Saturday, January 03, 2015
Possession Time
[quote]The Steelers won time of possession in first half 20:55 to 9:05 which just goes to prove ... they still keep that stupid stat. -- Joe Posnanski[/quote]
I asked my Twitter followers for the difference between possession time in NHL and NFL. The basic angle was efficiency in scoring.
In football, you can have the ball for 3 minutes or 7 minutes, and it doesn't really matter. What matters is how many yards you move the ball, regardless of how long it takes. And the more yards you can move the ball, the more you'll likely score. In hockey, possession time is more akin to moving the ball downfield rather than just possession time.
From that standpoint, having possession of the puck in the defensive zone is not really a net plus, at least, it's not anything close to the huge plus the possession time is in the offensive zone. Which is why shots taken is an interesting proxy for possession time. Imagine if you will if we also tracked all the passes too. Now, we'd have a possession metric that would be shots + passes. But, we don't want possession time, but WEIGHTED possession time, where we weight possession time in the offensive zone more than in the defensive zone. And that would mean weighting shots taken more than passes.
Going back to the efficiency point: let's look at the Canadian Juniors. They've scored 29 goals and allowed 4. Of course, they score goals per shot at a better rate than average, and allow goals at a lower rate than average. They've taken 194 shots on goal (goals + saves) and have allowed 99. We also have to conclude that they take shots at a better rate per possession than average and vice versa. They've scored 88% of the goals, but because they are so efficient (and/or lucky) they've only taken 66% of the shots. And because they are so efficient at just taking shots, chances are, their (weighted) possession time is somewhat less, say they control the puck 62% of the time. And if you include the unweighted possession time, maybe they have the puck 57% of the time.
Something like that. The question therefore is how much can we learn if we track possession time by the three zones? We don't care about the possession time for the game in question, but what we can infer about the team's talent if we had that information. It's a different question, one that is not typically asked. But it's ultimately what we are after.
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