Forecasting players' career stats

[Sidney the Kidney]

Overall good stuff, but the late career stuff (ie. players when they're 31 and beyond) seem to almost universally expect dramatic drop off in production for guys who, up until that point, were putting up top 10 or better production league-wide.

I know that injuries seem to be the biggest culprit, but at the same time if you look at most of the "elite" or "generational" players from the past, they were very productive into their mid to late 30s. I see no reason why guys like Crosby, McDavid, Ovechkin, and Malkin wouldn't be the same way.

IMO, one major flaw as the model currently is built is too much expectation for injury and too much reliance on comparing these "generational" types to peers who were more in the good to very good range.

 

[Hockey Outsider]

I don't think I ever wrote back to @Zuluss re his thoughtful comments.

I think the biggest takeaway for me is it was probably inappropriate to apply the model to a player currently in his 30's. The "input" players have a wide range of career arcs. Most of them had long, full careers (Gretkzy, Jagr, Messier, Sakic, etc) - but the model also implicitly assumes that there's a chance that the player ends up burning out young like Jason Allison, Barry Pederson or (especially) Jimmy Carson.

I think that approach generally makes sense. We don't know for sure what will happen with, say, Nathan MacKinnon. I think it's highly unlikely he'll age like Jimmy Carson - but it's still within the realm of possibility.

In the case of an established player like Alex Ovechkin - we know that's not going to happen. There's zero chance that his career path will be like Allison's (or Pederson's, or Carson's), because he's already playing well past the age at which they retired.

If I were to forecast Ovechkin's career arc (a challenging task - he's practically unprecedented as a goal-scorer this late in his career), I'd need a separate set of input players - excluding those who retired before age 35.

What does this all mean? The case studies that I did for McDavid, Matthews, Kovalchuk (hypothetical - had he not left the NHL), MacKinnon and Pastrnak are probably valid. Maybe Stamkos too. The ones I did for Crosby, Ovechkin and Malkin clearly aren't. As I said in the first post, I'm not taking this forecast system too seriously - but I figured that this "product recall" was worth disclosing.

(Now that I've written this post, I'm pretty sure I wrote this response to Zuluss elsewhere - not sure if I posted it in another thread or not. But I figured it makes sense to post it here, either way).