One of the challenges in creating breakthrough hockey analysis is the outdated state of hockey statistics. Even searching through www.thehockeynews.com or www.nhl.com's stats sections only gives us hockey card stats with little breakdown beyond splits for period, home/away, position, rookie.
A typical boxscore provides you with points info, ice time (maybe including special teams ice time), penalty minutes and shots, faceoffs and that's pretty much it.
A major part of any hockey prospectus project would have to be to come up with the questions that need answering - what we should be looking for to be able to prospect hockey success - what attributes lend themselves well to continued success or invoke flameout potential. We would need to find a way to divide success between the players and the coaches/system and the individual player/linemate.
I think one major element that can be tackled right away is in addressing the true cost of penalty minutes in hockey. In a manner even more blatant and transgressive than RBIs or saves in baseball, penalty minutes are still overly glorified as a measurement of "toughness", or "character" in hockey.
Yet, any watching of a typical hockey game with even a modicum sport-savvy, will point out that there are good penalties and bad (stupid) penalties. There are teams that are efficient in killing penalties and there are teams that are not.
To address the issue, I have been calling for a re-measurement of team success/failure on special teams. Currently, a team would get a grade represented fractionally as a measurement of special teams quality (i.e. the Red Wings were 2/5 on the power play and 4/4 on the penalty kill). The problem with looking at special teams in this manner is it makes each opportunity equal.
Let's simplify this experiment. If each power play opportunity the Wings had in this one game were a maximum of two minutes, that gave them 10 total minutes to score a goal with the man advantage. For simplicity's sake, we'll assume that in their failed opportunities, they played the full 2 minutes a man up.In one of the opportunities where they scored, the goal came 25 seconds into the power play. In the second goal, the goal came 1:45 into the penalty.
Knowing this, we can see that the Wings had 5 power play opportunities, but they were only playing with a man advantage for a total of 8:10, during which they scored 2 goals.
Going back to our 2/5 success rate, we can know say they scored 2 goals in 8:10, or 1 goal for every 4:05 with the man advantage. Over one game, that might not tell us that much, but over the course of a season, we can start to see how well different teams truly are on the power play or on the penalty kill. And we can do all of this without counting new things that aren't already readily available in a game box score.
I have other ideas of things that should be measured to give us a better understanding of player contributions to team success, but, unfortunately, I am unaware of the statistics for these things being currently kept - not that they would impossible to keep, but that extra manpower would be required to log this information - things like pass %, turnover +/- (how many forced, how many committed), shooting % based on shot type, player success over coaching changes and much, much more.
Hockey has the potential to be a much richer game, but we must first enrich our perspective on the minutiae of the game to reach that potential.
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