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Gabriel Desjardins is the author of the Behind the Net blog and runs the statistical hockey website Behindthenet.ca. He grew up in Winnipeg and was a huge Jets fan and Dale Hawerchuk fan. These days, with no hometown team, he analyzes the entire NHL.
His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, National Post, Globe and Mail and Toronto Star, as well as on ESPN.com, CNNSI.com, MLB.com, Puck Prospectus and Protrade. He has also worked as a statistical analyst for professional teams and agents in the four major sports.
In real life, he has a BSc from Queen's University and a MSc from UC Berkeley, and works as an Electrical Engineer in Palo Alto, CA. His last job before becoming an engineer was as a lumberjack. He recently stopped using wooden sticks and can't believe he waited this long to make the switch!
Contact him at info at behindthenet.ca.
ESPN: wrong and bad with small sample sizes, too
by Hawerchuk on Mar 11, 2010 7:23 PM EST
0 comments
Malcolm Gladwell has written extensively about the birthday phenomenon in sports: when youth leagues use a birthday cut-off (say January 1st), the majority of players tend to be older rather than younger. This phenomenon persists through junior hockey and seemingly into the NHL. As ESPN's Alvin Chang notes:
"People have tested this theory on several of sample groups, and it almost always holds true -- in junior leagues, the NHL and, of course, NHL draft classes."
It was nice of Alvin to link to my work on junior hockey, but unfortunately, he never read my follow-up, which noted that if we restrict our dataset just to high-scoring NHL players, the birthday bias almost completely disappears. While there might be a lot more first quarter birthdays in junior, players born late in the year are much more likely to make the jump to the NHL. It's not surprising either - if you're born in December, then you've been playing against bigger and stronger and better players for your entire life, and you have an extra year of development before you reach your peak relative to a guy who was born 11 months earlier than you. Sure, the minors are full of players born early in the year, and they are also over-represented among goons, but for the players we care about, it's not a significant effect.
Oddly,while Alvin doesn't acknowledge this effect, he draws a strange conclusion from a small number of players in the 2010 draft class:
"We tested [the 2010] class, fully expecting the usual results. But we found an anomaly. This draft class isn't dominated by North American skaters born between January and March. Instead, it's dominated by skaters born between April and June."
That's why you take more than one year worth of data, my friend! Sometimes weird things happen. Thankfully, the statisticians he consulted made no mistake:
"So, finally, we had to ask: Is this a fluke? Several statisticians told us an occasional anomaly is to be expected. Even Gladwell said, via e-mail, "One would expect wide variation from year to year. It's really long-term trends that we are interested in.""
Wow. Long-term proven trend experiences one-year anomaly.
Next time, it might be more interesting to ask general managers what they think of the late-early birthday disparity...
0 comments | 0 recs |
Campaign 2010: Fire Brian Sabean
by Hawerchuk on Mar 11, 2010 6:09 PM EST
7 comments
It's not often that I write about baseball anymore, but I have decided to campaign for one thing in 2010: the firing of Brian Sabean. If 2010 is going to be a bad year for incumbents, it should be a bad year for the most incompetent of them all.
A brief summary of the charges:
1) Once a successful general manager, Brian Sabean's recent record features four-straight losing seasons followed by a fluke 3rd place 88-win finish. If you think the 2009 Giants were that good, I have some Icelandic bonds to sell you.
2) While an ok evaluator of pitching talent, Sabean had zero home-grown hitters of consequence on his roster between 2004 and 2008. And it's not as though he traded them away - there are no Giants draftees hitting well for any other team. Sabean was so convinced that his first and second round draft picks were worthless that he intentionally gave them away for several years by signing free agents a day early; a day later and he could have had both the free agent and the pick.
3) Sabean doesn't seem to have a clue about player valuation. He has signed many mediocre players to bad 3- or 4-year contracts, and normally, his crowning achievement would be Barry Zito's 7-year, $126 million dollar contract, which BZ has already underperformed by 40% in his first three seasons. Of course, Sabean also consummated this deal:
11/14/2003: P Joe Nathan, P Francisco Liriano and P Boof Bonser to Minnesota for C A.J. Pierzynski
Fangraphs estimates that Pierzysnki was worth about $2.3M more than the Giants paid him. Of course, Sabean non-tendered A.J. at the end of his first season in San Francisco. In true Giants fashion, they needed after-the-fact justification for releasing Pierzynski and the San Francisco Chronicle dutifully reported that he had kneed trainer Stan Conte in the nuts.
Regardless, the three players Sabean sent away for a mediocre catcher have already been worth $80 million to the Twins.
The bottom line: Brian Sabean is so incompetent that he gave away nearly $200 million in value through bad free agent signings and bad trades since the 2003 off-season. For this, he deserves to be fired.
7 comments | 0 recs |
How Long is the Olympic Hangover?
by Hawerchuk on Mar 11, 2010 9:00 AM EST
1 comment
Sorry this piece isn't quite as timely as it could be: it was supposed to go in the Wall Street Journal but ultimately missed the cut...
In 1998, the NHL gave its players almost three full days off before restarting the schedule after the Olympic Games in
NHL teams fear that allowing their players to play a handful of extra games in the Olympics will hurt them later in the season or the playoffs. While it’s not clear that that happens, players do suffer when they’re not sufficiently rested. In particular, it takes players at least three days to recover and get as much ice time as they got before the Olympic break:
|
# Players, 1998-2010 |
Days Rest |
TOI |
Avg TOI before Olympics |
Percent Change |
|
86 |
2 |
20.06 |
20.74 |
-3.3 |
|
109 |
3 |
20.40 |
20.59 |
-0.9 |
|
122 |
4 |
20.38 |
20.02 |
1.8 |
That’s not a huge difference overall – one less shift in their first game back. But it doesn’t mean these players are effective yet. Their teams suffered significantly after they returned:
|
Days Rest |
Win % |
Goal Diff per G |
|
1-4 |
0.472 |
-0.14 |
|
5 |
0.527 |
+0.24 |
|
Before Olympic Break |
0.527 |
+0.24 |
And it’s not because other players were on the ice: the average Olympic hockey player who played in a medal game had a significant drop in his +/- upon his return to the NHL. Teams and players may not be hurt over the rest of the season, but they sure suffer in the first few days back.
1 comment | 0 recs |
Offensive Dominance: Goal Scored Percentage
by Hawerchuk on Mar 10, 2010 9:00 AM EST
11 comments
This post came out of a neat idea from the guys at Copper n Blue who, like me, have no team to cheer for anymore, and have turned their energy to the entire league. They wondered which players were involved in the highest percentage of their team's goals. I'm going to go through a series of these tables over the next little while, and I wanted to start with players who recorded points on the highest percentage of their team's goals when they were on the ice:
11 comments | 0 recs |
Edmonton Water Usage during the Gold Medal Game
by Hawerchuk on Mar 9, 2010 11:37 AM EST
5 comments
Can this be for real?
5 comments | 0 recs |
Exceeding Expectations: Top Corsi Overachievers
by Hawerchuk on Mar 9, 2010 9:00 AM EST
38 comments
One of the best ways to evaluate a player's performance is to count the amount of time his team and his opponets had the puck while he was on the ice. Nobody collects that data, but counting the total number of shots for and against while the player is on the ice is a good proxy for it. This shot differential has come to be known as the "Corsi number", after its presumed originator, Buffalo Sabres goaltending coach Jim Corsi. (We don't actually know who invented it, and Jim's not taking credit...)
One thing that's clear is that you can't use a Corsi number without context. If a player plays against soft competition and gets a lot of offensive zone draws, then he'll have a better Corsi than someone who starts in his own end against the other team's top line. One thing we can do is build a simple regression model for what a player's Corsi should be given his strength of competition and what faceoffs he lines up for. Here are the top 30 in the league in terms of exceeding their expected Corsi, all at 5v5:
| # | NAME | POS | TEAM | CORSI+ | CORSI | QoC | Off FO% |
| 1 | Goc | C | NSH | 21.3 | 7.5 | 0.29 | 32.6 |
| 2 | Erat | RW | NSH | 18.4 | 10.8 | 1.11 | 43.6 |
| 3 | Kesler | C | VAN | 17.6 | 12.7 | 0.62 | 45.4 |
| 4 | Zetterberg | C | DET | 16.8 | 15.0 | 0.93 | 50.6 |
| 5 | Raymond | LW | VAN | 16.4 | 13.7 | 0.70 | 48.6 |
| 6 | Lidstrom | D | DET | 15.8 | 15.5 | 0.97 | 52.7 |
| 7 | Datsyuk | C | DET | 15.8 | 15.0 | 0.88 | 51.7 |
| 8 | Boychuk | D | BOS | 15.6 | 15.8 | 0.48 | 51.8 |
| 9 | Weber | D | NSH | 15.5 | 7.2 | 1.09 | 42.7 |
| 10 | Keith | D | CHI | 14.8 | 16.4 | 0.46 | 53.5 |
| 11 | Samuelsson | RW | VAN | 14.7 | 13.6 | 0.39 | 49.6 |
| 12 | Ovechkin | LW | WSH | 14.4 | 20.5 | -0.81 | 55.0 |
| 13 | Grabovski | C | TOR | 14.4 | 20.7 | -0.84 | 55.2 |
| 14 | Bergeron | C | BOS | 14.4 | 13.8 | -0.10 | 48.7 |
| 15 | Suter | D | NSH | 14.2 | 6.0 | 1.30 | 43.6 |
| 16 | Williams | RW | L.A | 14.1 | 14.6 | 1.37 | 55.1 |
| 17 | Madden | C | CHI | 14.0 | 4.1 | 0.09 | 37.1 |
| 18 | Marleau | C | S.J | 13.7 | 9.3 | 1.72 | 50.0 |
| 19 | Ponikarovsky | LW | PIT | 13.3 | 17.0 | -0.49 | 53.0 |
| 20 | Legwand | C | NSH | 13.2 | 2.3 | 1.41 | 40.2 |
| 21 | Pavelski | LW | S.J | 13.1 | 5.1 | 1.68 | 45.1 |
| 22 | Hornqvist | LW | NSH | 13.1 | 11.6 | 0.49 | 49.5 |
| 23 | Holmstrom | LW | DET | 13.1 | 19.6 | -0.15 | 57.8 |
| 24 | Ward | RW | NSH | 13.0 | -0.8 | 2.36 | 39.8 |
| 25 | Polak | D | STL | 12.7 | -2.4 | 1.68 | 35.7 |
| 26 | Toews | C | CHI | 12.7 | 22.1 | -0.02 | 62.1 |
| 27 | Malhotra | C | S.J | 12.4 | 5.4 | 0.60 | 42.7 |
| 28 | Jackman | D | STL | 12.2 | -0.9 | 1.90 | 39.2 |
| 29 | Rafalski | D | DET | 12.0 | 13.1 | 0.84 | 54.0 |
| 30 | Hossa | RW | CHI | 11.8 | 22.3 | 0.59 | 65.6 |
It should be clear that the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts. Nashville has clearly found a couple of forward lines that are incredibly successful together - there's no guarantee that these players would do as well individually with other pairings. But separating the individual contributions of players who line up together almost all of the time is very difficult.
For completeness, here are the bottom 30 of the league:
| # | NAME | POS | TEAM | CORSI+ | CORSI | QoC | Off FO% |
| 1 | Brassard | C | CBJ | -11.4 | -0.5 | 0.20 | 64.8 |
| 2 | Stewart | RW | COL | -11.6 | -12.7 | 0.45 | 49.9 |
| 3 | Tavares | C | NYI | -11.7 | -5.8 | 0.36 | 58.8 |
| 4 | Mcleod | LW | COL | -11.8 | -10.8 | 0.74 | 53.6 |
| 5 | Bodie | RW | ANA | -11.9 | -18.6 | 1.14 | 45.0 |
| 6 | Brookbank | D | ANA | -12.0 | -9.0 | -0.17 | 53.1 |
| 7 | Reinprecht | C | FLA | -12.0 | -17.1 | 0.93 | 46.4 |
| 8 | Talbot | C | PIT | -12.1 | -4.6 | -1.55 | 54.3 |
| 9 | Kreps | C | FLA | -12.2 | -20.9 | 0.57 | 40.3 |
| 10 | Foote | D | COL | -12.4 | -16.7 | 1.13 | 48.1 |
| 11 | Mikkelson | D | ANA | -12.5 | -10.2 | 0.95 | 56.1 |
| 12 | Pisani | RW | EDM | -12.7 | -11.9 | 0.52 | 52.7 |
| 13 | Lapierre | C | MTL | -12.8 | -16.6 | 0.82 | 47.6 |
| 14 | Staios | D | CGY | -12.9 | -14.4 | 0.75 | 50.4 |
| 15 | Yip | RW | COL | -13.0 | -11.2 | -0.56 | 50.3 |
| 16 | Fraser | D | N.J | -13.6 | 0.5 | -0.36 | 67.0 |
| 17 | Stillman | LW | FLA | -13.9 | -15.3 | 1.06 | 51.7 |
| 18 | Galiardi | LW | COL | -15.4 | -17.3 | 0.17 | 47.9 |
| 19 | Moreau | LW | EDM | -15.6 | -19.5 | 0.81 | 47.4 |
| 20 | Tucker | RW | COL | -15.8 | -12.2 | 0.03 | 54.6 |
| 21 | Festerling | D | ANA | -15.9 | -7.4 | -0.18 | 60.4 |
| 22 | Halishuk | C | N.J | -16.3 | -4.7 | -1.44 | 60.0 |
| 23 | Liles | D | COL | -17.6 | -12.4 | 0.09 | 56.9 |
| 24 | Wilson | D | COL | -17.7 | -15.1 | -0.79 | 50.5 |
| 25 | Tambellini | LW | NYI | -17.7 | -20.1 | 0.03 | 46.8 |
| 26 | Sim | LW | NYI | -18.1 | -17.4 | 0.06 | 50.9 |
| 27 | Jacques | LW | EDM | -18.3 | -20.3 | 1.26 | 51.5 |
| 28 | Eminger | D | ANA | -19.1 | -21.9 | 1.30 | 50.6 |
| 29 | Strudwick | D | EDM | -19.3 | -22.2 | 0.36 | 47.2 |
| 30 | Garrison | D | FLA | -20.6 | -14.5 | -0.35 | 56.5 |
No big surprises here, but I would draw your attention to the number of Colorado Avalanche players on the list. The Avs have been fighting the percentages all season: they give up a ton of shots at 5-on-5 and get outshot, but they've had amazing goaltending and serious luck in the other team's end. Since their 14th game, they've essentially been even on goal differential, hardly what you'd expect from a team that could easily finish the season with 100 points.
38 comments | 0 recs |
Are Expensive Goaltenders worth the Money?
by Hawerchuk on Mar 8, 2010 9:00 AM EST
18 comments
One of the recurring topics over at Tyler Dellow's site is goaltending. Tyler has some great analysis over the years - he showed the extent to which past save percentage predicts future save percentage - and had the right take on the Nikolai Khabibulin signing. Somewhat tangential to the Khabibulin discussion was his recent post on high-priced, long-term goalie contracts even to younger goaltenders. Tyler's philosophy:
"If I were making decisions for an NHL team, I might lose the odd guy who really is that good to free agency but I think I’d be far less likely to end up paying a guy $3MM or $4MM+ to sit on the bench. In a league that right now has more competent goalies than it does starting jobs for them, with only a few true elites, making a mistake on a goalie really puts you behind the rest of the league, in terms of the salary that’s committed to someone who isn’t performing."
There are essentially 20 NHL goalies signed to multi-year, high-cost contracts, and 42 goalies age 24 or older who have no such contracts. The top 20 goalies have posted a .924 save percentage this season; the other 42 have a .918 save percentage. Over the course of 53 games, that translates to roughly a six-goal difference between the average goalie in each group. That six-goal difference costs an additional $4.1 million per goaltender, which doesn't compare favorably to the general market for wins:
| Cost/Win | |
| UFA | 2.23M |
| RFA | 1.33M |
| Entry | 0.65M |
| "Top" goalies | 4.1M |
These are ballpark figures, but I think it's clear that dropping $3M+ for multiple years on a goalie has not had a good rate of return in recent years. For a variety of reasons - chief among them the short career peaks of goalies and the difficulty teams have in determining a goalie's true talent level - these contracts underperform. Buying a top goalie is like giving away between half a win and a full win per season. If your team has a league-average goalie signed to a bargain contract today, you'd better hope they don't decide they need to sign Evgeni Nabokov in the off-season.
18 comments | 0 recs |
"Those Damn Homer Refs": Who's Getting an Edge?
by Bettman's Nightmare on Mar 8, 2010 1:51 AM EST
5 comments
You hear the complaint, you've made the complaint, and my mother will never forgive Andy Van Hellemond for it. You know what I'm talking about; it's those goddamn homer refs.
In all honesty, you aren't going to find a sport where the refereeing, officiating, judging, etc. isn't criticized. The exception may be Nickelodeon GUTS, possibly, but it's hard to question Mo' with that marvelous British accent.
Note: A great idea for a drinking game is to watch GUTS, pick your "horse" (contestant), and either slam a beer for each loss or do a "beer tower" after each event. The best part is you all end up yelling at children.
Moira Quirk aside, I want to take a brief look at players who either are a.) getting a lot of love from their homer refs, or b.) are getting slammed by homer reffing.
5 comments | 1 recs
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