(no subject)

[go_gentle]

shihadchick asked: or, if you could order around a bunch of fancy stats people/observers to build a data set, is there anything you'd particularly like to investigate in particular?

(She actually asked two questions, but the other one has a longer answer and will come at a later date.)

I have ...several answers for this!

1. First, I'd like to see the on-going zone entry/exit stuff expanded - more teams! more years! centralized database! (i suspect a proper bit of crowd sourcing could make this happen - claim a game via tick box, upload the standard excel sheet when you're done, allow for multiple people to claim the same game and cross-validate their answers, and then run this whole thing into a queryable database a la extraskater.) as best i know, no one does this for the hawks currently. someone needs to kidnap shutdownline, basically.

2. tracking change of possession. it's related to zone entries in that frequently zone entries become a turn-over, but i'd be also interested in how often turnovers come from bad rebounds, hits, datsyukian takeaways, etc, etc. (unlike many people, i LOVE interrogating hits. i keep thinking that with enough data, people will notice they're* meaningless.)

*technically i think there are several kinds of hits, and only MOST of them are meaningless - so i'd love to be able to distinguish between a hit that takes you out of position vs one that forces a turnover.

3. better show data. more accurate, more granular, plus whatever whoever at SN is doing trying to meaningfully understand shot quality.

4. realtime tracking of every player on both teams at all times plus the location of the puck.

granted, that last one is probably less 'stats folks' and more 'GMs', but, seriously, think about it: we could QUANTIFY how often that backdoor PP play doesn't work.

Comments

[shihadchick]

Oh maaaan, yeah, those would all be really interesting. Especially that last one! I would love accurate possession stats so much. I guess it's harder with a puck to be able to automate judging when it's 'under control' where near someone than it might be with other sports equipment, but maaaan, yeah. (...my flatmates made SO MUCH fun of me the other day when Foley was all "and there's Sharp with the backdoor play" and I just yelled "fuckssake, Sharpy ALWAYS goes backdoor, jfc!" at the TV. Heh. Oops.)

Also, not really related but you reminded me of it - a thing I keep meaning to discuss/bring up not on twitter -- would you say there's any difference other than semantic between a takeaway and a giveaway? Because I keep listening to pxp guys and worrying I fundamentally misunderstand it, because as a writer I would understand a giveaway to be "dude with the puck fucked up and let the opposition waltz off with the puck" and takeaway to mean that the team who began without the puck were the ones who took the actions which resulted in them coming away with the puck. But everyone I listen to regularly seems to consistently use those two phrases in the opposite meanings - eg, the other day when Duncs accidentally redirected a shot tape-to-tape onto (I think) one of the Devils guys' sticks, who naturally then grabbed it and fucked off to the Hawks blue line with it; I would call that a giveaway but they're calling it a takeaway. Thoughts?

[go_gentle]

so probably you'd get an answer from someone who is better at the mechanics of hockey than i am? but my personal view supported by zero fact is that it's often quite hard to tell the difference between 'he took it because i fucked up' and 'he took it because he did some datsyuk magic', so i suspect they get used as opposite views of the same action rather a lot. (and if i were designing a tracking system, that's what i would do to eliminate the gray area.)

that last one, though, you might just have to blame foley for homerism on.

[shihadchick]

Ha, very good point, yes.

...TRUE. :D

Thanks, bb. <3