Hockey
?It's fantastic that the NHL is at the forefront here. This is an issue that supporting it has no downside. It's just a matter of time until all leagues join up. I can't imagine why you wouldn't cheer and support someone because you might not like what he does in the privacy of his own home, committing no crime, and breaking no law.
Remember: There are plenty of openly-a$$hole players who get cheered and praised.
?This is an interesting little tidbit:
NHL contracts cannot be renegotiated once signed, but there is a potential loophole. In 1998, months after Glenn and Suzie Healy welcomed their first child, Meagan, Toronto demoted Glenn to the Chicago Wolves of the AHL because Curtis Joseph and Felix Potvin were with the big club. Healy's initial reaction was to go all Johnny Paycheck on Leafs executive Ken Dryden, but he received a phone call from then-NHLPA executive director Bob Goodenow warning him there was precedence for a goalie's contract to be voided for refusing to report. (Glenn wouldn't say, but I believe it was Vincent Riendeau in Boston). This will get sorted out, but if Luongo was serious about walking away from $40 million, well, that's the way to do it.
Luongo has talked about how his contract prevents a trade. Now, the NHL allows buyouts in the offseason, but, that's alot of money to eat up for a still quality player. You'd eat up a contract only if what's left of the contract after the buyout is still HIGHER than what he's worth. With Luongo, that's not necessarily the case. So, Healy is suggesting here that simply going AWOL will allow the team to void the contract (which it would desperately love to do), which then allow Luongo to negotiate a deal with any team.
But, what about the case of an underpaid player? What's a team to do? Well in that case, the team will likely seek damages, and prolong the player's non-reporting long enough to make it unappealing for him to do that. If I remember right, this is what Yashin did, holding out for a year and it didn't work. The league ruled that he still owed one year to his team.
So, basically, if a team and player both want it to happen, they can make it happen, without a buyout. Theoretically anyway. But Luongo is such a high-profile case, that, unlike Riendeau, it's not going to be quiet, and Bettman won't necessarily go along with the program.
Dave brings up swapping the top two prospects. The closest we've seen recently was Montero for Pineda.
In the NHL, we see that occasionally on draft day, none more exciting than when Vancouver landed the top 2 picks in the draft, as Brian Burke simply declared that he was walking out of there with both of the Sedin twins, and he made the deals necessary to make that happen. Hockey trades are simply much more fun than baseball trades.?
When the NHLPA agreed to the new CBA of 50% of revenue instead of 57%, this automatically meant a 12% rollback in wages. In their last full-season, they earmarked 8.5% of their wages for escrow. This means that NHL and NHLPA should have agreed to withholding 20% in escrow. (Either that, or rollback everyone's wages by 12%, and earmark 8% in escrow.)
But they didn't do that:
The NHL and NHL Players' Association have agreed to change this season's escrow rate to 20 percent, sources confirmed to ESPN.com.
That's up from the 10 percent rate both sides had agreed upon in late January shortly after the season began.
Pierre Lebrun, usually a smart cookie, instead says this as the explanation:
The change comes as a result of lower than originally projected NHL revenues for the lockout-shortened season.
No, that's not true. At all. Last year, they collected 3.3 billion, and without the lockout, we would have expected them to be at 3.5 billion for the 2012-13 season. But, the lockout has knocked out 41% of the REGULAR season, and probably about 35% of the revenue stream (0% of playoffs ?are knocked out naturally, so, we'd expect them to lose less than 41%). So, if the 3.5 billion was the original expectation, then probably about 65% of that is the expectation for the shortened-season. That means maybe 2.3 billion$ is our expectation. And what did I see published last week? 2.4 billion$. So, revenue expectations are in-line.
NHPA agreeing to 10% escrow was just delaying the inevitable sticker shock to its member. Most players have no idea how escrow works, and this just makes it worse.
?I get it that NHL has to deal with fighting all the time, trying to reduce it as much as possible (and they've still got a ways to go). And the other sports don't have to deal with it much, so it's a "too rare to worry about". But, would it be that hard to put something in place?
One of the NHL's brilliant move was that any player that comes off the bench is not only a suspension to that player, but also to the coach. If let's say you make it that any player that throws a punch gets a 20-game suspension and his coach gets a 10-game suspension, will that eliminate it? Or, is it the same reasoning/excuse that the NHL uses that this is a "safety valve", that this is the best way to diffuse the situation?
What say you?
?Just fantastic! Video starts at 1:35, but his preamble provides decent understanding too. If you want to skip, just go to the last two minutes, where he explains in slo-mo his reasoning.
The hockey world was at its finest with the 1987 Canada Cup (held before the 1987-88 season), which was Mario Lemieux's coming out party, and the historical pairing with Wayne Gretzky (arguably the two best players ever, at their peak, and playing on the same line). Preceding that however, in place of the A?ll Star game in 1987 (for the 1986-87 season), they held a two-day tournament, between NHLers and Russians.
BPro was offering their suggestion as to how to improve the WBC, and their first suggestion reminded me of the above.
?This is a total hockey rating, presented at Sloan. It has many elements of how I do (or did anyway) my hockey analysis. It also has similar elements to work from Brian MacDonald. This is an extensive plus/minus look that considers not only goals, not only shots, but every single event.
But, I didn't see any talk about adjusting for goalies, which I know is something I brought up with Brian, when I peer-reviewed his work. I'm also surprised that the "per N units" is the same N for forwards and defensemen, considering that the average D plays 20 minutes and the average F plays 15. And I wouldn't be surprised if their results have a problem considering there's a huge bias in terms of the top players being (hugely disproportionately) forwards.
I'm also not sure how they handled PP and PK. And, I didn't really get the penalties.
As long as Michael and James continue to refine and update their work, it looks promising. The whole thing is very Markov-type, which is ultimately the best way to handle it.
The NHL and NHLPA are working toward realignment. (Weirdly last year, NHL tried to do it on their own, and NHLPA rejected it.) They are settling into a four-division setup, with the Eastern conference two divisions with eight teams each and the Wester conference two divisions with seven teams each.?
The first question is if this is unfair on its own. As Tyler noted however:
According to Jeff Sagarin, since 2005-06, the Eastern Conference has had 6, 7, 4, 9, 5, 8 and 6 of the top 16 teams in the NHL. They still got 56 playoff spots over that time, despite having just 45 teams who were amongst the 16 best in the NHL.
You can also think about MLB, which had until now 16 teams in the NL and 14 in the AL. Both leagues sent the same number of teams, and since the AL is the stronger league, that actually worked out pretty well for the last decade. That is, both leagues, in total, spend about the same amount in salary, so it would seem right that they both send the same number of teams. (I'd like to see the payroll breakdowns in the NHL, and see if they conform to the Sagarin ratings.)
Anyway, the Eastern conference in the NHL has been lucky all these years, so, to the extent that you have a different number of teams, it seems perfectly acceptable that it's the Eastern conference that gets the two extra teams.
Next is the play-in game. Rather than have the top four teams in each division advance, they've decided that the top three advance, and then the 4th place of one division plays the 5th place of the other division. The question therefore is what is the "fairest" way to have that setup.
1. Should it simply be a one-game affair (at the home of the 4th place team)?
2. Should it be a best two of three? (And in that case, should they make it the first two at the home of the 4th place team, or the last two for the 4th place team? Or alternating)
3. Or, as is my preference: the 4th place team simply needs to win one game, while the 5th place team needs to win two games? You get a double-drama of a series-clinching game. You get the obvious advantage to the 4th place team.
In all this, should we care about the imbalanced schedule? That say the 5th place team of the stronger division may have finished one point behind (or even ahead!) of the 4th place team of the weaker division?
This play-in setup will be a huge advantage to the division-winning team, since they'll have say an extra four days of rest compared to their opponent.
I'm all in favor of more playoffs, even to the point that all thirty teams are given a chance at a play-in.
?Craig and Joe ask that question.
I'll add a more objective twist: which town generates the most revenue per capita, or has the highest enterprise valuation per capita? In some towns, you walk around, and you know you are in a sports town. That's not the case with New York. Unless you are walking around Penn Station, you can walk for miles in Manhattan and not see a single sports jersey/sweater.
Who wants to do all the hard work?
Brian applies his work to the NHL to see what a 6-division and 4-conference setup looks like.?
Wendy once again highlights the fact that MLB is not changing the rules to reduce home plate collisions. While the NFL and NHL go to great lengths to limit unnecessary contact plays, MLB has not kept pace.
We had a fantastic thread two years ago. I'd suggest reading through that before commenting:
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/posey_at_the_plate/
?A reporter is found to fabricate quotes, then spends the day explaining how he misquoted himself.
This post on Wages of Wins says that Plus/Minus is bad. And I'm telling you it's a great stat, if adjusted. That post says:
Indeed, we’ve seen iteration after iteration of “Adjusted Plus Minus” to improve upon the fact that all prior versions are bad at explaining wins. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you bring complicated metrics to try and solve a problem, you will remain convinced the problem is complicated and thus be convinced the only thing to solve the problem with is a complicated metric.
While I like plus/minus in hockey, I love it in basketball. There's not enough scoring in hockey to get good samples, which is why we look for anything, like shots for and against. In basketball, there's scoring a-plenty.
Anyway, this is the actual fact: we are recording who was on the ice/court/field when a run/goal/point is scored. We are also recording this when you are NOT on the field of play. This is actually at the heart of WOWY (with or without you). And, as we've seen, it's fantastic. And others have used that same process for cathcer framing. We use it all the time with ERA: we compare the pitcher's ERA to the rest of his team or rest of the league. We do it with park factors. Patriot has also done it with an adjusted "Wins Above Team". It works fantastically well.
So, the idea of plus/minus is as old as analysis itself: what happens when the player is involved and what happens when he is NOT involved.
Now, the issue occurs when going from "involved" to "responsible". You could in fact look at TEAM BABIP for a team when Andrelton Simmons is, and is not, playing SS. This is a form of plus/minus. The issue is of course that Simmons may be on the field when alot of balls are hit, except he's not responsible for most of them. We solve this problem by putting Simmons on the field for 50,000 balls in play. Unfortunately, that's a long career's worth, and we can't wait that long.
So, that's what we have: we have a signal, and we have the noise. We make our adjustments to reduce the noise so that that signal can come through.
In 1986, Mark Howe was an astounding +85 (as was Brad McCrimmon equally high). The Flyers were +74, meaning that when Mark Howe was not on the ice, the rest of the team was a negative. Now, we don't know if it was Howe and/or McCrimmon, or the rest of the defensemen were terrible, but what we do know was that it was an enormous gulf. There's signal in there. There's noise too.
Which is why we live for sample size. Which is why the work I did with catchers is as powerful as it is. Not only do I have the sample size, but I also have the benefit that catchers have been exposed to dozens and in some case over a hundred, different pitchers in their careers.
If you don't like plus/minus, fine, whatever. But calling it bad means you've come to a conclusion. And that conclusion won't hold.
There are undoubtedly two marquee events at the Winter Olympics: figure skating, and men's hockey. For figure skaters, the Olympics is a tremendous marketing opportunity for them. They can parlay that exposure into skating "tours". Hockey however is much different. They already have their own league. The exposure helps when they can show the games live and in normal viewing times. Socchi, Russia doesn't help them so much.
In addition, the IOC has broadcast and distribution rights. Whatever "Olympic ideals" is supposed to exist in the utopian world has to come face-to-face with the "absolute power corrupts absolutely" with our real-world Bayesian prior. The NHL, and NHLPA, want their cut of the action. So, now it seems they're trying to figure out the value for each party:
In return for sending its players to the Sochi Olympics, the NHL is trying to acquire video, photograph and website rights for the games. The IIHF and the IOC retain those exclusive rights now.
The NHL began sending its players to the 1998 Games in Nagano, Japan, and continued through the 2010 Vancouver Games. Even though the NHL received great exposure by having its players take part in an Olympics in North America, disrupting the season does come with a cost.
The stopping of the season, the potential injury risk to players, and no tangible upside for the NHL are all factors that create doubt about whether the investment is good for the league.
?
First GM from Europe.
Kekalainen, who spent eight seasons with the NHL's St. Louis Blues from 2002-10 where he was involved in all facets of hockey operations, takes over a Columbus team that has not made the playoffs since 2009 and finished last overall in 2012.
Prior to working for the Blues, Kekalainen spent eight years with the Ottawa Senators as their top European scout and later as director of player personnel. He also played three seasons in the NHL with the Boston Bruins and Senators.
His resume reads like a standard resume of a GM, except for his birthplace?. Given the huge number of European players in the NHL, it's kind of weird that he's the first. I don't know how many hundreds of people have been GMs in the history of the NHL, but the odds that all of the best qualified had to be Canadian or American seems to be a stretch.
Similarly, how long before a woman takes the leap too? They're already part of the CHL. Hockey seems to be different from the other sports, as being a former player seems to be a pre-requisite. Which tells me that it's either a highly specialized job, or it's likely a very inefficient selection process.
?Several months back, I was arguing that the NHL needed to implement a Cap Benefit Recapture into the CBA, that it was incredibly silly they way they used to have it. Well, now they did it, but it seems there's some huge misunderstanding.
The way it should have always worked is this: if a player retires early, and ended up earning say 100MM$ in salary, but 90MM$ in cap-hit, then there's 10MM$ of cap-hit that was deferred. Since he retired early, it's time to pay the tax man. If he retired 2 years early, then you spread that 10MM$ deferral over those two years, and he gets a 5MM$ cap hit each year.
Simple and natural, something any accountant would do. So, what's the problem?
The problem arises with traded players. If a player is traded early in his contract, such that a team might have paid a player 70MM$ in contract, but 40MM$ in cap-hit, there's 30MM$ of deferral. But, the player continues to play for his other team. That team will eventually have years were the cap-hit is higher than the contract paid. THAT EXTRA HIT REDUCED THE DEFERRAL OF THE ORIGINAL TEAM. I do not know this for a fact, but it seems plainly obvious that this is what has to happen.
The entire point is that once a player retires, you look at his total contracts paid, and his total cap-hits charged. The difference is the deferral that has to get paid. And that gets charged to the team that traded him. So, it's ridiculous to think that if Weber retires one year early that he'll have a 32MM$ cap charge. That's because then he'd have a greater cap charge than salary.
So, it's very simple: lifetime contract = lifetime cap-hit. That's it. That's the only thing you have to remember. If there's a shortfall, it's THAT shortfall that gets charged. It's not the interim shortfall when he was traded. That may be the STARTING POINT, but that amount eventually gets reduced as the years go on.
?For those wishing to start their own threads, I have a discussion board setup.
Phil makes the point that while the spread in offense and defense is roughly the same in MLB, the NHL has a larger spread in defense than offense. And the reason should be clear: goalies. I agree with basically everything Phil said in there.?
Adam turns his view over to hockey.
One thing I've been meaning to do, but maybe Adam will be inspired to do it: how many years do players wait? The BBWAA is notorious for not having "1st timers". But, the NHL voters don't see it that way at all. There was one year where they had five guys that would have gone in the first time, but they have a strict max-4 limit, so one guy (Larionov) had to wait a year.
The Hockey Hall of Fame elects about 25 players every 10 years, which makes it a medium hall, and right around the size that the average Straight Arrow reader expects from baseball.
So, that's what I like about the hockey process:
1. players have a 3-year waitlist, not 5 years (and waive the 3-year rule under exceptional circumstances)
2. deserving players are elected extremely quickly
3. they don't get a year without electing SOMEONE?
4. had active Hall of Famers (unretired Gordie Howe, Mario, Guy Lafleur)
5. you never, and I mean never, have the annual drone of the Jack Morris type of candidate... if a guy like that is on the horizon (Clark Gillies?), he's quietly elected, there may be some consternation, and then it's over and done with... Hall of Fame is really about celebration of players elected, and not hand-wringing about players ignored (Housley, Gilmour, etc)
Nov 23 14:15
Layered wOBAcon
Nov 22 22:15
Cy Young Predictor 2024
Oct 28 17:25
Layered Hit Probability breakdown
Oct 15 13:42
Binomial fun: Best-of-3-all-home is equivalent to traditional Best-of-X where X is
Oct 14 14:31
NaiveWAR and VictoryShares
Oct 02 21:23
Component Run Values: TTO and BIP
Oct 02 11:06
FRV v DRS
Sep 28 22:34
Runs Above Average
Sep 16 16:46
Skenes v Webb: Illustrating Replacement Level in WAR
Sep 16 16:43
Sacrifice Steal Attempt
Sep 09 14:47
Can Wheeler win the Cy Young in 2024?
Sep 08 13:39
Small choices, big implications, in WAR
Sep 07 09:00
Why does Baseball Reference love Erick Fedde?
Sep 03 19:42
Re-Leveraging Aaron Judge
Aug 24 14:10
Science of baseball in 1957
THREADS
October 24, 2023
NHL Edge - Player Tracking
June 30, 2023
Bayesian Goalie
March 27, 2023
NHL Draft, using the Gold Points
January 30, 2023
Science behind the genius of Lidstrom
January 14, 2023
WOWY Hasek
October 30, 2022
Connor McDavid, plus/minus, and Pitcher Won-Loss records
April 28, 2022
NHL realignment: Insane Proposal
December 16, 2021
Did Gretzky face easier goalies to score on than Ovechkin?
August 22, 2021
WOWY Patrick Roy: Every season with and without Roy
May 28, 2021
Head-to-head or Common-opponent: what’s a better indicator in the NHL?
October 22, 2020
How close is Mookie Betts to being great enough to be in the Hall of Fame
June 18, 2020
Floating Replacement Level
April 02, 2020
Do fans prefer small or large post-seasons?
March 06, 2020
Introducing Naive WAR for the NHL
October 21, 2019
Signal of Plus/Minus wrapped tightly with the bias of mates in a sea of Random Variation
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Complete Archive – By Date
FORUM TOPICS
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Apr 12 09:43 What if baseball was like survivor? You are eliminated ...
Nov 24 09:57 Win Attribution to offense, pitching, and fielding at the game level (prototype method)
Jul 13 10:20 How to watch great past games without spoilers