Now that we’re officially more than halfway into the season we’re starting to get a clearer picture of which teams are contenders and which are pretenders. However, there is still a lot of hockey left to play, and there will be a fair bit of movement up and down the standings. So what should we […]
Monthly archives for January, 2015
Forecasting the Second Half
This week’s article in The Star looked at what information was most useful for predicting how teams will perform in the second half of the season. In a previous article, I considered how a team’s performance in several variables after 25 games was predictive of making the playoffs. Here, the prediction was not a simple […]
Depth: Seldom Defined, Possibly Overrated
Arguably the greatest contribution of hockey’s analytics revolution is its ability to subject longstanding articles of faith to cold hard logic. Articles of faith have their appeal. Because if you say something often enough without thinking about it much, it eventually feels true. Occasionally, even those who traffic in pure reason fall into […]
The Power of Puck Luck
“Puck luck” is real. And it’s powerful. In early December, when Calgary was riding a white hot 17-7-1 start, we wrote an article explaining that its success was nothing but smoke and mirrors. We pointed out that puck luck was duping just about everybody from Toronto to Timbuktu into believing that the Flames were an […]