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About this blog

A mirror of my main blog, capitalizing on the suggestion of hf101.

 

You are welcome to comment either here, or on the blogspot site.

Follow me on Twitter, @morehockeystats.

Entries in this blog

On Intangibles. Carpe Jugulum.

Original post.   Often the general managers, the coaches and the players talk about "intangible values". Sometimes it's about the "locker room contributions". Sometimes it's about "passion". In my opinion, these two are actually negligible and in certain cases even harmful. I remember such references, especially the latter one, made about Israeli soccer players, and that usually meant that the player doesn't have a lot of talent to go along, but contributes a lot of passion into
More Hockey Stats

More Hockey Stats

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On Players Evaluation - Part VII and Final (Bundling it all up)

Original post.   Now that we obtained a way to estimate players' performances for a season, we can move on to estimate their performances for a specific game.   For the season of interest, we compute the average against for each teams, just like we computed the season averages. I.e. we calculate how many goals, shots, hits, blocks, saves are made on average against each team. Thus we obtain the team against averages Tavg. The averages are then further divided
More Hockey Stats

More Hockey Stats

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On Players Evaluation - Part VI (Skater's [and Goaltender non-SVP] Elo)

Original Post   The most important conclusion of the last chapter that dealt with goalies' Elos is that it is defined by actual performance of a goaltender versus the expected performance of the team he is facing. That is the approach we are going to inherit for evaluating skaters.   For the start we compute the average stats of a league for each season. We do that for most of the stats that are measured, from goals and assists to faceoffs taken, up to the time on ice for the goa
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On Players Evaluation - Part V (Goaltender's Elo)

Original post. The goalkeeper is half of the whole team   Soviet proverb from Lev Yashin's times. After a foray into the calmer lands of teams' evaluation using the Elo rating, it's time to turn our attention to the really juicy stuff - the evaluation of a single player. And we'll start with the most important one - the goaltender. DISCLAIMER: this evaluation concept is still a work in progress and one of several possible implementation
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More Hockey Stats

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A small digression - about bye weeks.

Original post.   One of the greatest chess methodologists, if not the greatest one, the sixth World Champion, Mikhail Botvinnik, wrote in one of his books (about the 1948 World Chess Championship Tournament):A tournament must go on a uniform schedule, so that the participants would get used to a certain pace of competition. ... The Dutch organizers neglected that. They didn't take into account that plenty of free days (because of the holidays, and because the number of the participants
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On Players Evaluation - Part IV (Teams Elo Projections)

Original post. Catching up... We left our reader at the point where we demonstrated how to produce Elo ratings for hockey teams over season (and over postseason too, if anyone wondered) and how to apply it to the up and coming next games of the rated teams. However, in its main eparchy, chess, Elo is rarely used to produce single match outcome projections. It's much more popular when used to create a long-term projection, such as the whole tournament, which in chess lasts between f
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On Players Evaluation - Part III (Teams Elo)

Part I. Part II.   Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are camping in the countryside. In the middle of the night Holmes wakes up Watson: 'Watson, what do you think these stars are telling us? 'Geez, Holmes, I don't know, maybe it's going to be a nice weather tomorrow? 'Elementary, Watson! They are telling us our tent has been stolen!   Iconic Soviet joke.   Estimating a hockey player via Elo ratings is a highly complex task. Therefore, we shall wield the d
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On Players Evaluation - Part II (Elo)

Happy New Year everyone! Original post.   The Elo rating system is the system used for evaluation and comparison of competitors. Up until today it's been mostly applied in the domain of board games, most well-known in chess, but also in disciplines such as draughts or go. The Elo system, named after its inventor, Prof. Arpad Elo, who first published it in the 1950s in the US, is capable to produce a reliable score expectation for an encounter between two competitors who oppose eac
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On Player Evaluation Systems - Part I

Original post.   In the previous post we mentioned the Goodhart's Law and how it threatens any evaluation of an object. We said that it traps the Corsi/Fenwick approach because it substitutes the complex function of evaluation of a hockey player by a remarkably simple stat - shots.   Goodhart's law is not alone. In any research it is preceded by the two pillars: Popper's law of falsifiability and the Occam's razor. A theory willing to bear any scientific value must comply with
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On The NHL Scoring System (Part II)

Original post.   Goodhart's law is the bane, the safeguard and the watchdog of everyone who tries to make conclusions from sample data. The "Schroedinger Cat of Social Sciences" practically says, if you want people to do X, but you reward them for doing Y, they will be doing Y rather than X. We start seeing that in the "possession analytics", based on shots taken, that the players begin to shoot from everywhere to get their possession ratings up. But we digress - the topic is the scori
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On The NHL Scoring System (Part I)

Original post.   There was nothing wrong with ties. The 2-1-0 point system works fine in various sports around the world. It's just ... not fitting into the mind of a North American sports fan. "Who won?" - "It was a tie." - "Who won on a tiebreak?" Basketball and baseball do not have ties, and American Football has them at a rate of 1-2 times per whole season. So more than ten years ago NHL went with the flow and abolished ties, introducing the shootout, and with a twist, where the te
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Talent, Skill and the NHL

Original post On Talent In General   When you want to do some useful work, you need a skill to do that work. Naturally, one doesn't need a skill to tweet, but that's not a useful work to start with. But to do stuff that actually profits you a certain level of skill is absolutely necessary.   In order to have the skill, you need to learn it, and then to improve it. And there are only two basic factors that define how well you learn and improve in the skill - the talent an
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More Hockey Stats

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