Doctor No
Registered User
(I did this for a thread in the Leafs' forum, and thought that it might start conversation here as well...)
How do scoring levels change from month to month?
Here's something quick-and-dirty that I pulled from the game log data on my website (http://hockeygoalies.org).
These include only NHL regular season games, and do not include empty-net goals. I wanted to see if goals-against averages increased as the season progressed. As you can see from the first graph, there is an effect (if not too big of one).
Each line represents one season, which makes the graph a bit sloppy.
Of course, GAA is the product of S/60 (shots faced per game) and (one minus) SV% (save percentage on shots faced), so I did the same thing with those statistics to see which was driving it. It appears that the save percentage increase is what's causing it (graphs two and three). Shots faced actually increase slightly as the season goes along, but save percentages increase a little bit (more) as the season goes along (as goaltenders get better?). Both defense and goaltending rely upon rhythm and timing, so this seems plausible.
Actually, if you ignore October (which is really what we care about here) and April (which is a comparatively small sample), it's a pretty flat pattern:
Month
|
10
|
11
|
12
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
4
S/60|26.0|26.1|26.1|26.2|26.3|26.1|26.3
SV%|0.897|0.900|0.899|0.899|0.899|0.900|0.905
GAA|2.98|2.91|2.94|2.93|2.95|2.90|2.76
This would obviously need to be done more rigorously for it to hold water (just to ask one question - do "top" goalies play a greater share of games in some months, and does that hide some other effects?). Anyhow...
How do scoring levels change from month to month?
Here's something quick-and-dirty that I pulled from the game log data on my website (http://hockeygoalies.org).
These include only NHL regular season games, and do not include empty-net goals. I wanted to see if goals-against averages increased as the season progressed. As you can see from the first graph, there is an effect (if not too big of one).
Each line represents one season, which makes the graph a bit sloppy.
Of course, GAA is the product of S/60 (shots faced per game) and (one minus) SV% (save percentage on shots faced), so I did the same thing with those statistics to see which was driving it. It appears that the save percentage increase is what's causing it (graphs two and three). Shots faced actually increase slightly as the season goes along, but save percentages increase a little bit (more) as the season goes along (as goaltenders get better?). Both defense and goaltending rely upon rhythm and timing, so this seems plausible.
Actually, if you ignore October (which is really what we care about here) and April (which is a comparatively small sample), it's a pretty flat pattern:
S/60|26.0|26.1|26.1|26.2|26.3|26.1|26.3
SV%|0.897|0.900|0.899|0.899|0.899|0.900|0.905
GAA|2.98|2.91|2.94|2.93|2.95|2.90|2.76
This would obviously need to be done more rigorously for it to hold water (just to ask one question - do "top" goalies play a greater share of games in some months, and does that hide some other effects?). Anyhow...
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