Rocket Science, Brain Surgery and Hockey?

Statistics conquer the NHL. The Geeks win the Stanley Calcuator

I know this far off any topic I've ever written on, but I'm a hockey fan, a long-suffering Blues fan. My addiction to the game goes back to when the St. Louis Blues entered the NHL in the 1960s, when the league doubled in size. The Blues went to the Stanley Cup Finals three years in a row. Remarkable for an expansion team, right? Not really. 

The way the NHL contrived the Stanley Cup playoffs then meant that an expansion ("Western" Division) team always played in the finals against an established real NHL team. Yet, after a slow half-season start, the Blues were by far, the best of the worst. The NHL altered that playoff system after three years. I guess folks in Canada got bored of seeing one-sided finals where the gentlemanly Habs resisted the urge to crush the Blues by ten goals in four straight. Instead of entertaining their fans, the Montreal Canadians mercifully chose to stop their scoring at three goals every game. Meanwhile they rationed the Blues to one goal a game. This demonstrates to me the Canada is definitely the most humanitarian country on Earth, but after two years of that, enough was enough.

In the third year, the Blues went up against the Boston Bruins. They weren't gentlemen. (Though the Blues brought that on themselves. In the pre-season, Blue's forward Wayne Maki fractured Bruin's defenseman Ted Green's skull in one the most brutal stick assault in hockey history. Players didn't wear helmets then.) 

I've been a puck sucker ever since. Even though I could see all the mirrors and strings, the Blues still looked so promising to a eight-year old who had never seen the game before. That was prior to when the Philadelphia Flyers awakened him to the sordid reality of the game. 

Off topic: If you know anything about pro hockey, it's not hard to see why the Blues were the very best of six expansion teams in those early years. Their coach the first three seasons was a young Scotty Bowman, who went on to navigate other franchises to nine Stanley Cups, (with Montreal Canadians mere five years after the Blues, and four years in a row) and win a record 1,467 games. The Blues next coach was Al Arbour who won four consecutive Stanley Cups with the New York Islanders. Blues teams during that time just seemed to have more on the ball when they played within their league.

There's a revolution in hockey right now, as enterprising nerds have discovered how make statistics from the chaos on the ice. Now there are stats and variants of stats and derivatives of stats, literally dozens of them. Every team now has its own statistical department, with its own trade-secret stats. I wouldn't doubt if there's a lot of corporate espionage going on between teams. Every player has stats attached to him, and his career now depends on it. There are the simple things that nobody bothered to count before like hits, save percentage, shot percentage. Then it begins to sound a little complicated: there's Corsi and Fenwick (those sound like a Royal Canadian detective team). Then you have the rink divided up into "Zone Starts," offensive, defensive, neutral zone. It makes a hockey rink into a mobius strip with neither beginning nor end.

But that's just the beginning. There are statistics derived from the basic statistics, Corsi Rel QoC and Corsi Rel QoT. (Both are obviously named after rivers in Quebec.) At least baseball can keep their stat abbreviations to four letters or less. Without knowing math, you can tell analysis is getting heavy when the abbreviations need to be abbreviated. All they have to do here is substitute Greek letters and hockey fans will all be trained in calculus. (I'm not going to try to explain the statistics. No, other websites do that quite well.)

Things have seriously changed in hockey when a coach gets fired because he doesn't do what the statistics department tells him to do (and he loses games as a result). That happened to Randy Carlyle with the Toronto Maple Leafs last month.

Yet, I think the analytics are improving the game. One thing they found out immediately was the tough, slow, stay-at-his-own-end defenseman was actually a liability to a team. My father always said, and repeated recently that hockey players just don't play hard until the playoffs. That's when the real hockey season begins, and the regular season should be called the exhibition games. Plenty of others say that the real season starts in April. I told him that's longer be true. Players know that their careers depend on their statistics. The ones that float through the regular season are going to be out, and/or earn several million dollars less if they relax. I can honestly say the game is faster now. It's hard to make an NHL game boring. If a player is slacking, he can't hide it anymore. His statistics will reveal it.

 However, for me, it seems like every hockey article I read cites a statistic I've never heard of or shows an utterly baffling graph. Just look at this one posted in today's Yahoo Puck Daddy:

A number scrum in hockey looks much like a scrum on the ice, only more so.

What could be clearer? Now everyone understands hockey.