A question which has been rattling around in my head quite a bit lately is that of how NHL coaches utilize their forwards and defense, and how to get a handle on how this varies for teams across the league. Do individuals focus on matching up against particular opponents, or deploying specialists based on where the next faceoff is taking place?
It's important stuff, because as I've looked through the last few seasons of data, there's a pretty strong, consistent link between where a player starts his shift (offensive or defensive zone) and how the flow of Shots For & Against goes. What we have yet to find is any such direct link with the level of competition that player is facing while he's out there. Intuitively, we understand that lining up against Pavel Datsyuk is an entirely different thing than playing David Steckel, but the effect is harder to isolate.
So how do various coaches approach this issue? Follow after the jump for a look...
I went to Behind The Net and pulled down the data from last season, and screened down to players with at least 40 games played, to get a look at the regular guys playing just about every night. I broke them down between forwards and defense, and looked at how widely two values varied within those groups for each team:
The best measure we have for the average quality of opposing skaters faced by each player. High numbers on the charts below indicate that some players are facing a high level of competition, while some of their teammates are facing much less. Lower numbers indicate that this factor plays less of a role in who a coach decides to put on the ice.
The percentage of non-neutral zone faceoffs taken by that player in the Offensive Zone. High numbers indicate that certain players are utilized more in specific offensive or defense situations, while lower numbers speak to a more evenly-spread workload.
Again, for each of these stats we're looking at the standard deviation for these values within that team. What I'm trying to get at is not which team values are high or low, but rather how much individual player results vary within each team.
What catches my attention are the outliers, like the Phoenix Coyotes as a team which has the widest swing in Quality of Competition, meaning Dave Tippett is much more active in matching his D up against particular opponents than the Buffalo Sabres, Atlanta Thrashers (RIP) or Colorado Avalanche did (remember, this is data from last season). The New York Rangers and Montreal Canadiens also stand out as "matchup"-type teams.
Flipping over to the Zone Start perspective, it's Alain Vignault and the Vancouver Canucks who jump to the fore here, a result that's none too surprising to anyone who has studied Zone Starts to any extent. What strikes me as a bit odd, however, is to see the San Jose Sharks and Washington Capitals down near the bottom of that list (only above the New York Islanders), as I would think that with offensive specialists like Dan Boyle and Mike Green, those guys would be deployed for significantly more offensive zone faceoffs, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
The first thing to note is the difference in scale - that Zone Start axis is twice as great as on the defense table, and it looks like that's almost entirely due to two teams. The Vancouver Canucks are off-the-charts in terms of the extent to which they spread their forwards between offensive and defensive zone draws (the Sedins get the gravy, while Manny Malhotra toils defensively). The Chicago Blackhawks stand a fair bit above the rest of the NHL, however, even if they are way behind Vancouver, while the Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers, Carolina Hurricanes, Montreal Canadiens, Tampa Bay Lightning and Los Angeles Kings care the least about offensive vs. defensive zone faceoffs.
In terms of matchups, the two that really jump out are the Anaheim Ducks and St. Louis Blues. Interestingly, both teams have fired their coaches already this season! It doesn't look like Tampa or Carolina paid much attention to either Zone Starts or the Quality of Competition, they just rolled the lines compared to everyone else.
Again, these charts are meant to describe the style of coaching, they're not intended as a qualitative measure of who's doing "good" or "bad" at winning hockey games. Perhaps over the weekend I'll freshen up these charts with current season data as well, as it would be interesting to see if the new coaches around the league are doing things differently.
7 recs | 29 comments
One of the advantages that coaches like Vigneault and Babcock have
is that their personnel has been roughly the same from year-to-year, so they have a pretty good idea of what they’re going to get when they match players X,Y,Z to opposing players A,B,C. I suspect a new coach might take a little time to figure that out (idea for another study?).
Bettman's Nightmare - January 6, 2012
Hey dirk,
Do the comments of people who have been banned disappear from the site?
cisar - January 6, 2012
It depends
I have the option to do that, or not, when I ban someone. Typically for a spammer I delete the commentary, but outside of spammers, there have only been a handful of other users banned. I don’t think in those cases I deleted comments, but it’s possible. I’d have to go back and check.
Why?
Dirk Hoag - January 6, 2012
I was looking for a series of comments that DFTB had made on Fisher around the trade and wanted to see how his predictions were panning out. Couldn’t find anything by him. Just wondering.
cisar - January 6, 2012
Search used to go back forever, but I dunno if it’s broken or what, but it only goes back a few months now. So if you’re looking for something old, try using google instead of the SBN search.
Eric T. - January 6, 2012
Hey Cisar, this is all I could find
Here is an excerpt of classic DFTB from
http://www.ontheforecheck.com/2011/2/12/1989150/is-the-mike-fisher-trade-a-long-term-loss-for-the-nashville-predators
don’t get why they are compared. Because of the salary? Fisher is cheaper.
Because of the two-way play? Fisher is his better defensively, and the odd year Legwand may have gotten Selke votes, Fisher got more, including once being a finalist.
One of them is physical and hits and sacrifices the body to block shots and will drop the gloves to avenge a teammate and plays with emotion and has been a key cog on successful playoff runs. The other sleepwalks for months at a time.
The only ones that ever compared Fisher to Legwand are (only a fraction of) the Nashville fan base.
There is a reason why Fisher was nearly universally loved by the Ottawa fanbase, despite his relative overpayment for his goals.
And there is an equally good reason why Legwand has as many detractors as he does fans in Nashville.
Man, those were the days, eh?
PekKarlsson - January 6, 2012
Indeed. How’s Georgia?
cisar - January 6, 2012
how did you know?!? hahaha
Creeping Death - January 6, 2012
Hey
downlow. Down. Low.
The new name not subtle enough for your tastes?
PekKarlsson - January 6, 2012
I like. I have a player on my fantasy team I might trade you… but he just got voted as a starter in the All Star game, so asking price is high… though you do get a bit of a break in the US dollar Canadian peso exchange? I don’t know what you guys call your money….
Creeping Death - January 7, 2012
Well
I have Pekka Rinne.
If you consider yourself a True Predator Fan (Esquire),
you should trade me Spezza AND Karlsson for Peks.
The two sens are overrated,
while Rinne is the real-life Master of the Universe (He has the Powerrrrrrr)
PekKarlsson - January 7, 2012
Augusta
is a small, pretty town. There’s Southern League hockey down here (haven’t checked it out yet, but they tell me that Toots would be a veritifiable choir boy in this League) but Creeping Death (when he should be in class) texts me to keep me informed, and SWFP (what’s this Pekka Pontiff nonsense?) keeps me in the loop with all things Preds and, for some reason, Rams. Like any one cares about the Rams.
The Preds are on FSN down here, although they split with the Canes.
These are interesting times for the Preds. Weber and Suter obviously, but Wilson and (choke) Tootoo are going to be due nice new contracts. Alot of work for GMDP.
I hope you (and fam) still enjoy supporting the boys in ..um, yellow, now….
PekKarlsson - January 6, 2012
He likes everyone to think he likes the NFL Rams, but, in reality, he actually likes sacrificing rams, you know, like the good old days. He then has a business selling horns made from the horns. I think it is called ‘Shofar, Shogood’.
cisar - January 7, 2012
Something I noticed that is necessary, I guess, but also kind of makes me sigh, is that if you change the name on your account it changes all of the old posts in the archive, too. It is sad to go back and look at some of the old posts and not see Shea Weber for President, but Pekka for Predators Pontiff. An entire generation of OTF’ers will never know how SWfP stirred the pot. Sniff, sniff.
Ha!
cisar - January 6, 2012
What exactly is on the axes? The standard deviation of that team’s distribution?
Something that interests me: the y-axis is completely under the coach’s control, but the x-axis isn’t. A coach who just sends four lines out in order without thinking about it might end up at 0 for the Corsi Rel QoC spread, but he might not — the opposing team might consistently try to get their best line out against his weakest defensive grouping, for example.
So I’m interested in home/road competition splits. Did the Islanders really put the least effort into competition matchups, or did their opponents just try equally hard to avoid those matchups? If a player who faces much tougher competition at home than on the road, that might be a sign that he’s a good defender. If a team has a very different distribution of values at home than on the road, that might be a sign that the opponents try to avoid the matchups that the team normally prefers, which might in turn mean that the team has a lot of one-way specialists.
Anyone with a good database interested in digging into this?
Eric T. - January 6, 2012
Great question on the road v. home.
cisar - January 6, 2012
Yes.
The home/road thing would be interesting to see, naturally a coach has more leverage to do what they like on home ice. Good luck getting that kind of data, though!
Dirk Hoag - January 6, 2012
I know the Driving Play guys have a database capable of pulling stuff like that. I suggested a bunch of competition-metric-related stuff to them once, including this, and they seemed really interested, but it never happened.
Another of those ideas: I want a competition metric that’s based on TOI. TOI isn’t linked to usage the way Corsi is (e.g. I fear the following causal chain: guy starts in the OZ a lot —> guy faces opps who start in the DZ a lot —> those opps have lower Corsi —> guy’s Corsi-based QoC is lower), and I have a hunch that it’s better at identifying the strength of the opposing defenseman than Corsi is (of the top 10 d-men in Corsi Rel last year, only two were on their teams’ shutdown pair). You could even imagine derivatives where you measure the opponents’ average PPTOI or SHTOI to assess whether a player is being used against offensive or defensive opponents.
Another idea: separate competition metrics for the opposition forwards and defensemen. I can imagine a lot of interesting things that come out of this: maybe all great forwards see the opponents’ top defensemen, but the two-way forwards are used against the opponents’ top forwards as well while the offensive guys are used against lower lines? In that case (and it could go lots of other ways, but that’s one I’d be looking for), the QoDC (quality of defenseman competition) would relate to a guy’s offensive skills and the QoFC would relate to his defensive skills.
Lots of fun ideas. Just need to either get Driving Play or Hawerchuk or someone interested in ‘em, or else bite the bullet and make a database myself that’s capable of calculating competition metrics.
Eric T. - January 6, 2012
That’s an idea I’ve mulled over quite a bit. If you’re a right winger, perhaps it makes sense to weigh the opposing left D, center, and left wing more than the right D and right wing, etc.
Dirk Hoag - January 6, 2012
This is really interesting!!
Thanks for putting in the work for this!
davisca - January 6, 2012
Fun look team by team
I would imagine home vs. road, and maybe even over time (say, Trotz may have had more trust in Spaling at year’s end than year’s beginning), would be interesting to look at, if that was even possible.
On an unrelated note, is it possible to do research into penalties drawn/penalties taken by penalty type? Where could you get than information, for this year, and recent years?
PekKarlsson - January 6, 2012
That's relatively easy
Wondering if certain players are able to draw more high-sticking calls? Load up on the shorties!
Dirk Hoag - January 6, 2012
defensive zone faceoffs
The tendency stats may have meant more 3-4 years ago than they do now because of a rule change.
Now, there are times when the guy you have taking a defensive zone draw isn’t the guy you would prefer, but because you just iced the puck, you’re stuck with the players who were on the ice before the whistle.
Jim5489 - January 6, 2012
true, but that’s a pretty small portion of the overall sample.
Dirk Hoag - January 6, 2012
Interesting analysis Dirk
cliffkoroll - January 6, 2012
The guy behind my kept yelling for Koistinen last night.
cisar - January 6, 2012
Nice work, Dirk.
Switching lines up throws a wrench into this. If halfway through the season Vigneault had decided to switch Burrows and Malhotra for some strange reason then those two would look like 50% ozone guys and pull down the variance. Chicago forwards last year were a good example – Kane got a ton of ozone starts and was centered by both Sharp and Toews so their variance should perhaps be a bit higher, though clearly below Vancouver.
An interesting sidenote is that playing extreme ZS teams should push you both up and to the right if you care much at all about either of these. Say you only care about matchups but play the Canucks every game. You are going to look like you care about zone starts a lot because the guys you want to face the Sedins will end up with low O-zone, etc. Last Stanley Cup finals they somehow talked a lot about the advantage of last shift when it doesn’t matter much at all in games the Canucks are in – Boston could almost control matchups as well away as at home, at least on faceoffs outside the neutral zone. That Calgary and Edmonton are so far at the bottom I think is a pretty strong indicator that they either switched up their lines a lot or just rolled lines.
JaredL - January 6, 2012
Fortunately, it doesn’t appear that this effect should play too much of a role here, with only 6 teams against any given opponent out of 82. But you’re right, this isn’t a scalpel here, and that’s why I’m only drawing attention to the teams at the extreme ends. I think we can say with confidence that those results speak more to those teams than any effect from their particular set of opponents.
Dirk Hoag - January 6, 2012
This is great stuff. The Canucks have been even more ridiculous this year with the Sedins at 79% and Malhotra at an insane 14.9%.
Alexandre S - January 7, 2012
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