What team leads the postseason in hits? Or how about shot blocking? Faceoffs?
by James Mirtle @ 9:46 PM
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A sportswriter at The Globe and Mail, James covers the NHL and the game of hockey. He is a member of the Professional Hockey Writers' Association, a senior editor with McKeen's Hockey and was the NHL network manager at SB Nation from 2008 to 2010. A graduate of Thompson Rivers and Ryerson universities, James grew up in Kamloops, B.C. — one of Canada's great hockey cities — and was a season ticket holder in the Blazers' glory years.
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7 Comments:
Most of those stats (particularly hits, giveaways and takeaways) are a joke as there is little or no consistency between game monitors at different arenas. Some of them are so out of whack that they are pretty much useless in raw form.
As opposed to cooked form?
I'm well aware of the limitations of the statistics, but with things like blocked shots being cited so often, I think there's some useful data there.
Well, not cooked form but bias reduced form if you attempt to determine amount of bias at each arena and then try to factor it out and you might get more reasonable results.
Blocked shots I haven't looked at for bias but I suspect they are fairly accurate as it is easier to determine if the shot was blocked or not. Either it is, or it isn't. A hit is more open for interpretation and thus much less reliable of a statistic. Was it a hit, just a bump or incidental contact?
I agree, blocked shots are more likely to be consistently applied, but the hits, takeaway, and giveaways data is so wildly reported that I've ceased working with them. I wonder who we'd contact at the NHL to ask about official scoring standards and what can be done to improve the situation...
As far as I know the NHL has contracted STATS Inc. to collect those stats so you could try complaining to both the NHL and STATS Inc. but I suspect you won't get anywhere. If anything the NHL is more likely to drop collecting those stats than put the effort and money into training the game monitors to make them more accurate.
THe NHL is unlikely to spend time training people. Stats, Inc, on the other hand, probably does. While they aren't my favorite data collection service (Baseball Info Solutions is very hard to top), they generally do decent work.
The thing I find most interesting about these stats, assuming you give them any credibility, is just how poorly correlated they all are with playoff success. This gets obscured since they are listed in descending order by total, which means that teams that have played the most games are going to be at the top simply because they've had more games to accumulate totals. Rank them on a per game basis, though, and they don't seem to provide much information about why teams are successful.
Caveat: Even the per game numbers are skewed. A rate stat really needs to be normalized to 60 minutes of play rather than 1 game, since a few long OT games will have the same effect as playing more games. That's not a complaint; I am very familiar with what a pain in the ass it is to try to hand collate a bunch of raw data. Just a comment.
No, you're right JMN, and that's a fair point. Does anyone know an easy way to get the total ice time played for all teams?
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