The selections for the 2012 All-Star Game will be announced today, if they’re not already available by the time this goes up. Oddly enough, 5 of the top 10 goaltenders in save percentage are unlikely to receive any consideration. None of those 5, one of whom leads the league in save percentage right now, were among Puck Daddy’s selections, and for good reason.
5 of the top 10 goaltenders in save percentage are backups.
Mark Stuart leads the league in blocked shots, but does this mean he's the best shot blocker?
Blocked shots are a bit of a contentious topic in the world of hockey statistics. Traditional, old-school thought is that blocking shots is a sign of grit and toughness, and is necessary to win hockey games; the more blocked shots, the better. Earlier this season, Don Cherry called out the Vancouver Canucks for not “paying the price” because they were frequently blocking fewer shots than their opponents.
Meanwhile, the proponents of advanced statistics claim that a higher number of blocked shots is usually a bad sign: if you need to block a shot, not only do you not have the puck, the puck is in your end of the ice rather than in the offensive zone. This school of thought would point out that the Canucks don’t block a lot of shots because they are one of the better puck possession teams in the league.
Even missing a number of games with a concussion, Jeff Skinner still leads the league in Penalty Plus/Minus.
Back in early November, I wrote a post about the statistic known as Penalty Plus/Minus. It’s not a statistic that gets mentioned a lot, even on blogs devoted to advanced statistics, but it tracks something that does help teams win hockey games. As such, I think it’s worth keeping an eye on.
I promised in that post that I would update the statistic throughout the season; now that we are near the midpoint of the season with teams nearing the 41-game mark, it seems like this is a good time.
Bruce Kluckhohn/via Getty images
While Santa’s elves were taking the day off to recover from toy-making and presumably exchange their own gifts, the elves working in Gabriel Desjardins’ workshop over at Arctic Ice Hockey gave me a good present to play with. Two of them, actually. They are advanced statistical graphs chronicling every NHL game played since the beginning of the 2007-08 season for every team.
While Behind The Net’s main website is a inhabitable wasteland of numbers and charts that can be pretty tough to get if you’re new to the stuff (we’ve all been there) the new graphs that were put up yesterday are a little more accessible.
The graphs allow fans to not only see shot counts, but also regressions to the mean over the course of a season. When you watch a few games in October, you tend to forget their surrounding circumstances. Behind The Net’s new shot graphs allow you to visualize the context using two simple statistics: shots and goals.
Rob Pizzo, my partner-in-podcast at theScore, dug up some pretty interesting info for us today.
He wanted to look at how teams have improved or gotten worse since last season. And, instead of just picking today’s date, he went back and said (as an example) ”okay – New Jersey has played 32 games so far this year – where were they after 32 games last year?”
Below is that information for every NHL team. How do you like the direction of yours?
Stephane Robidas was on the receiving end of more hits than any other player last season.
A couple weeks ago on Pass it to Bulis, I wrote a post exposing the “Soft Sedins” narrative as a myth by tracking how they played in games where there were a higher than average number of hits recorded. It got me thinking about a statistic that is not being tracked at all: hits received.
When a penalty is called, both the player who takes the penalty and the player who draws the penalty are recorded in the game’s play-by-play. Likewise, when a hit occurs, both the player who delivers the hit and the player who receives the hit are recorded. There are people in the blogging world who track penalties drawn, but no one tracks hits received. In fact, those interested in advanced statistics generally ignore hits altogether.
It’s not breaking news that the Vancouver Canucks are a dangerous team on the powerplay. At this point in the season, they sit 2nd in the NHL with a conversion rate of 26.4%, so things are cruising along as usual – take four penalties against them, they’re getting a goal. The Sedins will make sure of it.
But they also feature prominently in a few other categories.
Fun with powerplay numbers, comin’ up:
Jo Innes, Ryan Lambert, Daniel Wagner, Cam Charron, Ellen Etchingham, Jake Goldsbie, Darren Kritzer
