All posts by G Money

Edmonton Oilers, G Money, NHL

How Big Are the Oilers Really?

We know that Pete Chiarelli has prioritized adding size over the last year.  Those moves have been universally lauded where the package included skill (e.g. Pat Maroon), but less universally loved when it involved a size vs speed+skill tradeoff (Lucic for Hall for example).

No question, though, that the Oilers are now a bigger and tougher team than they have been in the past.

Seems that a couple of questions are now floating in the heads of some Oilers fans: a. do we need to get even bigger? b. will we?

Maybe, maybe not.

There does seem to be a tendency for teams to copycat the latest Stanley Cup champions “formula”.  So now the focus turns to Pittsburgh’s speed and skill rather than size. It always works that way – follow the “leader”!

But how big are the Oilers really?

Before most Oilers games, I tweet out what I call my “Heavy Hockey Update”, which scrapes the NHL roster pages for the Oilers and the team they are playing. I take all players listed on the active roster for each team, and calculate the average height and weight of the forwards and defensemen separately.

Although I do this mostly for fun, splitting the data this way I think is more useful than just giving a roster height and weight, which not only conflates the two player positions, but also rolls in goalies (who, let’s be honest, are not relevant to the question of how big a team really is!).

(The ideal way to do this would be to weight the players based on TOI, but I won’t have that improvement ready for a little while yet as I’m preoccupied with other projects).

All Thirty

What I did for this article is tweak my program to scrape the rosters of all 30 teams at once. You can take a look at the raw data table at the end of this article.  What can we glean from it? Let’s dig in!

First off, you can see that height is mostly not a big deal – the shortest team forwards are TBL at ~5’11”, and the biggest are COL and WSH at 6’2″. That’s a range of about 4%. For defensemen, that range compresses, running 6’1″ to 6’3″.

The bigger discrepancy is in weight, where the range is ~11% for forwards and defense.

The roster size of forwards ranges from 190 lbs (CHI) to 210 lbs (COL).

For defense, that range runs from 194 lbs (MIN) to 217 lbs (CBJ).

In the table, I’ve highlighted the Oilers, as well as the top and bottom teams in the two categories.

Based on these parameters, the Oilers now rank:

  • 14th overall in the forward size ranks
  • 21st overall in the defense size ranks

Again, this is based on the NHL.com active roster listings as of January 4th, 2017.

There is no question the Oilers are bigger – in times past, the Oilers were bottom 5 in the league in both categories. But still far from ‘big’!

Is it enough?

Well, if you look at the table, you’ll note that there really doesn’t appear to be much of a relationship between size and results.  CHI and MIN and PIT are all well down there, and they’re pretty good!  Mind you, so are CBJ and LAK up at the top of the table.

But BUF and COL are both big and terrible.

Also funny to see how average Chiarelli’s old team is size-wise.

Personally, I’d rather add speed and skill over more size. The Oilers need a right handed shooter, and someone on defense who has a PP cannon and/or can make headman passes like Ryan Whitney or Pronger or Visnovsky used to do.

If you are going to add size, though, it’s the defensemen that are smallish, not the forwards.

Data

Team Avg F Height Avg F Weight F Weight Rank Avg D Height Avg D Weight D Weight Rank
ANA 73 202.4 12 74 205.7 18
ARI 73 201.2 15 74 203 23
BOS 72 196 20 75 208 13
BUF 73 206 3 75 213.4 3
CAR 73 195.6 23 74 202.6 24
CBJ 73 202.9 10 74 217 1
CGY 73 195.2 25 74 202.3 26
CHI 72 189.8 30 73 197.4 29
COL 74 209.9 1 74 211.4 4
DAL 73 203.4 7 74 209.4 7
DET 73 196.7 19 74 207 15
EDM 73 202.3 14 74 205.1 21
FLA 72 194.6 26 75 206.6 17
LAK 74 208.9 2 75 213.6 2
MIN 73 203.2 8 73 194.1 30
MTL 72 191.9 29 74 208.3 11
NJD 73 195.9 21 74 205.6 19
NSH 73 200.8 17 73 201.9 27
NYI 72 203.1 9 73 205.6 19
NYR 73 202.6 11 74 209.1 9
OTT 73 195.7 22 73 204.7 22
PHI 72 195.6 23 72 198.9 28
PIT 72 193.9 27 73 202.4 25
SJS 72 201.1 16 74 208.6 10
STL 72 205.2 5 74 210.8 5
TBL 71 192.2 28 75 208.3 11
TOR 73 202.4 12 73 206.9 16
VAN 73 197.8 18 74 210.4 6
WPG 74 203.5 6 74 209.4 7
WSH 74 205.8 4 73 207.1 14
G Money, NHL

Oilers and Playoffs – Guidelines for Scoreboard Watching

Oilers and – gasp! – playoffs?!?

Yes, indeed, here we are in January and the Oilers don’t just have a shot at the playoffs, but should be favoured to end up with a spot in the post-season dance!

That means we as Oilers fans get to do something that should be quite familiar – scoreboard watching.

The difference is, this time we’ll be watching the scoreboard for the playoffs and not the lottery. Which means now we want to win, and we want other teams to lose! Refreshing!

So I thought I would lay out my particular set of rules for scoreboard watching as it sits today: the things we want to happen with other teams in order to get the Oilers into the playoffs.

Of course, ideally we want the Oilers to win every game and be in complete control of their own destiny … that hopefully is a given, yes? But it’s not that realistic, so hoping for other teams to suffer strategic losses is par for the course.

So, here they are, my actual rules for scoreboard watching:

  1. Since we don’t compete with the East for playoff spots, any time there is an Eastern matchup with any other Western team, we want the Eastern team to win.  Always.  So gird your loins and start cheering for BUF, TOR, PHI, etc!
  2. At this point, the teams with a realistic chance of overtaking the Oilers are CGY, DAL, and WPG, with VAN having an outside chance and COL and ARI already pretty much out. So we want them, especially the first four, to lose. Always. (With CGY and VAN that should go without saying).  Especially important for the Oilers to win these games, which is why the SO loss to Vancouver on New Years Eve was … annoying.
  3. In any matchup between those five teams that are chasing the Oilers, we don’t really care much who wins, but we want the win to be in regulation, with no Bettman point awarded!
  4. With any other West-West matchup, we generally want the teams the Oilers are unlikely to be ahead of (SJS, LAK, ANA, MIN, CHI, STL) to win out over the teams the Oilers are likely to be with or ahead of (NSH plus the teams mentioned in point #2).  NSH losing decreases the likelihood that one of the teams that are behind can actually displace the Oilers out of a playoff spot. Again, obviously a regulation win is preferred.

So to summarize:

  • Oilers uber alles
  • East always over West (except Oilers)
  • CGY, DAL, WPG, VAN, COL, ARI to lose. Especially to the Oilers. If playing each other, no Bettman point.
  • High West vs Low West, we want higher to win, now including NSH among the “Low”. Again, preferably with no Bettman point.

Did I miss any other rule you think is critical? Please post in the comments section.

Otherwise, let’s git to watchin’ that scoreboard!

Edmonton Oilers, G Money, NHL

Is Connor McDavid getting fatigued because of too much ice time?

Connor McDavid, Age, and Fatigue

I made this comment in my OilersNerdAlert EDM-DET post-game yesterday:

McDavid isn’t really McDaviding very much. … Prior to this game, McDavid had the fourth highest ice time in the league for a forward. All the players ahead of him are veterans. Maybe the idea of playing the crap out of him is not a successful long term strategy, especially for a 19-year-old player who was a featured high ice-time player in the World Cup before the season started.

Da Fax

Let’s look at some facts in that regard:

  • McDavid is averaging 21.4 minutes of all situations ice time (ATOI) per game this season. He’s still fourth in the league after last night’s game. (All data sourced from corsica.hockey)
  • The next nearest Oiler forward is Jordan Eberle at 18.5 minutes, nearly three minutes per game less than McDavid.  That’s a very reasonable 55th in the league for forward ice time.
  • There are three forwards ahead of McDavid in ATOI.  They are: Ryan O’Reilly (25 yo, 22.4 mins), Patrick Kane (27 yo, 22.2 mins), and Anze Kopitar (29 yo, 21.8 mins). The #1 ATOI forward in the league is 6 years older and plays just one minute more per game.
  • Of the top 10 forwards for icetime, not including McDavid, the average age is 28 years.  The youngest are 23 years old (Scheifele and Trocheck).
  • A quick scan of the top 50 ATOI forwards shows only a handful of young players (Gaudreau, MacKinnon, Forsberg, Barkov). McDavid is the only teenager on the list. (note: can’t guarantee that as this is eyeballed)

The Immortals

Now, we all know that McDavid is an extraordinary player, and I don’t doubt he can tolerate more icetime for his age than ordinary mortals. And the team is generally not very good without McDavid on the ice, so the temptation to play him every minute you can must be overwhelming.

But let’s not forget, he’s just 19 years old – still a growing boy. (And given he’s three years from his likely peak, his age is something that should absolutely terrify the rest of the league)

So this kind of icetime load has me worried, especially since it looks to my eyes like McDavid hasn’t been able to easily shed the hooking and holding the way he did early in the season.

Overtraining or Ubertraining?

In my day they called long-term fatigue from too much training volume ‘overtraining’ – do they still use that term? While this could just be an ebb in the regular pattern of ebb and flow, it might not be. The end result of overtraining is often injury, and that’s something the Oilers must protect McDavid from at all costs!

Not sure if this is anything real, but I believe it is something that should be given attention. I hope TMc and the Oilers training staff are watching closely.

Edmonton Oilers, Fancy Stats, G Money

It’s way too early for this dashboard

It’s not enough data!

Normally for a shot metrics dashboard like this, you’d prefer to have at least 10 and preferably 20 games of data.

But I’m showing it to you anyway!

The reason is because, well, it actually does have a few interesting things embedded in it, and I’m going to walk you through what I see. Would be interested to hear if you observe anything else!

So without further ado …

Here is the dashboard, annotated with numbered points of interest (click to embiggen, an explanation of the dashboard is at the end if you haven’t seen it before):


Analysis

So referring to the numbers above, and remembering the caveat about how early as it is, here’s what I see of interest:

  1. Oh what a surprise, the McDavid line tops the board!  The biggest thing to note here is that big discrepancy between McDavid’s blue Corsi line and his purple Danger line. Most players I expect will have those converge over the season. I expect with McDavid that divergence is going to stay.
  2. Mark Fayne only played the one game but hey, it was really good!
  3. I still think the best thing for his development (and the cap situation) is for Jesse P to spend a good chunk of time in the AHL.  But these are nice numbers for a raw rook.
  4. Oscar and Adam aka KlefLar aka AdamBom are giving up an unhealthy edge in shot attempts, but are doing very nicely on the danger aspect.  As I noted in point #1, this is a mild cause for concern, as these two tend to converge over time.  However!  Larsson has shown for the last couple of seasons that he is a better danger suppressor than he is a shot suppressor, so I expect that we may see this ‘poor shot, good danger’ being a persistent effect too. I can live with that!
  5. You can clearly see the recent uptick for Gryba and Nurse – they’ve played two really solid games in a row.
  6. Russell and Sekera started very strongly but have been falling off the pace the last while. This is what a lot of the “Russell warners” suggested was likely to happen.  I don’t think it’s overly indicative either way, and have very much liked both Russell and Sekera’s game so far.  But it’s something to keep an eye on.
  7. Like Nurse and Gryba, Nugey had a rough start to the season, but the last couple of games have been really solid, and against Vancouver I thought Nugey was the best of the Oiler forwards.

The other notable issue is that performance of the team outside of the McDavid line is a significant concern.

Those are the main things I see on this dashboard this early in the season.  There are other things of note (like Pitlick’s shot metrics vs his 20% sh%!, but those are exactly the kinds of things that it really is too early to comment on. I’m more interested in some of the early trends around the key players and prospects).

How about you?  See anything else interesting?

PS. Dashboard Explanation

If you haven’t seen this dashboard (I tweet it out regularly through the season, and will do more of these walkthroughs here at BLH every 20 or so games), here is how to read it:

  1. Every player with even a single game will show up.  Blue background is a forward, yellow is for defensemen.
  2. The list is sorted by raw Corsi differential
  3. The blue/brown trace shows you raw Corsi differential over the course of the season so far. Blue means above breakeven, brown is below.
  4. The purple line shows my Dangerous Fenwick metric, which takes unblocked shots and adjusts them for danger (based on shot type and distance)
  5. Obviously, the farther above the line, the better!
  6. But really what you’re looking for is things like trends, hot and cold streaks, big divergences between raw and danger metrics, and so on
  7. I call it a dashboard because in a single image it gives you a really clear look on how every player on the team is doing over the course of the season, and that’s not easy to do!
  8. Feel free to tweet questions at me @OilersNerdAlert. You can also post questions in the comment section below, but for some reason my comments get eaten on a regular basis, so I might not be able to respond!
Edmonton Oilers, Fancy Stats, G Money, NHL

Vital Signs – Late October 2016 Edition

1 Comment

Every once in a while, I do a ‘vital signs’ analysis on the team.  I look at a variety of indicators that give us a look under the hood of how the team is doing on a number of important indicators.

Why do I call them important?

Because they tend to predict how well the team is going to do in the future much better than do the above the hood indicators like goals and win-loss record. The under the hood indicators tell us whether recent success (or failure) is likely to sustain.

Now that said, it is very early days, and so these numbers are going to shift around a lot (unstable condition, a symptom of life). Even so, they do carry a little bit of information right now, so the peek under the hood isn’t entirely futile. And it supports the idea of staying level headed – something that becomes all the more important when the team rockets off to the best start in many years!

The Vital Signs Monitor

To make the measures a little easier to review, I take my inspiration from the Star Trek vital signs monitor, to wit:

The main difference when using this idea for hockey is the switch in colour scheme. Unlike vital signs where normal is good and high or low is bad, with hockey the middle tends to be good (for a middle pack team), the high numbers are often unsustainable, and the bad numbers you hope will rebound. So we adjust.

Let’s see how that looks for Our Oilers (click to embiggen; data from corsica.hockey):

Down below, I explain the rationale for the indicators I’ve used.  If you’re not interested in such arcanery, just pay attention to the rankings for overall, EV offense, EV defense, special teams, and what I call ‘unpredictables’ (sh% and sv%, which are volatile and for most teams without either elite or terrible goaltending tend to move strongly towards the midline as the season progresses).

What’s the Frequency, Neal?

First, before we mull on this chart specifically, take a minute to think on what you think the chart should say by the end of the year. Are the Oilers a top 10, middle 10, or bottom 10 team?

In my view, there are some terrific strengths (McDavid, C depth, the new top pair) married to some real flaws (backup goalie, right wing depth, not enough righties on defense). I’d call this a mid pack team – I don’t expect the current record to sustain, but I don’t expect a fall all the way back to historic depths either.

IMO

In that context, this vital signs set actually looks OK to me.

  • Sh% is high and will likely come back to earth.
  • Sv%? Well, it’s not out of the question that the Oilers have a Top 10 goalie if Talbot stays healthy.
  • The PP shot rates give me great cheer. These are excellent numbers, and exactly what you’d hope to see a team loaded at forward able to do. Huzzah!
  • The PK shot rates cause some concern, and that SA60 number needs to come up big time.
  • The EV CF% is not very good, but most of that is the poor shot rates against. Some of that is score effects, as the Oilers have opened up the score a few times. But it is concerning. Like a few others, we’d like to see it move up towards the middle as the season progresses.
  • The xGF numbers are higher than the CF numbers. Both have comparable predictivity, so I’d expect the two of them to converge in the middle. And middle is good.  By the way, in December of last year the trend was reversed – the Oilers were having trouble converting their shots to dangerous chances, so this is not a bad place to be.

Bottom Line

I’m usually quite curmudgeonly when I look at the Oilers fancystats.  They haven’t been good over most of the last decade – and they’ve been right.

This year, though, I’m a little encouraged. Overall, this is kind of where the Oilers should be if they are to be a middle tier team.  As long as the raw shot metrics (CF/CA) move towards the danger metrics (xG) and stay somewhere in that middle lane, life is good.  We’ll keep our eyes peeled.

But there’s a bright side to the great start, even if it’s unsustainable. Because the early points are banked, they can’t take them away, and other teams have ridden an early hot streak and late season mid-tier play to a playoff berth.

So why not us?

Happy i.e. Ungloomy Halloween!

Addendum – Metrics Rationale

Ferda boys.  Ferda!

I use these metrics, for the following reasons.

1 – CF% (5v5 Corsi For %) is the single best predictor of future success we have (it’s not great, but it’s as good as we’ve got).  I break the components of this down into rates to look at the offense and defense separately.

2 – I roll in the corsica.hockey expected goals (xG) to get a sense of whether the shot attempts levels that Corsi is giving us are translating into dangerous chances.  Again, also looking at offense and defense rates broken down.

3 – I look at shot rates on the special teams. I don’t use Corsi in this case, because I’m not interested in possession so much – the team on the powerplay should have possession as a given! Rather, I look at how many unblocked shots the team gets on net (or gives up). This is a sustainable skill on powerplays.  I add in the expected goals, again to incorporate the degree of danger for and against.

4 – Just for fun, throw in the shooting and save percentages. These don’t tend to stick or predict very well, but usually if they are unusually high or low, you can expect them to move back towards the middle as the season progresses.

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