NHL players' peaks

[Bear of Bad News]

(While I'm writing, I still wish that statistical analysis could focus more upon getting knowledge about things that are easy to measure (like in this topic), and use that knowledge to build further knowledge on. Instead, much focus is being spent on trying to quantify quite difficult things that depends on many factors working together. For example, +/- is affected by lots of things, like zone starts, strength of teammates, strength of opponents, strength of own goaltending, etc. For +/-, a good approach would be to frist try to determine how much goaltending affects it. By doing that, one should for example look at save percentage and try to figure out how much that is affected by the skaters' defensive skill, etc. Even that is difficult. I think the key is to try to gain knowledge about bit by bit, and then use that knowledge to learn about other bits, and so on... For example, how much is a offensive zone start on average "worth"?
Sorry for getting off-topic.)

Agreed - I've been trying to do this a bit with goaltenders, but also to do it in a way that it could also apply to prior seasons and minor/junior leagues (since my ultimate goal is to predict future performance).

That's the hard part in my mind, and it seems like we agree on that (given that you were writing this while I was responding above ).

 

[plusandminus]

Agreed - I've been trying to do this a bit with goaltenders, but also to do it in a way that it could also apply to prior seasons and minor/junior leagues (since my ultimate goal is to predict future performance).

That's the hard part in my mind, and it seems like we agree on that (given that you were writing this while I was responding above ).

Yes, I think we mostly agree.

You mention the minors, and I think including them in the statistical analysis adds information. When looking into past seasons, we can likely tell if a player's lack of NHL games during a season is because of injury or because he wasn't good enough.
It's a fairly simple rule: If a player spends time in the minors, he is probably of borderline NHL skill. Looking at past seasons, one can often see rosters where the star player(s) on the team was surrounded by players (including linemates) who were borderline NHLers, which might help us in the analysis of the star player in question.