The analytical Era has started: Are the Canucks ahead or Behind the curve?

[Barney Gumble]

Ballard though I really have wonder what was going on there. His corsi numbers have never been great and are often weak. The year before we traded for him he posted a 42.3% corsi at ES. That is about as anti-advanced stats as you can get. Poster boy for someone you don't get based on advanced stats.

Ask Rick Bowness.

 

[Scurr]

Booth has good analytics - relatively speaking he is a poster boy but he fails to turn the numbers into results.

Ballard though I really have wonder what was going on there. His corsi numbers have never been great and are often weak. The year before we traded for him he posted a 42.3% corsi at ES. That is about as anti-advanced stats as you can get. Poster boy for someone you don't get based on advanced stats.

http://www.behindthenet.ca/nhl_stat...3+5+4+6+7+8+13+14+29+30+32+33+34+45+46+63+67#

I think the argument was that he had played well the year before... which is the problem with someone like Dave Nonis and advanced stats. It still comes down to someone taking the information and making a good decision based on it.

 

[Wisp]

I remember Thomas Drance looking at Ballard and determining he was doing something weird with zone exits that. He was absolutely buried in the defensive end, on a bad team, and still putting up good points.

Ballard was apparently a Gilman initiative, and he likely thought his strengths would improve his possession numbers with different usage.

Bad possession, good points, strong possession track record previously. Weird that the same sort of trends present when they got Ballard are the same ones present when they got rid of Garrison. Perhaps Gilman was wary of making that gamble twice?

 

[Lonny Bohonos]

They should invent something called the win/loss record and a point system to track that, I heard it works pretty well for other competitive sports.

Cant we just simplify it and call it the Stanley Cup.

 

[LeftCoast]

I remember Thomas Drance looking at Ballard and determining he was doing something weird with zone exits. He was absolutely buried in the defensive end, on a bad team, and still putting up good points.

I think that as a very good skater, Ballard preferred to skate the puck out of the zone. Alain Vigneault / Rick Bowness wanted their bottom pair defense to ALWAYS pass it out or clear it off the boards. As far as I could see, that was the major problem with Ballard in Vancouver.

 

[Wisp]

I think that as a very good skater, Ballard preferred to skate the puck out of the zone. Alain Vigneault / Rick Bowness wanted their bottom pair defense to ALWAYS pass it out or clear it off the boards. As far as I could see, that was the major problem with Ballard in Vancouver.

Was it because he was bottom pairing or because he was a possession anchor? Or was it a chicken and egg thing, with insistence of chipping it out turning him a possession anchor?

Hard to tell with AV. Sometimes he was really progressive, others he was so cautious you wanted to scream.

 

[Scurr]

Was it because he was bottom pairing or because he was a possession anchor? Or was it a chicken and egg thing, with insistence of chipping it out turning him a possession anchor?

Hard to tell with AV. Sometimes he was really progressive, others he was so cautious you wanted to scream.

AV wanted his defensemen to join the rush but not lead it. Move it up quickly and then join the rush. The idea being that it doesn't allow the defensive team time to setup and it makes it difficult for forwards to attack the offensive zone with speed when the defenseman lugs it all the way. Ballard isn't a good passer though, so he had trouble when he was suppose to be the guy moving it. When he played with Tanev, he was able to defer the puck moving to him and then be the guy that joined the rush. That worked. When he played with Alberts, neither of them could get them out of the zone, so there was no joining the rush. That didn't work. Ballard was pretty good at carrying it out... but that wasn't the game plan.

AV is probably more progressive then people think. You call it cautious, he calls it playing the percentages.

 

[me2]

http://www.behindthenet.ca/nhl_stat...3+5+4+6+7+8+13+14+29+30+32+33+34+45+46+63+67#

I think the argument was that he had played well the year before... which is the problem with someone like Dave Nonis and advanced stats. It still comes down to someone taking the information and making a good decision based on it.

That year was the anomaly though in terms of corsi he's bottom half most years. He should have been singled out as a "do not want" yet he passed some scout's "eyeball test".

 

[me2]

AV wanted his defensemen to join the rush but not lead it. Move it up quickly and then join the rush. The idea being that it doesn't allow the defensive team time to setup and it makes it difficult for forwards to attack the offensive zone with speed when the defenseman lugs it all the way. Ballard isn't a good passer though, so he had trouble when he was suppose to be the guy moving it. When he played with Tanev, he was able to defer the puck moving to him and then be the guy that joined the rush. That worked. When he played with Alberts, neither of them could get them out of the zone, so there was no joining the rush. That didn't work. Ballard was pretty good at carrying it out... but that wasn't the game plan.

AV is probably more progressive then people think. You call it cautious, he calls it playing the percentages.

Ballard rushed with tunnel vision. It made him easier to focus in on because teams were less worried about the pass. Someone like Ehrhoff would kill you with the pass if you overcommitted to stopping him carrying the puck.

I really wanted to like Ballard and see him given more of a shot but at the end of the day he wasn't good enough all round to overcome the weaknesses in his game.

 

[mangdas]

I'm pretty sure we're ahead of the curve or at least no further behind than any other top NHL team. Canucks were the first to introduce that sleep schedule were they not?

 

[Scurr]

That year was the anomaly though in terms of corsi he's bottom half most years. He should have been singled out as a "do not want" yet he passed some scout's "eyeball test".

But that's the thing... there were some pretty knowledgeable posters on this forum making corsi arguments for Ballard. I said he looked like Kevin Bieksa without the offense.

 

[Scurr]

Ballard rushed with tunnel vision. It made him easier to focus in on because teams were less worried about the pass. Someone like Ehrhoff would kill you with the pass if you overcommitted to stopping him carrying the puck.

Ehrhoff isn't the kind of player that needs the puck on his stick. He wanted to draw guys to him, move the puck, skate to open ice. If you want a guy that can rush the puck up the ice and distribute it in the offensive end, there are a lot better options then Ehrhoff. That style fit him really well imo.

 

[denkiteki]

I would say behind the curve. Seems like Benning is more of the old school type and more willing to go with gut feeling. That doesn't mean he won't use some of the data to support his decision but he probably won't rely on it nearly as much as other GMs.

 

[Jay Cee]

I don't know how it has gotten now that it is all about how pious everyone must be about "analytics". You are either completely 100% in, or you're with the evil doers.

Anyway, wasn't Gillis saying that moneyball was cool before most GMs? We have been doing this for years and have department dedicated to it if you believe past management. I don't understand how the leafs sign this young guy who is into numbers and all of a sudden it is a brainwave that no one has thought of.

 

[Pip]

I'm not sure how to answer this considering that not many teams release how much exactly they use advanced stats, so it's hard to get an average. I know that Gillis appeared to be at the forefront of moneyball, but there's really no way to know.

 

[F A N]

I think the Canucks are ahead rather than behind the curve. The question is whether Linden and Benning will continue to utilize and trust the results of their analytical work. The latest example of Gillis making use of analytics was when he established a new chain of command based on regions for the draft and identified the WHL, OHL, and USA as the three main areas of focus after their research and analytical results suggested there were trends in terms of where the players came from and the best place to get players from.

Didn't analytics bring up Keith Ballard, David Booth, Marco Sturm, etc?

I think Eric Crawford is responsible for most of the Florida acquisitions.

 

[SighReally]

thor was bad because its an answer to a question that nobody asked. any attempt at making The Holy Stat belies a fundamental misunderstanding of why anyone would approach hockey with analytics in the first place. honestly, the only people that seem to believe in Unified Stat Theory are dinosaurs like simmons or whatever that don't understand them in the first place

like you can point out many methodological flaws, and you're completely right, but more fundamentally when presented with a stat like thor, we should be asking: "why do we care?"

The nature of hockey and its players obviously makes calculating a "Unified Stat Theory" number unfeasible; there's just too many variables and a large degree of subjectivity in approaching the game of hockey (i.e. identifying and quantifying areas of the game such as "defensive play"). In that, I agree with you; I just wanted to point out the various flaws that THOR has because it seems a lot of people misunderstand THOR that it's a damning nail in the coffin (well it seemed like that on HFBoards anyways).

I believe that an academic approach, meaning a proper investigation into a problem, is good for many areas of life that we may not consider in the beginning such as sports. I am always supportive of new methodology in evaluating players and the game and believe that a greater and proper application of statistics and modeling will give a team an edge in play though obviously things such as cultivating a winning atmosphere, while not quantifiable, are still important in something that involves human emotions and motivation.

 

[DadBod]

#FancyStats are good and all but until it's a proven winner it's really just another stat. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. So far we haven't seen an NHL team put together a bunch of "money ball" & #FancyStats players and win a cup, until then let's not get too excited.

 

[me2]

This is literally the posterchild post for someone who doesn't understand what advanced stats actually entail.

#fancystats #sorrynotsorry #yolo

It also assumes some of the recent cup winners aren't into stats.

 

[BeardyCanuck03]

#FancyStats are good and all but until it's a proven winner it's really just another stat. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. So far we haven't seen an NHL team put together a bunch of "money ball" & #FancyStats players and win a cup, until then let's not get too excited.

Chicago and LA are built around having a strong puck possession game, which is what a lot of the advance stats are measuring (Corsi/fenwick). The top teams are into hockey analytics in one way or another. This summer was really the first time teams advertised they hired people to do it.

Look back at the Canucks lead up to he cup run. They were using zone starts.

I think the era of analytics is misleading because teams have been using them for a for years now. I think this is the watershed moment though.

 

[BobbyJazzLegs]

#FancyStats are good and all but until it's a proven winner it's really just another stat. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. So far we haven't seen an NHL team put together a bunch of "money ball" & #FancyStats players and win a cup, until then let's not get too excited.

In the cap era you effectively have to anyway.

 

[BobbyJazzLegs]

Chicago and LA are built around having a strong puck possession game, which is what a lot of the advance stats are measuring (Corsi/fenwick). The top teams are into hockey analytics in one way or another. This summer was really the first time teams advertised they hired people to do it.

Look back at the Canucks lead up to he cup run. They were using zone starts.

I think the era of analytics is misleading because teams have been using them for a for years now. I think this is the watershed moment though.

The Leafs had to make a fuss about it. Last season they were lambasted for their terrible possession numbers from all corners.

But of course if something happens in the Center of the Universe...

 

[Hollywood Burrows]

Obviously we're all just chasing shadows here.... some rather credulous people seem to think the Canucks have a thriving analytics department, despite the fact that we've never heard anything meaningful about it (it doesn't exist imo).

I frankly don't think the current management team has any interest in the new forms of analysis. I don't think they really know what they are. The few comments from Linden and Benningtons on this matter have been profoundly ignorant. This summer is the first time a lot of this information has moved off the internet and into the media. I don't think Benningtons reads the internet regularly, certainly not the blogs and comment sections that drove these ideas.

Not to open a can of worms, but if the Canucks were serious about analytics they would not be doing what they've been doing this summer. Nick Bonino: shooting % outlier with poor WOWYs. Ryan Miller: overrated star goalie with a middling sv%. Derek Dorsett: intangible-laden plug who spends all game chasing the puck around his own end but provides "grit".

Safe to say this club is going in an old-school, anti-analytics direction. I don't think anyone who understands the new wave of internet-driven analytics would say the Canucks are ahead of that curve. The dark ages approach might succeed, it might not. Personally I find it disappointing, and would rather the Canucks succeed using a progressive approach.

 

[The Stig]

Obviously we're all just chasing shadows here.... some rather credulous people seem to think the Canucks have a thriving analytics department, despite the fact that we've never heard anything meaningful about it (it doesn't exist imo).

I frankly don't think the current management team has any interest in the new forms of analysis. I don't think they really know what they are. The few comments from Linden and Benningtons on this matter have been profoundly ignorant. This summer is the first time a lot of this information has moved off the internet and into the media. I don't think Benningtons reads the internet regularly, certainly not the blogs and comment sections that drove these ideas.

Not to open a can of worms, but if the Canucks were serious about analytics they would not be doing what they've been doing this summer. Nick Bonino: shooting % outlier with poor WOWYs. Ryan Miller: overrated star goalie with a middling sv%. Derek Dorsett: intangible-laden plug who spends all game chasing the puck around his own end but provides "grit".

Safe to say this club is going in an old-school, anti-analytics direction. I don't think anyone who understands the new wave of internet-driven analytics would say the Canucks are ahead of that curve. The dark ages approach might succeed, it might not. Personally I find it disappointing, and would rather the Canucks succeed using a progressive approach.

"That's a huge part of the game. And Laurence has done a great job with this (him and Jonathan Wall), I believe we're cutting edge when it comes to analytics. Those are tools that our coaches will use, but I think in anything there is not an end-all, be-all. It's not all about analytics, it's a piece of the puzzle. You can use it to help your team, to help pre-scout, to see trends. It's become a part of the game, but at the end of the day it's another tool to help you assess your club."

Source

Doesn't sound like anti-analytics to me. Just sounds like they're using it as a part of the puzzle. Which is where it should be used.

 

[mrmyheadhurts]

Obviously we're all just chasing shadows here.... some rather credulous people seem to think the Canucks have a thriving analytics department, despite the fact that we've never heard anything meaningful about it (it doesn't exist imo).

I frankly don't think the current management team has any interest in the new forms of analysis. I don't think they really know what they are. The few comments from Linden and Benningtons on this matter have been profoundly ignorant. This summer is the first time a lot of this information has moved off the internet and into the media. I don't think Benningtons reads the internet regularly, certainly not the blogs and comment sections that drove these ideas.

Not to open a can of worms, but if the Canucks were serious about analytics they would not be doing what they've been doing this summer. Nick Bonino: shooting % outlier with poor WOWYs. Ryan Miller: overrated star goalie with a middling sv%. Derek Dorsett: intangible-laden plug who spends all game chasing the puck around his own end but provides "grit".

Safe to say this club is going in an old-school, anti-analytics direction. I don't think anyone who understands the new wave of internet-driven analytics would say the Canucks are ahead of that curve. The dark ages approach might succeed, it might not. Personally I find it disappointing, and would rather the Canucks succeed using a progressive approach.

Just an awful post with zero substance or evidence to back up any of your claims. Just a supreme example of intellectual dishonesty. Chasing shadows indeed.