After a long and ultimately successful playoff campaign for my hockey team, I needed a break. It’s been a long winter in Canada and, when my sister suggested going to Costa Rica, I was all for it. I’m not a particularly well travelled fellow, so I figured that, if nothing else, it would be an interesting exposure to the way in which non North Americans live.
Editor’s note: New hockey content can be found after the long prelude. Also, check your local listings so that you don’t miss Matt, Andy and Bob Stauffer Sunday night on CBC.
Every so often, when roaming around the hockeyosphere and reading something that someone has put a lot of time into writing, or when reading a debate on a point that seems to have become a little too nasty, I think to myself: “Man, there’s a lot of energy and vitriol wasted on something that, in the grand scheme of things, is pretty inconsequential. Shouldn’t I be doing something better with my time?” Occasionally, I’ll then surf over to one of Canada’s political blogs to find out the hot topic du jour that I should probably care more about than whether Rob Schremp gets his chance in the NHL next year or whether Matt Greene is a truly effective sixth defenceman.
Colby Cosh had a good line a while back about the NHL and statistics (he was specifically talking about high event versus low event players, but the quote is of general application):
This will be the next stat revolution in hockey when the league finally realizes it already has the data–it just needs to present them to the fan. (Ideally, in some intelligible form that encourages number-crunching, as opposed to making it a bigger pain in the ass than rectal cancer.)
The NHL has presented more data to fans this year than ever before and they should be commended for that. They should be vehemently criticized though, for the fact that it’s harder to compile than ever. I used to have a spreadsheet with a VBA script that did most of the dirty work for me; it’s been rendered useless by the changes to the site. One of my favourite developments is an apparently new policy whereby they present different information on the event sheets and game sheets from game to game. For instance, they started presenting shots broken down by game state this year. It’s not compiled anywhere on their site (FYI: they seem to have difficulty compiling information correctly as well) so if you’re interested, you need to scrape it. Of course scraping it is a pain in the ass because you don’t know where it will be from game to game. As a source of anything more than general statistics, their site is borderline useless. I can’t believe that this would be that difficult to fix; hire a computer science student for a summer and turn him loose. They would do well to pay attention to MLB.com, who are currently making the Pitch f/x data available free of charge almost instantaneously, in an easy to grab format.
There was a hellacious debate that erupted in the comments section here a while ago, relating to outshooting the opposition and whether the stats inclined amongst us should be so dogged in our preference for teams that can outshoot the opposition. A lot of interesting points were raised and I’m going to highlight some of them here. Just skip down to the bottom of the blockquotes if you want to read the content I’ve generated instead of this rehash of points:
As is alluded to in the header on my site, I am on vacation in Costa Rica at the moment. The keyboards here are absolutely baffling, so I am going to be avoiding the use of contractions. I cannot have my brother be the only family member writing a travel blog for the consumption of friends and family, so I thought I would toss up a post here whenever I get the chance. This is different fare than is usually found here (albeit less frequently of late), so if it is not your thing, it is not your thing.
I’ve long thought that if I was an NHL player of any skill, there’s no way in hell that I’d hire an agent and put him on commission. I’ve just never thought that the value was there. I was looking at Gillis v. Eagleson the other day and a passage jumped out at me:
The athletes had a choice of what services to purchase. If they chose only Eagleson’s negotiating services they were charged a small percentage of the yearly value of their contract. If they wanted financial management provided by Rae-Con they paid a larger percentage. Gillis chose both negotiation and financial management services. Gillis was charged either 6% for negotiation and 4% for financial management or 5% for each. There is uncertainty on that point but nothing turns on that.