Sabermetrics and Hockey

It seems that I will have some very exciting news to share soon, but for now, I will keep you in suspense.
Today, I wish to bore you by writing about sabermetrics and how they could be applied to the great northern game of hockey. What do you mean that only 20% of the best teams actually play in Canada? What percentage of all NHL players in history were born in the Southern hemisphere? What percentage received their hockey training down there? It's a Northern game.

Sabermetrics, is the term coined by any advances to the statistical research in baseball, as made by the group named SABR (The Society for American Baseball Research.) As stated in their home page, "Our mission is to foster the study of baseball past and present, and to provide an outlet for educational, historical and research information about the game."
While one may not always agree with the results, I feel that the process is even more important and should be watched by other avenues to further their understandings of their own industries. There should always be room to question the perceived norms of any industry and to try to understand more about what you do and why you are doing it.
Sticking with the baseball beginnings of this segment, last summer I was planning with a very close friend to attend a baseball game. A few days before the game, I was visiting him and his wife and he mentioned how excited he was to be going to the game with me, as I understand baseball better than most and he could learn more about the game by my side. I was touched, but decided to qualify his own knowledge before setting out. Basically, I told him that baseball knowledge can be given three distinct levels of understanding. The first, most basic level of understanding would be the casual spectator who knows what an RBI is and how that measurement is counted. The second level of understanding, and probably the median for most fans of the game, is in knowing who is leading the league in RBIs at any given moment. The third, higher level of baseball understanding comes with the knowledge that the RBI is essentially a meaningless statistic.
With that in mind, let's move on to hockey. Over the last few years, living in Israel, I have been almost completely isolated from the game I grew up with. Short of knowing which teams won the Stanley Cups, I was clueless.
I have always felt that hockey statistics had done a poor job of measuring what was happening in the game and were not able to tell the story as neatly as a baseball box score did. Of course, as most of my baseball research has occurred in the time I was away from hockey, my thoughts were never crystallized. The only measurement I could pinpoint that was wrong and had a method for correcting was team efficiency with the power play (it works on the defensive side as well.)

Generally speaking, under the scoring and penalty minute keeping of a hockey game, would be the power play efficiency ratio. In the form of a fraction. The team may have gone 1/5 on the power play. This means that they were a man (or more) up five times (for an unspecified period of time) and they scored a goal in one of those occasions. What does that tell me? Next to nothing. Lets say that in a given game, two teams (for our purposes, the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens) both were 1/5 on the power play. Does that mean that they were even with the advantage? Not nearly.

The majority of penalties are for a duration of 2 minutes of game time. Some penalties are of the 5 minute variety, but in most cases, they are given out for fighting and to one member of each team, thereby negating any potential advantage. So if each team was 1/5 on the power play, that would mean that they each scored one goal in the space of up to ten minutes. Knowing that the penalized player can return to the ice when a goal is scored, the power play is shorter when the advantaged team succeeds. Therefore, a successful power play is a shorter power play.

Sometimes, such as when the team with the advantage loses one of their own players to penalty, the power play is negated. This shorter power play is not successful, but it still counts. Why not simply count a team's power play efficiency by how many goals they sored for the amount of time they had the advantage, instead of how many times (regardless of how long each time was)? I believe that this would give us a much better idea of which teams were better on the power play and which teams killed penalties better - and by how much.

To this end, in the upcoming season, I will track a number of teams, game by game for power play and penalty killing efficiency to see how they stack up to the standard measurements. I'll keep you posted.

Until then,
I remain,

Ryan