Yearly Archives: 2013

What’s the cost of icing the puck?

Following the 2004-2005 lockout, the NHL introduced a variety of rule changes intended to increase scoring and bring fans back to the rink. One of these changes which prevented a team that ices the puck from changing their defenders, was

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The Benefits of the 4-Forward Powerplay

On Friday night I wondered aloud why coaches don’t play a 3F/1D setup during overtime, given the unpredictable nature of the shootout and the single point they’d already guaranteed themselves. And so naturally, as I often do, I started to

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Bypassing the Shot Quality Argument: Were the 2012-2013 Leafs Lucky?

The true ability of the Toronto Maple Leafs seems to be the subject of never-ending debate in the hockey world. On the one hand, you’ve got the fancy stats crowd who insists that the incredibly high shooting percentages the Leafs

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Lucky or good: 2012-2013 Historical Comparables

The New Jersey Devils were the poster child for bad luck last year. In spite of putting up a 55.6 CF% in close situations, the Devils couldn’t seem to get the puck into their opponents net or to keep it

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Do defensemen play worse on their off-hand?

Steve Yzerman apparently has a problem. A right-handed defenseman problem.  The former Red Wing and current Team Canada general manager has too many talented right-handed defensemen at his disposal and is now stuck deciding between sending out a balanced lineup

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Examining Rebound Control

Earlier this week, Rob Pettapiece had an interesting article over at NHL Numbers on rebound control, where he looked at the percentage of shots a goaltender faced that resulted in a rebound (which he defined as a shot within the

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Posted in Goaltending

Shots Against and Even Strength Shooting Percentage

I had a discussion on twitter the other day about the relationship between shots against and save percentage. I wrote earlier about how on an individual game basis, save percentage tends to increase as the number of shots against increases.

Posted in Goaltending

GAA- Continued

I’ve added full lists of season-by-season and all-time (since 2007) GAA- leaders here and here respectively. The season-by-season list contains all goalies who played a minimum of 33% of the games during a given season, while the all-time list contains

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Adjusting GAA for Shots Against

Over my last few posts I’ve been looking into the idea of game level goaltending performances and adjusting goalie evaluation metrics to account for the number of shots against a goalie faces. One of the issues I have with Save

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Round 2 Prediction Updates

Updated playoff odds based on our game prediction model are given in the table below. For those of you unfamiliar with the model, it uses each team’s Fenwick Close, Regressed Shooting Percentage and Regressed Save Percentage to predict single game

Posted in Predictions