In November I wrote a couple of articles on whether teams with taller and heavier forwards or defensemen see more success in the playoffs. The conclusion was, over the past 5 or so years teams with bigger defensemen (taller and/or heavier) have gone deeper in the playoffs. Teams that have an average defenseman height 0.5″ taller than their opponent won 55.7% of playoff games while teams that had an average defensemen weight of 5lbs heavier than their opponent won 56.8% of the games. This advantage was not seen in the regular season so it is unique to playoff hockey and wouldn’t be reflected in ..read more

With today’s rumours that the Arizona Coyotes may soon be on the the move to Utah, the most interesting thing to me is how quickly they could become a contending team. The Coyotes have added a lot of good young talent over the past several drafts however they have been unable to spend on good veteran players to help their young players grow. This is not how you build a winning franchise, or at least not how to do so quickly. Few teams just do not build solely through the draft and become contenders. You need to build with free agents and trades too. The Coyotes are in a great position though ..read more

Last week I wrote about SportLogiq and its Expected Goals model and how it compared to public expected goal models. I just wanted to expand on that a little by comparing four public expected goal models and how they performed over the past 5 seasons. The most rudimentary method to evaluate an expected goals model is by looking at whether at a league-wide level they accurately estimate the actual number of goals that are scored. This is what I am doing here and the graphs below show the percent deviation the expected goal model is from the total goals scored. Negative values indicate the model ..read more

So, I have just rolled out Puckalytics 2.0. I am starting small but will grow over time. My goal with my new Puckalytics site is not to recreate what you can find on other sites like Natural Stat Trick or Evolving Hockey or what I had on my stats sites before I joined the Calgary Flames though there will certainly be some of that. My goal is to bring new data and new ideas to the table. Public Analytics hasn’t really changed much over the past 6+ years. There have been tweaks to statistical models, improved visualizations, but conceptually very little has changed. I want to change that. To sta ..read more

We often use assists as an indicator of playmaking ability and there is often a preference for primary assists since these are the ones that directly lead to the shot that led to the goal. However, not all primary assists are created equal if we want to use them to measure playmaking ability. Over the previous 3 seasons Brady Tkachuk has 69 primary assists, or 0.328 primary assists per game played. Drake Batherson has 56 primary assists or 0.304 primary assists per game played. These per game numbers are relatively close so one would assume that they are similarly good passers/playmakers. Howe ..read more

Last week I looked at the relationship between player size and playoff success at the individual level (i.e. do taller/heavier players go deeper into the playoffs). What I found what that bigger defensemen generally go deeper into the playoffs than smaller defensemen but there is no relationship for forwards – both big an small forwards do equally well in the playoffs. In this second part I wanted to look at team success when their group of defensemen or forwards are taller or heavier than their opponents and see if there is a difference between regular season and playoffs. To do this I look a ..read more

We all believe that NHL players are getting smaller and more skilled but is it true and are the smaller more skilled players leading teams to playoff success? This all started by my (and others) observations that recent Stanley Cup champions have had big defensemen. Just look at last years Vegas Golden Knights. Hague 6’6″ 240lbs. McNabb 6’4″ 215lbs. Pietrangelo 6’3″ 215lbs. Whitecloud 6’2″ 218lbs. Martinez 6’1″ 210lbs. Theodore 6’2″ 197lbs. There are no small defensemen there. Is this a trend, or an anomaly? To investigate this I looked at the top 6 defensemen on the Stanley Cup winning teams ..read more

Welcome to my new blog! To be honest, I don’t know how active I will be writing here however, recently I have been working on some stuff that I think deserves a longer form post than Twitter or Bluesky can offer so I will do that here. If you have any questions or comments or requests for something let me know ..read more