Posts by Phil Curry

Has NHL salary cap created competitive balance?

Not too long ago – before the salary cap -- teams were unconstrained in the amount of money they could spend to attract hockey’s top talents. Not surprisingly, the difference between what large market teams spent and small market teams spent was large, and it showed on the ice. (Although spending more was certainly no […]

Leveling the Playing Field: A Look at Parity in the NHL

This week’s column in The Star looked at parity in the NHL. Parity refers to the extent to which teams are equal in terms of talent and ability. The specific form of parity that was addressed concerned the extent to which teams are evenly matched in a given season. (Sports economists also look at measures […]

Top NHL players really do improve in contract year, statistics show

By Phil Curry and Mark Drummond With a new NHL season around the corner, we’re bound to hear commentators talking about which players have contracts coming up next season and whether they’ll “step up their play” in order to get that big payday. But does this actually happen? Martin LaPointe is the poster boy for […]

Cashing in Big: A Look at Contract Year Effects

This week’s column in The Star was based on research done by Mark Drummond. Mark just graduated from the University of Waterloo as an economics major, and one of his graduation requirements was the writing of an undergraduate thesis. I was fortunate enough to act as supervisor to this project. Mark chose to examine the […]

Drafting by Position: The difficulty of forecasting young players

At last week’s 2014 Entry Draft, Aaron Ekblad became the first defenseman to go first overall since Erik Johnson in 2006. Since the NHL began its draft in 1963, only 13 defensemen have been picked first overall. The first was Barry Gibbs in 1966 (and no, he did not later go on to found The […]

The Star: Possession is 3/4 of the playoffs

One of the central battlegrounds between the fancy-stat set and hockey traditionalists is “puck possession.”  Most practitioners of hockey analytics believe that puck possession – as measured indirectly by stats that look at shot attempt differential – are powerful predictors of performance.  The traditionalists tend to focus more on such things as experience, grit, and […]

Possession and the Standings: Explaining the Playoffs

This week we looked at whether looking at a team’s possession numbers in the regular season (in conjunction with the regular season points) helped explain playoff performance. Even if you’re already sold on the importance of puck possession, it’s not obvious that this should be the case. Puck possession has already been established at being […]

Coming in Hot: More on Momentum and the Playoffs

This week we looked at whether there was anything behind the common claim that teams need to go into the playoffs playing well. There are actually several ways one could examine this problem, some of which unfortunately suffered from a lack of data. Ideally, I think we would have liked to look at a team’s […]

More on the Hit Parade: The Good Stuff

There were a couple of requests to see more about the regressions that were run. So here it is. First, I should mention that the kind of regression that is run is called a probit regression. The variable we’re trying to explain is wins, so it can only take on two values - 1 if […]

The Hit Parade: More on the Relationship between Hitting and Winning

This week’s Star column looked at the relationship between hitting and winning. Several articles have already been written on this topic in the advanced stats community, but somehow the analyses generally seem to fall short in what seemed like a rather obvious way. This piece set out to correct this oversight. This week, I need […]