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Ecw Press - Rob Vollman

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224 pages

English

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With every passing season, statistical analysis is playing an ever-increasing role in how hockey is played and covered. Knowledge of the underlying numbers can help fans stretch their enjoyment of the game. Acting as an invaluable supplement to traditional analysis, Stat Shot: A Fan's Guide to Hockey Analytics can be used to test the validity of conventional wisdom and to gain insight into what teams are doing behind the scenes or maybe what they should be doing! Inspired by Bill James's Baseball Abstract, Rob Vollman has written a timeless reference of the mainstream applications and limitations of hockey analytics. With over 300 pages of fresh analysis, it includes a guide to the basics, how to place stats into context, how to translate data from one league to another, the most comprehensive glossary of hockey statistics, and more. Whether A Fan's Guide to Hockey Analytics is used as a primer for today s new statistics, as a refere

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	18 octobre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773052502
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Stat Shot
A Fan’s Guide to Hockey Analytics
ROB VOLLMAN

Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Hockey Stats 101
Team Stats
Individual Player Stats
Goals Created
Goaltenders
Closing Thoughts
Who Is the Most Valuable Goalie?
Projecting the Next Season
Adjusting for Age
When Do Careers End?
Converting to Goals and Dollars
Results
Closing Thoughts
How Can We Compare a Player’s Stats Between Leagues?
Background
Prospects
Ontario Hockey League
Western Hockey League
Quebec Major Junior Hockey League
Western Collegiate Hockey Association
National Collegiate Hockey Conference
Big Ten
Central Collegiate Hockey Association
ECAC Hockey
Hockey East
Veterans
Kontinental Hockey League
American Hockey League
Swedish Hockey League
Finland SM-liiga
Switzerland NLA
Other Leagues
Closing Thoughts
Can a Goalie’s Stats Be Compared Between Leagues?
Closing Thoughts
How Can Stats Be Placed in Context?
Simplified Player Usage Charts
The 2010–11 Vancouver Canucks
The 2000–01 Colorado Avalanche
The 2014–15 Frolunda HC
The 1976–77 Montreal Canadiens
New Developments in Visualizations
Closing Thoughts
Who Is the Best Women’s Hockey Player?
The Subjective View
The World Championship
Translating Data from Other Leagues
North American Professional Leagues
U Sports
U.S. College Hockey
European Leagues
Closing Thoughts
Who Has the Best Coaching Staff?
Setting Expectations
How Valuable Are Coaches?
Outside the NHL
American Hockey League
Canadian Hockey League
U.S. College Hockey
ECHL
Top Coaches Outside the NHL
Looking at the Entire Staff
Closing Thoughts
Are There Careers in Hockey Analytics?
Manual Trackers
Data Scientists
Programmers
Career Advice
Closing Thoughts
Questions and Answers
Which Is Better, a Penalty Shot or a Power Play?
When Should Teams Pull the Goalie?
Will Ovechkin Catch Gretzky?
How Can the NHL Boost Scoring?
What’s the Key Stat for Individual Players?
Super Glossary
Conclusion
About the Author
Copyright

Foreword
by Craig Custance
NHL insider, editor-in-chief of The Athletic Detroit , and author of Behind the Bench: Inside the Minds of Hockey’s Greatest Coaches
Detroit, Michigan
It was a room full of people at one of the largest analytics conferences in the world. On stage, there was a nice mix of traditional hockey voices and those knee-deep in analytics. Everything was in place for an informative session on hockey analytics and how they should best be used, and for a good 10, maybe 15 minutes that’s exactly what the audience received.
But slowly, as the session continued, the conversation strayed from analytics and into a general hockey question-and-answer session. When a panellist started talking about the benefits of the larger European ice versus North American ice, my hope of getting a substantial lesson in analytics was gone. Years ago, this was how it often went.
There’s a reason for that. Talking about analytics in a way a large audience can easily consume while still being in-depth enough to satisfy those with more than a passing knowledge of the subject is really hard.
Start explaining the calculations for Euclidean distance and how it factors into your analysis, and you’re probably going to lose any fan who just wants an understanding of hockey analytics beyond Corsi. The same thing happens when you present a chart that looks like somebody puked NHL team logos onto a spiderweb.
But in the last couple years, we’ve also seen an overreliance on basic shot-based statistics sold as advanced metrics. I’ve been guilty of it myself. Hockey fans now want context and a deeper-level analysis, beyond suggesting a defenceman is great because he has a 52.3% Corsi for.
Rob Vollman always hits the sweet spot.
I got to know Vollman when we were working together at ESPN, when hockey analytics were just emerging from the obscure writings of some of the original ground-breakers into everyday conversations. What was new to many of us traditional hockey writers on ESPN’s staff was stuff Vollman had been working on for years, and so he became the guy we went to with questions.
During an era in which there was often a rift between the traditional media and those developing hockey analytics, Vollman was exactly the opposite. He was patient in answering questions and emails that came from our hockey-writing group as we tried to grasp the different concepts.
Soon, in part because of his insight, we were working hockey analytics into stories, helping round out our coverage. While some corners of the media were hostile and resisted the analytics movement, we worked hard to figure out where it fit into traditional hockey coverage. Having Rob in those discussions, quick to answer any and all questions in a way we all understood, made the process anything but hostile. It was educational. It was fun. It made us better writers.
It’s all the things that make reading his books worthwhile.
There’s a reason people keep buying the Hockey Abstract series, like we all used to buy season preview magazines from the newsstand. And in this sequel to Stat Shot , readers are treated to the same mix of clear analysis, a little humour, and complex ideas presented in such a way that the pages keep turning.
It’s been fascinating to watch the adoption of hockey analytics come in fits and starts. It hasn’t been a linear process, but when you pan out, you see that the progress has been constant. For years now, Vollman has been a part of that constant march toward mainstream acceptance of hockey analytics. His consistent, clear guidance has made us all better viewers of the game.
If this is your first time reading Vollman on analytics, I’m excited for what you have ahead. You’re going to laugh, you’re going to question how you watch hockey, and, most importantly, you’re going to become better equipped to soundly analyze hockey. If this isn’t your first time reading Vollman, you know what you’re in for. Enjoy!

Introduction
“Go ahead, give him another one,” my older brother Mike smilingly prodded his friend.
“Anyone?”
“Yes, anyone. Any page, any player,” my brother insisted.
“Okay.” My brother’s friend flipped through my well-worn copy of the 1988 Baseball Register and studied the pages, brows furrowed. I watched on nervously, but my brother had a relaxed and confident grin on his face. “Okay, got one,” his friend said at last. “Dickie Noles.”
I breathed a sigh of relief because I knew this player well. “Dickie Noles, played with the Chicago Cubs and Detroit Tigers last year,” I reported from memory. “He was 4-2 with an ERA around 3.53.”
Mike smiled at his friend, who nodded to confirm my information was correct.
“That was actually his best ERA ever. I think it started in the 3.80s in his first two seasons with the Phillies, but really shot up after that,” I continued. “His best season was around 1982, with the Cubs, when he was 10-13. Other than that, I don’t think he ever won more than five games in a season.”
By this stage, my brother was chortling at the shocked look on his friend’s face. “So, he memorized everybody’s stats?” his friend asked. “Is there something wrong with him?”
As a child, I often wondered if there was something wrong with me, and my love of numbers. Sure, it was a source of amusement for my brother and very convenient for my parents to have a walking calculator when a nation-wide 7% sales tax was introduced in 1991, but none of my friends seemed to share my passion for numbers.

That’s why the discovery of the Bill James Baseball Abstract 1984 was such an important event in my life. Not only had I found someone who apparently looked at the world the same way I did, but he showed me the tremendous benefits of doing so.
It didn’t take me long to start applying these ideas to my favourite sport, hockey. I even discovered and fully digested a few of the early books on hockey analytics, like Stan and Shirley Fischler’s Breakaway ’86 , and the Klein and Reif Hockey Compendium . I never dreamed that one day I’d be publishing an analytics book of my very own, but that day eventually came.
After several seasons of co-authoring annual guide books in the Hockey Prospectus series, I finally published my own book in 2013, Hockey Abstract . It was obviously named after the Bill James books from my childhood, and I even designed the structure and layout to match (please don’t sue). It was organized into 10 chapters that asked questions in true James-like fashion, followed by 10 chapters that provided some background on key statistics and related principles—10 being such a nice, round number.
The book was a success, not just in terms of sales but in terms of getting people hooked on the world of hockey analytics, much like Bill James had inspired me so many years before.
My fellow fans weren’t the only ones paying attention, and I soon found myself in an NHL GM’s office. He was absolutely fascinated by what I had explored in those pages, and we swapped stories and opinions for hours. I hadn’t planned on writing another book, but by the time I left his office, he had convinced me of the importance of this work.
I set about writing a sequel, imaginatively entitled Hockey Abstract 2014 . I found more questions to explore, included two-page, James-like essays for each team, and added contributions fro