Analytics invasion NHL teams latest to welcome them, Penguins included
As a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, Samuel Ventura helped the Tartans club hockey team win a 2015 College Hockey East title recently. His biggest contribution to the sport might take place off the ice.
As a graduate student studying statistics at CMU, Ventura co-founded the hockey analytics web site War-on-Ice.com in August 2014. His goal was to develop enhanced statistics that could help teams analyze player performance beyond conventional methods such as goals and assists.
Ventura, a newly hired visiting assistant professor at CMU, belongs to a community of online hockey fanatics leading a movement to integrate enhanced statistics into player evaluation in the NHL. Similar to sabermetrics in baseball, enhanced statistics have slowly attracted mainstream attention, and, within the past year, a flurry of analytics-based hires has swept the NHL.
“Even if hockey is 90 percent random, smart teams would do what they can to gain an advantage in that remaining 10,” Ventura said. “Baseball is random, too. That's why we call baseball statistics ‘averages.’ ”
Penguins general manager Jim Rutherford made at least one such hire, bringing in Jason Karmanos as vice president of hockey operations, but the team declined interview requests for this article.
As early as 2006, hockey bloggers started presenting new statistics as a way to evaluate team and individual performance. It started with metrics that tracked offensive output by measuring how many shots a team generates with a particular player on the ice, a way to justify puck possession. The metrics backed the idea that teams that take more shots generate a higher number of scoring chances and limit scoring chances for opponents. NHL teams saw value in the new statistics and started to hire analytics consultants, including many bloggers who started the movement. James Mirtle, a hockey writer for the Globe and Mail newspaper based in Toronto, said today about 22 teams use analytics. Five years ago, it was 10 or fewer. Several of those teams hired analytics consultants before this season. The NHL recognized the interest in enhanced statistics and partnered with Germanbased data company SAP to give anyone access to accurate enhanced statistics in as close to real time as possible. The league rolled out an enhanced statistics page Feb. 20. In many ways, the movement continues to evolve
For instance, one of the original enhanced statistics, the Corsi relative score, measures a player’s shot attempts — including shots on goal, missed shots and blocked shots — compared to shots generated by the team when that player is not on the ice.
Ventura, recently named an assistant coach for CMU’s club hockey team, said that metric fails to account for the quality of a player’s teammates among other variables, but he has developed a model to put those numbers in context.
For example, the Corsi relative score — which the NHL calls “shot attempts relative” on its Web site — shows the Penguins generate offense at the highest rate with left winger Chris Kunitz, not star centers Sidney Crosby or Evgeni Malkin, on the ice. Kunitz leads the Penguins with a 5.5 Corsi relative score and a 10.2 Corsi relative score per 60 minutes, which means if Kunitz is on the ice for all 60 minutes , the Penguins would generate about 10 more shots than if he were on the bench. That might be one reason why Kunitz, despite a sub-par season, still is part of the Penguins offense.
“Just because Crosby’s not leading the league [in Corsi relative score] doesn’t mean he’s not the best player in the world,” Ventura said. “At the same time, just because a player doesn’t produce a lot of offense doesn’t mean he doesn’t have value.”