There are many great moments in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, but one of my favorites involves an exchange between Dan Feinstein, the Oakland A’s video coordinator and newly acquired outfielder John Mabry. Mabry and teammate Scott Hatteberg are commiserating over how difficult it is to prepare for a game against Seattle Mariners ace Jamie Moyer, […]
Ducks Luck
With his Anaheim Ducks in first place overall, coach Bruce Boudreau is in familiar territory. All too familiar, in fact. In his last three seasons as coach of the Washington Capitals (2009-2011) he won one President’s Trophy (first place overall in the regular season), and came second and fourth overall in the two others. But […]
Puck possession helps predict playoff chances, analytics suggest
Springtime means different things in different NHL cities. In some cities, fans can begin to get comfortable with their shiny new trade deadline acquisitions – players intended to help them on their way to Lord Stanley’s coveted mug. In other cities, fans brace themselves for the inevitable end to the 18-wheeler’s freefall, and hope that […]
NHL’s draft lottery seems to help fight tanking
The season is approaching the three quarter mark, and two races are in full flight: the race to secure a playoff seed, and the race to secure a high draft pick. For fans of those teams clearly out of the former, losses are cheered perhaps more than wins as tanking is seen as the best […]
Dishonour for Connor: How the Lottery Has Affected Tanking
This week’s article in The Star looked at the effect that the draft lottery has had on the incentive for a team to intentionally try to be bad in order to get the top pick in the draft. The draft was instituted in 1963 as a way of sorting out how to bring amateur players […]
Sabres have best shot at Connor McDavid, analytics suggest
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 […]
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 […]
Shot Attempts Are Valuable Information
This week’s article in The Star looked at the predictive value of information embodied in a team’s points and in their possession metrics. In particular it showed that these two stats contained different kinds of information, so that when used together, predictive power is increased. I should begin by mentioning that the first draft of […]