the Oilers would be expected to be a touch MORE streaky with Goals% than they were in 0809.

The Oilers just weren't a very good even strength hockey team in 0809. And they aren't this year either.

There is a downward trend in the ScoringChance% starting early in the back half of the season, and it never recovered. I'm not sure when Hemsky got concussed or when Visnovsky's season ended, but it must be thereabouts. Both are terrific players when healthy, and neither appear to be fully fit at the moment, so this next stretch could be tough for the Oil.

On the other hand, Gagner and Cogliano should improve, Gilbert and Grebeshkov too, Penner even. Though, as RiversQ showed in an earlier post, that progression is wildly erratic. And the guys who are on the hard downslope of their careers (Moreau, Staios, Strudwick, Pisani) can't do much worse this season than last. Plus Comrie is a good addition to my mind, or maybe it's just the thrill of seeing the Oilers sign someone with a good chance of beating his contract price.

My conclusion: With good health, the Oilers should be better this year than last, maybe even become dead average at outchancing (50%). Let's dare to dream.

NHL Hockey in Winnipeg: Post Game

Off to the game tonight! The last time I saw the Oilers play live it was also a preseason tilt at the MTS Centre. I was lucky enough to end up with a puck from that game (it's true: I'm rich, bitch!) as well as sit with a good friend who possesses a keen eye for talent - he identified Patrick Thoresen as a legitimate player right from puck drop while I was busy fawning over the "speed" of Toby Petersen and goal scoring "prowess" of Alex Mikhnov.

Tonight I will be sitting 8th row, front and center, with that same good friend. For my own enjoyment I'll do my best to post after the game with my thoughts and his. If you're watching on TSN and have no need of this commentary, deal with it: it's not every day I get to see my favourite NHL team in my home city and I will enjoy it however I like :)


Post Game Thoughts:

First off, I really meant to get these posted last night. But then I got drunk.

My experience at the MTS Centre last night started off in an amazing way. I'm not sure how much detail is appropriate but right after entry, I found myself on a brief tour of the facilities by a staffer at the arena which included...

The press box.

First thing I noticed was a gorgeous brunette near the entrance who smiled at me which definitely made me feel more at ease. The second was that Bob Stauffer is a very large man which kind of killed the boner I had going from #1. And lastly, as surprised as I was to see him, Tony Rajala was in the press box smiling and looking rather sharp in a nice suit. My first thought here was WTF but then, he does play in Brandon and I later had it confirmed that he came over on the charter with the team. My tour was quick and I didn't talk to any of the aforementioned, but if you happen to be a press box visiting gorgeous brunette who smiled a boner into the pants of a handsome U of M student...

Anyhoo. Next stop on the tour was the tunnel underneath the stands that the Oilers used to take to the ice from their dressing room. Unfortunately, we made it there about a minute too late and just caught the team turning the corner towards the ice from a distance but still: for me, this was amazing! I had no idea any of this was going to happen and I was sporting a shit eating grin as a result of it for at least half the 1st period.

Speaking of which, there was hockey last night!
I'll basically pull from my notes from here on out:

The atmosphere:
The arena wasn't full and it felt like it, but the announced ~12k felt about right. From what I saw it was mostly pro Oilers (by the way, for the first time I know how much hotter a hot girl is while wearing copper and blue) with the occasional Bolts jersey. I also, for the first time, ran into a Flames fan in the concourse and felt that despite my choice to respect him as a human being I need not look him in the eye or acknowledge his presence in any way whatsoever. Is this about par for the course or was I supposed to jersey him and take his beer?

The 1-2-2:
At times I was surprised with just how passive Edmonton's forcheck was - they frequently dropped into a 1-2-2 so passive the rear wingers were chilling out by the offside dots. This wasn't always the case but it was clearly a part of the system and honestly, it tended to work. We shall see if it carries forward into the regular season but it might be a decent way of idiot proofing puck recovery for our particularly small group of forwards.

Ryan Stone:
I texted someone (doritogrande, iirc) during the intermission that Ryan Stone has every tool of a top 6 forward but speed. He was hitting, he was blocking shots, he was a 1st choice winger on the pk, and he was able to create a little bit of offense down low. Stone also incited one of the best moments of the night: Steve Downie's raging charge through the Bolts' zone into a flying hit on a Lightning teammate. Despite my praise and this hilarious moment, Ryan Stone was also the poster boy for an Oilers roster gone wrong on the game winning goal - a goal that was only scored because none of Horcoff, Brodziak, or Malholtra were available to take the draw. My one game verdict: I'd be happy with Ryan Stone on the 4th line or as a 1st choice callup.

Gilbert Brule:
One of my favourite Oilers of the night. He was skating well, made some nice plays to retain the puck and some nice passes transitioning through the neutral zone. Brule also loves to hit people, and while this may have helped in terms of puck recovery it's clear that he will never crush people at the NHL level like he did in junior. He was also Quinn's consistent choice for a 2nd pk unit winger, suggesting to me that he along with Stone were being given every chance to audition against each other. Gilbert Brule's best shifts of the game came in OT where he and Dustin Penner were, strangely enough, dominant on shift 1 and were rushed back onto the ice 2 shifts later for a 2nd go at it.

Dustin Penner:
Speaking of #27, he was actually great to watch. For a guy who I've been down on in the past from time to time because he never quite looked like he gave a shit, Dustin Penner was one of Edmonton's best players for the 2nd night in a row. He was separating people from the puck, winning battles, and was perhaps the best Oiler in OT - while I thought he was gassed at the end of his first overtime shift, Penner was good to go for round 2 and did it all again with aplomb.

Rob Schremp:
Those fans who say he was invisible last night are overstating things quite a bit; I have photographic evidence that Rob Schremp was in the building last night and that his features were not in fact ghostlike and transparent but were instead perfectly opaque. So while you might damn him with your curses of shineboxery and your suggestions that beneath his sugartits there lies no heart, I will simply damn him with faint praise: Schremp looked like he fit in just fine in a non impactful sort of way. His best shifts came at the end of the game, first getting denied on the doorstep towards the end of period 3 and then having a halfway dangerous shift with Nilsson driving the bus in OT. I don't want him on my NHL team and feel he is skilled only in a narrow view but I think that there are few fans who can speak on Rob Schremp hockey without past arguments clouding our judgment. Oh well, see you on waivers Robbie!

Robert Nilsson:
Speaking of overstatements, I don't think it's safe to say that Robert Nilsson was the best player on the ice last night. I have read this in a few places but I will say only that he had a good game. Nilsson appeared by my eye to be skating better as the night went on and was most effective towards the end of the game, especially in OT driving the bus in his duo with Schremp hanging on. One funny moment of the night, at least for me, was seeing Gagner way effing more excited for Nilsson's goal than anyone else on the ice including Rowbear himself. Is Sam always this animated? I took it to mean that he is pulling for his old linemate. Anyhow, a solid effort and when he had time and space, Nilsson looked dangerous.

Sam Gagner:
I'll be honest and say that I expected Gagner to impress me more than he did. Maybe asking him to dominate like the last time I saw him at the MTS Centre was a little much, but for every great pass (and there were a few) there was an equal amount of frustration as he skated the puck to a standstill on the halfboards and then turned it over. In his favour I will say that Gagner has sublime vision finding lanes for teammates to skate into and demonstrated it more than once leading Andrew Cogliano into gaps in the neutral zone.

Andrew Cogliano:
It was a treat to see his wheels up close and personal. There was one sequence where he was kind of coasting back towards the Oiler blue line just as Edmonton forced a turnover and Gagner took it the other way. Cogs made an instantaneous U-turn, kept his head up, and by his second crossover back towards Tampa's zone, he had gained a step on both Lightning defencemen. Unreal.

A second note and a bit of an aside leading from Cogliano's goal. The more I watch the replay the more I think that the reason his shot beat Smith was largely the timing of release. Once upon a time I played soccer at a reasonably high level and I often found it easy to step around defenders by changing direction at unexpected rhythmic moments as opposed to with especially impressive dribbling skills. By delaying a step by half a second or taking an extra one just a little bit faster than before I could make defenders look pretty silly without ever doing anything remotely intricate. I think Cogliano "flatfooted" Smith on his goal last night and I will be keeping an eye on his timing in the future. I'm not sure if I've explained this as clearly as I'd like but if anyone out there has ever studied musical theory, theatre, or comedy (or has had a similar sports experience to mine) then maybe you understand what I'm trying to get at.

Jordan Eberle:
I came away from the game last night feeling very relieved about Jordan Eberle. It has long been my fear that he would have no sense of battle, no hope at puck recovery, and be consistently overmatched both through his smaller size and through a lack of try much in the same way Schremp is. I'm not ready to say Eberle is an NHL forward and he could clearly stand to gain from some additional strength but the guy has try and came up with more than his fair share of pucks in the corner. To use a MacT-ism, the play didn't die on his stick nearly as much as I expected. As a result, I think Eberle had a pretty solid game and created some chances - my verdict is that it sure would be nice if he could play in the AHL but I'll be just as happy to see him at the World Juniors one more time.

TheCaptain:
I asked my buddy Chris if he wanted me to take pictures of people in the penalty boxes (we were right behind them). He suggested I wait until Moreau took one so that I would have the definitive shot. Five minutes later:












Moreau was also one of two Oilers to take the pregame skate without a helmet on; this struck me as odd and perhaps a bit ego driven when I saw the other was Steve Staios. Maybe I'm projecting the leadership issues we read about from time to time on too tiny a detail but when only two players go helmet free it rubbydubs me the wrong way and conveys arrogance. Thoughts?

The Fourth Line:
Steve MacIntyre, god love him, is not an NHL hockey player. Zack Stortini had a quiet night and I still think of him as a tweener. Strangely enough, I came away impressed with Liam Reddox on both sides of the puck. He does little things defensively that are endearing (for example, he went down to block a shot. The Dman tried to step around him. He made the extra effort to swing his stick around and swatted it away). He has hands, honestly he does. In junior, where more players were his size and he was probably faster than many of them I can definitely understand why Reddox put up points. Is he an NHL player > Toby Petersen? I have yet to make up my mind.

The defense:
Doritogrande was a pretty big fan of Chorney, who I thought made some smart but unnoticed pinches on the powerplay. I'm not sure if this speaks to bad communication, other players' lack of trust in him, or the fact that a certain Rob Schremp was unwilling to give up the puck but I think Chorney found some good lanes. Staios was Staios. Stupid fucking penalty but the rest of his game was very solid, physical, what-you-want-of-a-veteran-bottom-pairing-guy. All of Gilbert, Grebeshkov, and Visnovsky had acid trip moments but Gilbert's goal was a fantastic wrister, Grebeshkov made a gorgeous pass to Cogliano for a goal, and Visnovsky made a lot of solid defensive plays. Chris called him a rat, saying he would be annoying as hell to play against and I agree completely. As for Laddy Smid, the first thing I noticed in person was that his stride is smooth as hell. I've quietly thought this for some time but Smid reminds me so much of Eric Brewer when I watch him: smooth stride, good hands, technique-wise he often just looks like a top flight player dammit but in the end top-4 D is the most reasonable expectation I can think of despite said look.

Jeff Deslauriers:
I am not fan and never have been so take this with a grain of salt. Half the time he looks like an NHL goalie: he made a nice glove save by outwaiting the shooter (Stamkos) in tight and picked off a couple of deflections with some pretty impressive reflexes. The other half: out of position, goes down too easily, lost track of the puck, does not ever appear to cover as much of the net behind him as his size dictates should be possible. With Khabibulin's age and JDD's warts I am sincerely worried about goaltending in Edmonton in the near future.

In Conclusion:
I had fun. I owe Chris a huge thank you for his company, the excellent seats, and for the series of events that led to the tour. I am hungover.

Ice Veins: A New Journalistic Blog

I have a great friend, one who I've grown up with since we made paper mache dragons in Mrs. Klassen's grade 3 classroom, who is a Ryerson Journalism grad. He has recently started a journalistic style blog that I urge all of you to have a look at. Today he's got an interesting Hamilton story with Winnipeg implications up that hasn't yet made it into mainstream media to the best of my knowledge.

Now you won't get the same statistical analysis at his blog that you do here but he is a great friend, a solid writer, and he is looking to gain some traction in the media. Drop by his site (he has linked to this one as well) and leave whatever comment you like.

Enjoy your weekend!

Positional Shot Quality

[Note: I had my curiosity piqued the other day, and I ended up writing this article. Since I don't have a blog, I thought I'd post it here. Thanks to Vic and crew. Hopefully I'll be able to contribute more in the future. - Sunny Mehta]


Shot quality at even strength has been a point of debate around these parts lately. Some folks have built shot quality models. Others have poked holes into those models’ reliability and significance. Some people have linked specific team defensive tactics with suppressing opposing shot quality. Others have questioned the evidence for its existence on a league-wide scale.

Rather than focus on what we don’t know, I’m going to focus on what we do know. Let’s start with something most everyone agrees on: A good amount of evidence exists that offensive players can, in fact, display the ability to take higher quality shots than other offensive players. I.e., shooting percentages for certain players are persistently higher than can reasonably be explained by chance (see: Kovalchuk, Ilya).

Further, we observe a large difference in shooting percentages between forwards and defensemen. It makes intuitive sense that shots taken by forwards are more likely to go in than shots taken by defensemen. The numbers back that up. We don’t need any fancy models: forwards shot 9.6 percent at even strength last season, and defensemen shot 4.1 percent. And we see similar splits every year. [Note: the data in this article is taken from Behind The Net, which unfortunately includes empty net goals, as well as certain inconsistencies with regards to players traded mid-season. My numbers would be slightly more accurate with those two issues resolved, but the conclusions would be the same.]

So, before we look at a team’s overall shooting percentage and attempt to debate how much of it was luck versus skill (or randomness versus shot quality), we can at least first look at the composition of their shots with regards to forwards and defensemen. After all, that is one area of “shot quality” we know exists and can therefore confidently adjust for.

The following chart shows the results of my inquiry:

(2008-09 Even Strength)


Let me explain the last column on the right. It is each team’s Expected Shooting Percentage based on the ratio of shots taken by forwards relative to defensemen. (Each team’s forwards and defensemen were assigned league average shooting percentage, 9.6 and 4.1, respectively.)

A few observations:

1) Some teams, even after adjusting for forward/defensemen shot ratio, over- and under-performed their expectation by a significant amount. That could be due to either randomness or the fact that their individual forwards and defensemen are offensively better or worse than average.

2) A more precise way to model this would be to weight every team’s shots by the historical shooting percentage of the player who took each shot, and then see how far teams over- and under-performed their expectation. That’d be a hell of a task.

3) I’d be curious how persistent the ability to have forwards take more shots relative to defensemen is at the team level. If someone wants to run these numbers for previous seasons for comparison sake, or run some sort of split-reliability test, that’d be great.

4) If every team took the same number of shots, the scoring impact due to F/D shot ratio from the 30th team to the 1st team is 13 goals. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but on the other hand, I guess ~2 wins isn’t scoff-worthy.

5) Detroit led the league in total shots. No surprise there. But they also led the league in shots by forwards. That may surprise people. The Wings are often, and incorrectly, accused of padding their shot totals by taking a ton of shots from the point.

6) Pittsburgh was second in shots by forwards. Considering they have a few forwards with some pretty serious talent, don’t be surprised if the Pens are near the top of the shooting percentage list again next season. (And considering Pittsburgh increased their overall shot totals and decreased their shots against once Bylsma took over, don’t be surprised if they are near the top of the standings either.) With a whopping 181 goals, Pittsburgh’s forwards led the league by a fairly wide margin. (They had more than double the goals of the Islanders’ forwards. LOL.)

7) The fact that defensemen have such persistently lower shooting percentages than forwards certainly begs the interesting inquisition into the effect of shot distance on shot quality. Are defensemen scoring at a lower rate than forwards primarily because they are shooting from farther out or because they have less offensive talent?


Viewing teams’ shots and shooting percentages separated out by forwards and defensemen has value. The two positions are inherently different, and observing them separately adds nuance and gives a more descriptive view of what is happening on the ice. And as far as measures of shot quality go, this one is much less prone to recording bias than others.

Viewing a breakdown like this for teams' shots against would probably also be insightful.