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Post by soccer24 on Oct 16, 2017 17:48:02 GMT
2 summers ago, I started looking at several key team stats to see if there were any patterns noticeable amongst all the playoff teams. Basically, looking to see which stats might help predict the post-season. Two things that were interesting stood out: Going back to the 2007-08 post-season, nearly every year featured at least 1 team that was ranked top 5 in (regular season) corsi. And 7 in 10 years, that top 5 team won. The other big thing is that if you had a good PP in the regular season, it made no difference to how well your team performed in the post-season. (PK however is a good thing to have.)
So basically, for every playoff team going back as far as the 2007-08 season, I took their league ranks in these stats: Fenwick For % (5v5); goal differential; Corsi For % (5v5); save %; PK rank; Standings position; shot %; PP rank;
Then for every playoff round, I determined how often the better corsi team won. How often the better fenwick team won... etc, repeat for all stats. The listing you see above is put in order of most accurate at making 'predictions' to least. Shot % and PP rank actually fall on the wrong side of the 50% mark.
So last year prior to the playoffs, I started fidgeting with the numbers to see if I could put some basic equation together for a power ranking. When all was said and done, I got something that was able to 'pick' 97 of the 150 different playoff series correctly (those numbers now include last year's results as well.) Further, 5 out of 10 years, the #1 ranked team won the Stanley Cup. (I think that's more of a fluke than anything though.)
So this year, I decided I would start tracking it on a weekly basis. I've chosen Monday as my day to do this. So here is what I have this week. I attached a picture as well which is a graphical representation, so you can see where teams ranked n past weeks. I'll be updating that as it goes along. I imagine the lines will be scattered about everywhere early on looking like a bit of a mess, but will stabilize later.
Just thought I'd share this in case anyone else is interested.
Rank Team 1 Los Angeles 2 Ottawa 3 Vegas 4 Columbus 5 Carolina 6 Dallas 7 Toronto 8 Nashville 9 Florida 10 Detroit 11 Montreal 12 Edmonton 13 Tampa Bay 14 Anaheim 15 Colorado 16 New Jersey 17 Philadelphia 18 NY Islanders 19 San Jose 20 Chicago 21 Pittsburgh 22 Calgary 23 Vancouver 24 St. Louis 25 NY Rangers 26 Minnesota 27 Buffalo 28 Winnipeg 29 Boston 30 Washington 31 Arizona
Hopefully the attachment works well? My first attempt at that here.
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Post by lari on Oct 16, 2017 18:21:45 GMT
Going back to the 2007-08 post-season, nearly every year featured at least 1 team that was ranked top 5 in (regular season) corsi. Clearly you didn't waste your time. Good work.
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Post by gadi on Oct 16, 2017 21:52:42 GMT
That's a lot of work there, but I do have a few questions.
You say since the 2007-08 post-season, nearly every year featured at least 1 team that was ranked top 5 in (regular season) corsi. OK, so at least 20% of the top 5 corsi teams made the playoffs where 53.3% of the total teams make the playoffs? How does that correlate to anything helpful?
You then say that 7 of 10 years a team in the top 5 in Corsi won the Cup. Sounds good, but it's only helpful if that percentage (70% of the time one of the top 16.67% in a specific statistic) is a better indicator than other stats (like Fenwick, which I think is probably a slightly better stat than Corsi).
I'm curious, how does that predicting the 97 out of 150 playoff rounds compare to just seeding?
Anyone, I'll be interested to follow this.
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Post by soccer24 on Oct 17, 2017 2:24:35 GMT
Sorry, I should have been more clear. Since (and including) the 2007-08 post-season, at least one top 5 corsi team has made the Cup FINAL in just about every year. (I can get full numbers tomorrow morning, I keep this on my work computer, roflz)
Fenwick was the best indicator of who would win a playoff series, but that same "top 5" effect that Corsi has wasn't there when it came to making/winning the Final. I believe also that the #1 corsi team was even better at winning the Cup than the #1 standings team (aka Presidents Trophy winner)
As mentioned earlier, I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but Fenwick was the most accurate stat when it came to who advanced out of a given playoff series. It was around the 63% mark. The team that accumulated more points in the standings was just about 53%, MAYBE 55%, but no higher than that. So some things to note about that last piece:
1. Having more standings points doesn't necessarily equate to having a higher seed. You had an era of division champions being given top-3-in-conference status that could play someone with fewer points. So it's really a question of what you think is more important. The better regular season or the better seed? One comes with home-ce advantage, the other comes with actually winning more games.
2. 55%? That's it??? The playoffs are designed to intentionally give advantages to teams that perform better in the standings. On one hand, I suppose it's cool to know that anyone can win a given playoff series. On the other, is that maybe too much parity? Upsets aren't surprising if they happen nearly half the time, right? And if they're happening nearly half the time, what is that saying about the regular season then?
And I think that's kind of the interesting thing about the PP% and Shot% being under the 50% mark. More often than not the team with the better PP% during the regular season and better Shot% suring the regular season has ended up losing the series. I can understand the case with the Shot%, as people have been suggesting a higher shot % is evidence of a team that's lucky, not necessarily good. But it seems like having a higher PP% SHOULD be a good tool to have; but it just hasn't been true the last 10 years. I can't explain that. At first I thought that maybe it's because fewer penalties are called in the playoffs, and if you relied on that to win games, your advantage was weakened. But I remember reading something in the past few months that showed the same amount of penalties are typically called in the playoffs. I remember thinking that was bullshit, but then it pointed out what I wasn't considering. In the playoffs they definitely get lax on the rules and let more go, but you also have more players committing more penalties more frequently, thus balancing out to more or less the same amount of penalties in the end. Don't remember the source, I just know it was someone compiling stats way harder than my amateur skills on exhibit here. All this to say.... I don't know why having a better PP seems to be a detriment.
Sorry, that went longer than I thought it would.
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Post by lari on Oct 17, 2017 5:50:04 GMT
So, I should put money on an LA vs Ottawa Cup final?
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Post by soccer24 on Oct 17, 2017 13:56:48 GMT
Yes, your entire life savings.
As promised from last night, here is each individual category and how many playoff series it would have accurately predicted out of a total of 150:
Custom formula: 97 (65%) Fenwick: 95 (63%) Goal Differential: 94 Corsi: 90 (60%) Save%: 88 (59%) PK: 84 (56%) Standings: 82 (55%) Shot%: 73 (49%) PP: 72 (48%)
Then some other things I mentioned, here are what the Cup Finals looked like the last 10 years going by corsi rankings, starting in 2008 to current: 1 defeats 29 19 defeats 1 1 defeats 13 14 defeats 5 2 defeats 12 4 defeats 3 1 defeats 7 2 defeats 7 2 defeats 11 16 defeats 5
Here it is for Fenwick: 1 defeats 27 19 defeats 1 1 defeats 5 17 defeats 9 6 defeats 10 3 defeats 6 2 defeats 5 3 defeats 16 5 defeats 3 7 defeats 8
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Post by soccer24 on Oct 17, 2017 15:22:45 GMT
And to finish that, here is the same look but using their ranking based on the formula. One thing to note, they are not ranked 1 through 30, but instead 1 through 16. This is the first year I started tracking all teams. Maybe sometime I'll go back and fill in the rest of the data.
1 defeats 16 12 defeats 7 1 defeats 11 10 defeats 2 5 defeats 8 1 defeats 2 (Hawks vs Bruins) 4 defeats 5 1 defeats 10 1 defeats 8 4 defeats 9
And as a bonus, here are the Hawks rankings starting in 2008-09 (since they missed in 2007-08); so again these will all be out of a possible 16, not 30: 2009 - #2 2010 - #1 2011 - #8 2012 - #12 2013 - #1 2014 - #7 2015 - #1 2016 - #12 2017 - #11
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Post by lari on Oct 17, 2017 15:46:35 GMT
So this current iteration is the worst Hawks team by far in the last ten years? (ranked 20th)
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Post by soccer24 on Oct 17, 2017 16:47:40 GMT
2 weeks in, that is about right. With corsi & fenwick they've been getting trounced (25 & 30th respectively.) Still plenty of time to see that improve, especially with basically a brand new defense that needs time to gel.
But yes, I could just give you the raw 'score' the Hawks have had year by year. The lower your score, the better. I'm not sure how much sense it makes to compare these year to year since I generally look at league rankings. For instance, in 2013, the Hawks had a 4.2, their best score. But that just means that was the year that they were that much better than the rest of the teams in the league. But it wouldn't necessarily mean they were better than the 2010 team, because you could just make an argument that in 2010 it was harder to separate from the rest of the pack because there were more elite teams to contend with. I don't know if that made sense or not.
Here are the raw scores, lower is better: 2009 14.7 2010 10.5 2011 24.4 2012 30.4 2013 4.2 2014 21.0 2015 9.5 2016 31.1 2017 29.4 2018 40.0
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Post by khawk20 on Oct 17, 2017 18:07:35 GMT
Well those numbers as they are paint a pretty clear picture for a person you would ask to guess which years the Hawks won the Cup, so there's that.
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Post by lari on Oct 17, 2017 18:11:44 GMT
Well those numbers as they are paint a pretty clear picture for a person you would ask to guess which years the Hawks won the Cup, so there's that. Indeed. But if we trust this, it doesn't bode well for the current Hawks. Everyone knows that 10-1 game was a freak anomaly, and other than that, the team really hasn't impressed yet still somehow stands 1st in Central. So let's not get too depressed once the other shoe drops.
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Post by soccer24 on Oct 17, 2017 18:45:29 GMT
Right. The Hawks have been earning the wins, but it certainly hasn't been the best hockey we've seen either.
Lots of time to change though. And the start of their schedule was expected to be rough. They haven't played any of the more well known bottom-feeders yet. Lots of time to adjust to new teammates. If we get 8 weeks in and their underlying numbers still look bad, then there's probably more room to be concerned.
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Post by soccer24 on Oct 23, 2017 15:26:46 GMT
In the attached image, the left chart shows the fluctuation in rank. The right chart shows the fluctuation in score. So the order of the teams on the most current week (right-most data point) will be in the same order. The right chart might help in showing how far the gap is between some teams. But the labels might be tough to read, haha, so consult the left chart.
Again, still early in the year, and lots of changes are bound to happen. As the season moves along, teams should start to lock into a particular position.
This past week saw Vegas take the biggest drop, despite remaining 2nd in the standings (remember, they started the season x2 against Arizona, which made a large % of their games to allow for great stats to be posted.) Hawks are remaining pretty level. San Jose, Boston, & St. Louis all with significant increases. LA is monopolizing that #1 spot. Arizona is likewise for last, although Minnesota wants to give them a run for their money.
1 Los Angeles 2 Dallas 3 Columbus 4 Nashville 5 Toronto 6 Carolina 7 Ottawa 8 San Jose 9 New Jersey 10 Detroit 11 NY Islanders 12 Florida 13 St. Louis 14 Philadelphia 15 Tampa Bay 16 Edmonton 17 Vegas 18 Chicago 19 Anaheim 20 Boston 21 Montreal 22 Vancouver 23 Calgary 24 Colorado 25 Pittsburgh 26 NY Rangers 27 Buffalo 28 Winnipeg 29 Washington 30 Minnesota 31 Arizona
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Post by Pez68 on Oct 24, 2017 8:10:44 GMT
Great work. I'll have some useful feedback once I have some more time to look over all of this, but kudos. That's a lot of work and it looks like you're on to something.
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Post by jimc on Oct 24, 2017 13:03:50 GMT
I doubt that
Season isnt even 10 games old....
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