Adjusting Time On-Ice: Can 5v5% Tell Us More About TOI?
Ben Wendorf
December 03 2012 12:57PM
Dealing with sum data should inevitably make a fancy stats person a bit uneasy; sums perpetually have a wealth of additional factors a person needs to know before they try to conclude anything. For instance, let's say your team's prospect is Lukas Sutter, and you want to know what the hell is going on with his point totals (aka, sum data). Well, Sutter's ice time is suffering right now, and the penalties he's taking aren't helping him get out of the doghouse. Hence, low points. Let's also say I'm predicting that, had the season happened, Evander Kane was going to score 50 goals...would he be taking enough shots? Will he play enough games? Will he receive enough ice time? Et cetera, et cetera...
Well, one of my previous posts pointed out two things we know about team 5v5 time on-ice: a) it can be volatile and independent of team talent, and b) it has gradually increased over the years. This throws a little bit of a wrench into using raw 5v5 TOI/60 to look at player quality, although that wrench can pretty easily removed.
First steps
My thinking is that you could control for those two elements of volatility by taking a player's 5v5 TOI and divide it by the team total 5v5 TOI in the games the player played. Whenever you do something like that, you want to make sure that you're actually improving predictability and either easing access to or learning new information, otherwise there's no point in creating the new metric. So, how did creating 5v5% work for me?
Best of the Nation – 12.2.12
Jonathan Willis
December 02 2012 07:13AM
After the jump, the answer to every question you've ever had. Provided, of course, that "every question you've ever had" relates to the NHL's return to Winnipeg, the true meaning of "one billion dollars," which NHL prospect got caught drunk and in a Teletubby costume, or something else that's answered in one of the excellent links below.
KHL Highlights - Friday, November 30 2012
Cam Charron
November 30 2012 07:11PM
Avangard and Barys go to overtime, but as you can tell by the above image, the real story out here is Karri Rämö's awesome mask.
Here are the rest of the highlights:
THE CASUAL AMERICAN HOCKEY FAN
Wanye
November 29 2012 07:52PM
With every blessed day that the Lockout drags on, your ol' pal Wanye is pushed further from home in the vain attempt to forget about the NHL and the beloved Edmonton Oilers. Today his sobering musings come from San Francisco. Also he is speaking in the fourth person, which has to be some sort of Olympic Record.*
Top 5 Under 25 - Atlantic Division
Scott Reynolds
November 29 2012 01:39PM
One of the ongoing projects I worked on at The Copper and Blue was the Top 25 Under 25. The series began with Ben Massey asking a very important point about the evaluation of young players: "determining when one has gone from prospect to player is more a matter of half-baked opinion and guesswork than rigorous statistical analysis." The result was a look at the best young players in the organization under 25 years old no matter how many NHL games those players might have played. It's a practice that gives us a much better look at what the future holds because we're no longer omitting a team's very best young players.
Of course, at the Copper and Blue, I was focused on the Oilers. That gave our readers an idea about the quality of players in Edmonton, but didn't offer much as far as comparison with other teams. Today, I'm beginning a series that will look at the top five players under 25, first comparing teams with the others in their division, and then comparing the best teams in each division with one another. After the jump, we begin with the Atlantic working our way fifth to the team with the best young players in the division.
