Ongoing Stats and Analytical Discussion Thread: Battle of the Defense

NJDevs26

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Probably a lot of drafting is luck since it's based mostly on projection though there's some small weight I think to being more prepared, thorough and taking fewer nutty chances on questionable characters. Some organizations like the old Blue Jackets or Senators never seem to hit on even a super high pick. Player development is just as paramount as actual drafting (if not more so) though. Would a guy like Nail Yakupov actually have become a good player outside of the Edmonton pit? That's probably more of a discussion for another thread though since there's no real way to quantify how much of drafting is luck and how important player development is.
 

devilsblood

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What are you talking about? :laugh:

I think you might have missed the point of my post.

It was a bit of an aside. But I'm basically saying the results of coin flips, while unpredictable(at least to current human abilties), are not luck driven. They are physics driven.

In general I am just further degrading this idea of luck driven results.
 

devilsblood

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What makes a better scout? I think most scouts in the NHL probably have fairly equal abilities. Some might be worse than others, but I don't think there's a Wayne Gretzky of the scouting world out there.

Besides, look at how NHL teams perform at the draft. There is almost no consistency to it. The Devils scouting was amazing in the 90s. Then it sucked in the 00s. And then got a bit better in the early to mid 10s.

Did Conte suddenly lose his magical scouting powers and then regain them?

Do we think Conte is a 100% static entity? Of coarse he changes over time. People are constantly changing, organizational philosophies change, the game itself changes, the players change, heck the scouts themselves change.

Compare to a baseball player, in a groove one week, hitting balls all over the place, can't make contact the next. Did that player magically lose his hitting powers? Well to an extent yeah, but there are numerous other factors involved as well.
 

NJDevs26

Once upon a time...
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To be fair I don't think Conte changed...the game did though. To keep with the theme of the thread, not adjusting to the game's changes quick enough decreases the odds of good drafting even more.

What makes a better scout? I think most scouts in the NHL probably have fairly equal abilities. Some might be worse than others, but I don't think there's a Wayne Gretzky of the scouting world out there.

I think whoever the overseas scout is for Detroit is pretty close to that, Hakan Andersson I think is his name. I saw an article on him a while back how the Wings discovered so many gems in low rounds overseas.
 
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Triumph

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To be fair I don't think Conte changed...the game did though. To keep with the theme of the thread, not adjusting to the game's changes quick enough decreases the odds of good drafting even more.



I think whoever the overseas scout is for Detroit is pretty close to that, Hakan Andersson I think is his name. I saw an article on him a while back how the Wings discovered so many gems in low rounds overseas.

And yet the Wings keep missing in the late rounds lately, or at least they've certainly stopped unearthing gems overseas. Nyquist was the last Swedish pick to have an impact and that was 8 drafts ago.
 

MadDevil

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Every team has ups and downs in drafting. We were spoiled by having such good drafting through much of the 90's that helped us win 3 Cups, and then it kind of averaged out with some bad drafting through much of the 2000's (of course drafting later for much of that time played a part of it as well). And unlike an LA, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Edmonton, etc. we didn't have long stretches of futility that allowed us to pickup generational or elite talents. Detroit really is the outlier in terms of picking up such good players in the later rounds for years. I think they were also ahead of the curve in European scouting, but now other teams have caught up to them and they don't have that advantage anymore.

Anyway, back to the argument over what "luck" really means.:sarcasm:
 

RememberTheName

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I am not really that into analytics so when I was just randomly scrolling around a stat website, I happened to come across a stat Corsi Save Percentage (C sv%) and noticed that Kyle Palmieri was 5th in the league and Ben Lovejoy was 19th. Palmieri was also 1st is C Sv% Rel and Lovejoy was 6th. I was curious to find out what this actually meant, as I don't use stat websites too much and only focus mainly on the basics, including corsi and fenwick, and pretty much the basics. Any help would be appreciated, as I just found this a little bit interesting
 

Bleedred

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I am not really that into analytics so when I was just randomly scrolling around a stat website, I happened to come across a stat Corsi Save Percentage (C sv%) and noticed that Kyle Palmieri was 5th in the league and Ben Lovejoy was 19th. Palmieri was also 1st is C Sv% Rel and Lovejoy was 6th. I was curious to find out what this actually meant, as I don't use stat websites too much and only focus mainly on the basics, including corsi and fenwick, and pretty much the basics. Any help would be appreciated, as I just found this a little bit interesting

I believe what you're referring to is Devils goalies even strength save percentage when Lovejoy and Palmieri are on the ice. Lovejoy has on ice save percentage of .942, which is absolutely amazing and probably makes Lovejoy look a lot better than he is.
 

Triumph

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I am not really that into analytics so when I was just randomly scrolling around a stat website, I happened to come across a stat Corsi Save Percentage (C sv%) and noticed that Kyle Palmieri was 5th in the league and Ben Lovejoy was 19th. Palmieri was also 1st is C Sv% Rel and Lovejoy was 6th. I was curious to find out what this actually meant, as I don't use stat websites too much and only focus mainly on the basics, including corsi and fenwick, and pretty much the basics. Any help would be appreciated, as I just found this a little bit interesting

Bleedred is correct. Stats people have found that this sort of thing really isn't a talent - defenseman and forwards alike show almost no ability to consistently elevate their goalie's save percentage. We should expect Palmieri and Lovejoy to be closer to the league average next season.
 

devilsblood

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Bleedred is correct. Stats people have found that this sort of thing really isn't a talent - defenseman and forwards alike show almost no ability to consistently elevate their goalie's save percentage. We should expect Palmieri and Lovejoy to be closer to the league average next season.

This guy is suggesting otherwise.

http://hockeyanalysis.com/2017/01/29/offensive-players-negatively-impact-save-percentage/

I also remember an article regarding Larsson and his high on ice save % last year. That guy suggested it might be a thing as well.
 

CHIP72

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Mar 16, 2013
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Bleedred is correct. Stats people have found that this sort of thing really isn't a talent - defenseman and forwards alike show almost no ability to consistently elevate their goalie's save percentage. We should expect Palmieri and Lovejoy to be closer to the league average next season.

The way to look at this is to see what Palmieri, Lovejoy, and others have done over the course of their careers. If certain guys are consistently above or below average, the statistic may have player evaluation value.
 

VoidCreature

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I can't find a good site for tracking how good certain defenders are at supressing high danger scoring chances. Supressing shots is one thing, if players have no trouble cutting in front of the goalie when a particular defender is on the ice more goals are going to go in.

My eyes tell me Lovejoy is good at protecting the house, but I'd rather have some statistical evidence to back that up. If it's true then that's why coaches love him so much. Same for guys like Salvador and Volchenkov, who I think were underrated around here.
 

VoidCreature

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I'm very far from an opponent of Corsi, I absolutely love it and have a great amount of respect for how useful it is, I've benefitted greatly from it in playoff brackets.

But it does have a key weakness I wish someone could address. Both Corsi and Fenwick see all shots or shot attempts as being created equally. A flubbed shot attempt from the point and a shot from the slot after a cross crease pass are both only counted as one attempt, yet clearly one was more dangerous than the other.
 

Triumph

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I'm very far from an opponent of Corsi, I absolutely love it and have a great amount of respect for how useful it is, I've benefitted greatly from it in playoff brackets.

But it does have a key weakness I wish someone could address. Both Corsi and Fenwick see all shots or shot attempts as being created equally. A flubbed shot attempt from the point and a shot from the slot after a cross crease pass are both only counted as one attempt, yet clearly one was more dangerous than the other.

The reason Fenwick and Corsi are used is because they give us the largest sample size possible. So sure, there's some nonsense counted in there, but many shots on goal have little to no chance of going in the net either - it's a sport where around 9% of the shots on goal are goals. In addition, people have counted scoring chances for ages and for the most part they have mirrored Fenwick and Corsi.

The danger with something like high-danger scoring chances is A: the definition of them - as you narrow your sample size, NHL scorers are bound to miss more important events (including goals), whereas missing individual Fenwicks and Corsis is less important and B: the repeatability of them. Part of why we like Fenwick and Corsi is that over smaller samples, it's more reliable at predicting future goal rates than goal rates themselves. If high-danger scoring chances show similar randomness to goal rates, they're not particularly useful other than measuring past performance. I haven't really seen anyone take a look at high-danger scoring rates yet.
 

VoidCreature

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The reason Fenwick and Corsi are used is because they give us the largest sample size possible. So sure, there's some nonsense counted in there, but many shots on goal have little to no chance of going in the net either - it's a sport where around 9% of the shots on goal are goals. In addition, people have counted scoring chances for ages and for the most part they have mirrored Fenwick and Corsi.

The danger with something like high-danger scoring chances is A: the definition of them - as you narrow your sample size, NHL scorers are bound to miss more important events (including goals), whereas missing individual Fenwicks and Corsis is less important and B: the repeatability of them. Part of why we like Fenwick and Corsi is that over smaller samples, it's more reliable at predicting future goal rates than goal rates themselves. If high-danger scoring chances show similar randomness to goal rates, they're not particularly useful other than measuring past performance. I haven't really seen anyone take a look at high-danger scoring rates yet.

Interesting. Still, if two Corsi juggernauts go at each other, I'd like to have as many ways as possible to determine who's more likely to prevail.

Part of the reason I picked Pittsburgh last year was that they controlled the most high danger scoring chances in the league after the trade deadline on top of their strength in corsi. The other two teams who did that were San Jose and LA.

Without War-on-ice, though, I'm not sure what my approach is going to be this year if no other sites track scoring chances.
 

AfroThunder396

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If you guys are interested in advanced stats you should follow Micah Blake McCurdy on twitter. His data visualization work is phenomenal.
 

Davegarri

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What're your guys' feelings on those hero charts? I'm not too crazy into advanced stats to know if they're good or not
 

AfroThunder396

[citation needed]
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What're your guys' feelings on those hero charts? I'm not too crazy into advanced stats to know if they're good or not

They're alright, but pretty useless without context. If I were to just pull out Defenseman A from Team 1 and compare him with Defenseman B from Team 2 there's really nothing you can gain from looking at a HERO chart. People think they're the end all of stats, they're really just a quick fix for casual fans who don't understand math.

A lot of times player possession stats end up being driven by team possession stats, not the other way around. On a HERO chart a guy like Henrique has 4th line possession numbers - obviously he's not a 4th liner, but our shots for/shots against numbers are so bad that anyone who gets a lot of minutes on this team is getting bombarded with negative possession. Likewise, a guy like Brandon Dubinsky, who is a pretty average middle six player, has monster 1st line possession numbers because he plays on a team with absurd shot differential. You have to be really careful about comparing guys on different teams.

They're really there for confirmation bias. If you think a guy is good and the HERO chart agrees, then your eye test was probably right. But when people just post them in threads with no context it's really annoying - a lot of things factor into a HERO chart that actually aren't displayed on a HERO chart.
 

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