Where are the personality profiles for players?

[HugoSimon]

Personality will tell you an incredible amount of how people will perform in high performance competition. It seems obvious that there needs to be some record of stats following the behaviors of players is there anything that exists?

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[Bear of Bad News]

You should explain a bit more on what you're hoping to have accomplished here.

 

[Bear of Bad News]

Also, it feels like this statement:

Personality will tell you an incredible amount of how people will perform in high performance competition.

Is relying on a heavy amount of narrative bias, since by your own admission there isn't data to quantify whatever you're trying to exhibit:

It seems obvious that there needs to be some record of stats following the behaviors of players

 

[HugoSimon]

Also, it feels like this statement:



Is relying on a heavy amount of narrative bias, since by your own admission there isn't data to quantify whatever you're trying to exhibit:

It's all relative to the resolution of how that data is collected.

Personality is consistent across long periods of time. There's always gonna be a high error rate, but my guess is it correlates to behavior in such a way it's impossible to remove it from an equation.

Personality profiling is really useful in figuring out how people will perform in modern work environments. Environments that are far far harder to define than skating between nets.

Again I'm unsure of what I'm asking because I'm unsure of what exists.

To ignore personality seems absolutely absurd. I'm convinced it must have been done, I'm not that clever and it isn't a trivial thing.

It's gonna heavily correlate to the stability of players, their ability to adapt etc

Power play killing, drawing penalties, cohesion with new team mates, success when down points, ability to travel, ability to improve and the streakyness are all things heavily rooted in personality.

 

[Hockey Outsider]

I think the OP's idea might have some merit (even if it would be very difficult, in practice, to do any analysis).

My understanding (and take this with a grain of salt as I've never even taken a Psychology 101 course) is there are certain frameworks that allow you to describe someone's personality with a reasonable amount of precision. (One model that I'm aware of is the "OCEAN" or "five forces" model).

It's easy to imagine how some of these personality traits might be correlated with on-ice performance. A great clutch performer could conceivably rate low on the trait of neuroticism. A great penalty killer could conceivably rate high on the trait of conscientiousness.

I'm sure that teams are already doing psychological evaluations of their players, just as they'd do an annual physical. But in terms of doing any type of analysis with this - I don't see any possible way us (as fans) could collect this type of data. There's probably some interesting research that can be done here, but I can't envision any research that can be done beyond anecdotal case studies ("Joe Sakic comes across as confident and poised in his interviews, so it makes sense he scored so many overtime goals").

 

[Doctor No]

There's definitely something there - I remember Bill James suggesting this in at least one of his 1980s Baseball Abstracts (I think the 1985 one where he introduces the Brock-2 system, the premise of which is that it takes a baseball player's career to date and projects the remainder of his career). He suggested that you could feed in scouting report phrases such as "hustles", "contract dispute", "loves the night life" and use them to close the gap between his model and reality (for instance, does his projection model routinely underproject the careers of players who scout as "hustles"?).

I would start by looking at common projection models and finding players with significant residual components (players that models generally underestimate or overestimate), and then incorporate an NLP algorithm to convert scouting reports (or whatever you want to consider) into something that can be regressed with. I've attempted similar with my goaltending work, but there are too many other things that I find interesting and I set it aside for the time being.

 

[morehockeystats]

Personality will tell you an incredible amount of how people will perform in high performance competition. It seems obvious that there needs to be some record of stats following the behaviors of players is there anything that exists?

You can analyze the following traits:

• How similar the performances are from game to game
• How well a player does in the next game after a bad performance
• How well a player does following an exceeding performance
• How well a player does in regularly high pressure games (e.g. rivalry games)
• How well a player does in high stakes games
• How well a player does in money time
• How well a player does in garbage time

And so on. A lot of narratives are actually testable.
The Daniel Wagner's speech from VanHAC18 deals with related stuff.

 

[HugoSimon]

I think the OP's idea might have some merit (even if it would be very difficult, in practice, to do any analysis).

My understanding (and take this with a grain of salt as I've never even taken a Psychology 101 course) is there are certain frameworks that allow you to describe someone's personality with a reasonable amount of precision. (One model that I'm aware of is the "OCEAN" or "five forces" model).

It's easy to imagine how some of these personality traits might be correlated with on-ice performance. A great clutch performer could conceivably rate low on the trait of neuroticism. A great penalty killer could conceivably rate high on the trait of conscientiousness.

I'm sure that teams are already doing psychological evaluations of their players, just as they'd do an annual physical. But in terms of doing any type of analysis with this - I don't see any possible way us (as fans) could collect this type of data. There's probably some interesting research that can be done here, but I can't envision any research that can be done beyond anecdotal case studies ("Joe Sakic comes across as confident and poised in his interviews, so it makes sense he scored so many overtime goals").

The starting point would be dissecting interviews, etc of the more prominent players.

I'd argue this would likely end up being more of a for fun game for fans than anything else.

I do think this could be a way of bridging the conflict between the eye test and actual stats.

Reading a person's emotions on its own means nothing, but being able to chart it against real world penalties, ppks etc would seem to be something special.

The beauty of personality is that it appears to be relatively fixed across time, and in an environment like hockey it'd appear to be very very hard to hide your natural state for long.

 

[morehockeystats]

The starting point would be dissecting interviews, etc of the more prominent players.

I'd argue this would likely end up being more of a for fun game for fans than anything else.

I do think this could be a way of bridging the conflict between the eye test and actual stats.

Reading a person's emotions on its own means nothing, but being able to chart it against real world penalties, ppks etc would seem to be something special.

The beauty of personality is that it appears to be relatively fixed across time, and in an environment like hockey it'd appear to be very very hard to hide your natural state for long.

We can see enough examples of assholes, knights and nobodies among the top players to see that these kinds of personality traits do not really matter. Also Sidney Crosby is a fine example of a true knightly soul off the ice, but quite a jerk on the ice.

 

[HugoSimon]

We can see enough examples of assholes, knights and nobodies among the top players to see that these kinds of personality traits do not really matter.

I'm not sure you have a much of a point.

Are you saying a brad marchand and a Laine are interchangeable?

Also Sidney Crosby is a fine example of a true knightly soul off the ice, but quite a jerk on the ice.

That's not exactly how personality works.

Nice people can be mean, part of the issue is they burn out from the behavior, in contrast disagreeable people can have real issues with maintaining good working relationships with their teammates(aka P.K. Suban).

 

[morehockeystats]

I'm not sure you have a much of a point.

Are you saying a brad marchand and a Laine are interchangeable?




That's not exactly how personality works.

Nice people can be mean, part of the issue is they burn out from the behavior, in contrast disagreeable people can have real issues with maintaining good working relationships with their teammates(aka P.K. Suban).

The personalities of Patrik Laine and Brad Marchand do not weigh much in this question, I think, because their pure hockey value is so high.

The personality can work the other way around, where a jerk makes himself behave in front of the microphone, or off the ice in general "to maintain the brand", but let any brakes off on the ice. "Darkness of waters, thick cloud of the skies"...

I'll diverge into my favorite example area: chess. Among the pleiades of Soviet chess players in 1950-1980s there were types of truly disgusting, tolerable, amicable and knightly ones. Karpov and Kasparov were mixed. Korchnoi was a rare asshole, Spassky a true gentleman, Tal soul of any company, Petrosian a petty intrigue-maker. Go figure.

 

[HugoSimon]

The personalities of Patrik Laine and Brad Marchand do not weigh much in this question, I think, because their pure hockey value is so high.
.

I'm not sure how you can pretend personality is irrelevant when talking about one of the most inconsistent fins in the league.

The personality can work the other way around, where a jerk makes himself behave in front of the microphone, or off the ice in general "to maintain the brand", but let any brakes off on the ice. "Darkness of waters, thick cloud of the skies"...
.

I think you're misunderstanding what personality means.

It isn't your gut feeling about a person or how they've treated you.

It is one's internal monologue.

 

[morehockeystats]

I'm not sure how you can pretend personality is irrelevant when talking about one of the most inconsistent fins in the league.



I think you're misunderstanding what personality means.

It isn't your gut feeling about a person or how they've treated you.

It is one's internal monologue.

Last time I checked Patrik Laine hasn't a fin, for he isn't a fish. And a young boy still.

And I think that you just have rediscovered what's the problem with the term 'personality': how would you define it?
That's why the referenced quote.

 

[HugoSimon]

Last time I checked Patrik Laine hasn't a fin, for he isn't a fish. And a young boy still.

And I think that you just have rediscovered what's the problem with the term 'personality': how would you define it?
That's why the referenced quote.

I'm not defining it, professionals have and they've gone a long way to understanding it at a level that reaches into the very fabric of your brain.

 

[Mickey Marner]

NHL teams do a great deal of background checks and interviewing, the information gathered is just proprietary.

 

[jc17]

NHL teams do a great deal of background checks and interviewing, the information gathered is just proprietary.

We don't know how scientific it is though.

There are always stories of GMs or scouts really going after kids but I'm not sure their reaction tells us anything, or is at least proven to.