Archive for the ‘Analysis’ Category

Jonas Brodin has quietly assumed a big role in Minnesota. Does he deserve consideration for the Calder Trophy? (Bruce Kluckhohn, Getty Images)

A defenceman has won the Calder Trophy just 3 times in the last 23 years, with Tyler Myers being the most recent. There are a number of reasons why it’s rare to see a defenceman win rookie of the year. Opportunities are harder to come by: with teams dressing just 6 defencemen, most young defencemen will spend their rookie seasons on a team’s third pairing or shuttling between the NHL and AHL.

Defencemen also don’t tend to put up the kind of point totals that catch the attention of voters. Myers was a rarity. He finished third in rookie scoring and was just 7 points behind Matt Duchene, who led the league. He also stepped into a lineup that needed a number one defenceman and averaged just short of 24 minutes per game.

This season, the forwards are once again leading the way, as Jonathan Huberdeau and Cory Conacher battling for the rookie scoring lead and Brendan Gallagher making an argument for himself by putting up respectable point totals while playing for a team that is actually playoff-bound. The selection of Gabriel Landeskog for the Calder Trophy over Ryan Nugent-Hopkins last season, however, indicates to me that voters may be paying more attention to the role that a rookie plays on his team.

With that in mind, several defencemen are playing important roles on their respective teams and could, by the end of the season, have worked their way into the Calder conversation. If the forwards falter in the final days of the season, one of them could even win. Here are six rookie defencemen who deserve some attention.

Read the rest of this entry »

So the analytics movement has gone mainstream. I’ve seen references to the website Behind the Net in several major daily newspapers over the last two weeks. And now, Elliotte Friedman wrote a fairly popular blog post on the subject at CBC. His work itself has a line or two that I’d quibble with, but it’s pretty enlightening about the state of analytics in hockey:

The biggest problem for the NHL is the sport just doesn’t have the statistical bent of others.

“We are third, behind baseball and basketball,” [Washington assistant GM Don] Fishman said.

So teams are creating their own. Because there is no consensus, they are notoriously secretive. One thing I believe some teams do is remove “second assists” from players and see how many points are left over. But good luck trying to confirm that.

I find a lot of useful information in hockey has made its way through the Internet. A lot of the statistical bloggers who have been hired to do some consulting work for NHL teams still post quality information on their websites and it’s not like the whole project is going dark.

Read the rest of this entry »