Original post

Nothing derails from the regular blogging like a research that you've been so eager to start, but were putting off to finish simpler and more materialistic stuff, but then you couldn't hold it off any longer.

But then, I realized that in order to do that research I need to perform a lemma research. Just like its mathematical namesake, a lemma research is one that is done for the sake of a bigger one, yet producing a useful result by itself.

So I noticed that I needed the penalty box data. Who was in the penalty box during a power play goal? More specifically, who was responsible for that goal, i.e. who left the penalty box as the result (or had a non-matched 5-minute major penalty during it). Once there was a feed that had penalty box data, but it was only since 2010 or so, and it seems to have become discontinued. Therefore I gathered the game data I already had and just went through the power play goals from 1987/88 through now, and tried to match them with penalties, while weeding out all the cancelling and all the irrelevant (e.g. misconduct) ones.

I am glad to tell that I was able to create a consistent, at least at first look, dataset. But before that I had to go in and correct penalty box entries for about 160 goals manually. About 35 of them were just forced to enter the penalty data manually, because any algorithm assigning the player in the box to the goal would be ambiguous. However I also discovered about 125 goals (120 pre 1999/00, when extra reports were introduced, and only five since) that should not even be marked as power play goals. There was no matching penalty. Of course, the mistake can be on the penalty data in the NHL report: the time of the penalty may be reported wrongly. But until further notice, these goals should not be considered PPG:
 

The resulting penalty box data is available on our website, in the Request Analysis section.
Hopefully, tomorrow, I'll blog about another useful dataset the lemma research has produced.