Brett Hull Gets His Due and Brenden Shanahan is a Beast

The last two hockey weeks have triggered some feelings of nostalgia for me. First, one of my all-time favorite players, and one of three members of the Dallas stars who were so influential on me growing up that I have used their numbers in some fashion for every pin and password that I have, was rightfully inducted into the hall of fame. Brett Hull - the current Dallas Stars Ambassador of Fun - is in the hall alongside his pops and other great players across time.

When Brett came to the Dallas Stars I was around 12 years old and was about to start my first year of pee-wee hockey. I was going to play for the Dallas Jr. Stars that year, but had to make a very important decision on the number that I would wear. I had a lot of idols to choose from, but once Golden Brett announced his signing to my favorite team, his #16 was a no brainer choice. Yes, the "Little Ball of Hate" Pat Verbeek was already #16 on the Stars so Hull had to wear #22, but that didn't matter to me, because as a Hull fan he was always going to be seen as #16 to me(after Verbeek left the Stars Hull did reclaim his famed number - though he did win the cup as #22 and lost as #16 but that's a whole new discussion).

Brett did not disappoint on the ice in his time in Dallas between winning the Cup in Buffalo, delivering an unbelievable opening to the new millenium, netting his 600th and 601st goals on New Year's eve and ushering in the Hullenium, and many others before and after. Off the ice, Brett was funny and engaging and was simply likable. Hull said recently "I got to play with wonderful players, and I made sure when I played I was just having fun. I figured if I was having fun, then the game was going to go the right way for me." That kind of attitude is what made Hull a special player and a special guy.

The second piece of news that interested me this week was the retirement of Brendan Shanahan. As a guy that I always had to watch as an opponent to my teams (as a native Coloradan I have hoped on the Avs bandwagon when the Stars were out of contention) I was a bit scared when he was on the ice. He seemed to always make something happen, with either a big hit or just occupying space in front of the net, but he also had the ability, much like Brett, to get lost on the ice and then reappear as he was following through on a one-time that ended up in the back of the net. In addition to his undeniable knack to score goals, Shanahan was one tough S.O.B.



When I heard Shanny was retiring I immediately went to hockeydb to look at his career stats to think about whether he will be a hall of fame inductee. In my estimation, and likely anyone who follows hockey, he will be a shoe in. The most striking statistics that Shanahan put together were that while he amassed a total 656 goals, he also managed to spend 2,489 minutes in the penalty box. No other NHL player has gained entry into the 600/2000 club, which means Brendan Shanahan is a BEAST. The 600/2000 club, or for now "Club Shanny" has become a fascinating idea of study for me. Considering that I label myself as a fan of the economics of the game, I though I would turn this fascination into something quantitative. The question that I wanted answered was, controlling for games played, who else should, would, or is likely to join Club Shanny. Below is a table listing the career stats of every NHL player who has scored at least 600 goals, and a few other players who on my own intuition I thought may be on pace to make the 600/2000 mark.

The blue shading shows players who at their per game pace of scoring and sitting in the penalty box would or will join Club Shanny if they do or had played in the same 1,524 games as Brendan (The names in red signify active players). Cam Neely was really no surprise to me for goal scoring or shenanigans, but I really let it creep out of my mind what an offensive talent that Tkachuk had. The two other guys that I think should get mentioned for the offensive might, and general ruggedness are Pat Verbeek and Rick Tocchet. Had each of them made it to play 1500+ games, they were dangerously close to being on pace for 600 goals and yes, 3000 penalty minutes! That's the equivalent of spending 50 entire games in the penalty box. I guess you don't end up looking like Tocchet or being called the Little Ball of Hate for nothing. Impressive stuff guys.

Wild Bill Wednesday: Hockey Bears

(eds. note, this post is dated 11/04/09)

The hockey season is 14 games old. I know that some teams have played more than 14, some less, but I don’t care. The Bruins have played 14 games, and the B’s are my B-arometer (see what I did there?) as to how the season is progressing. After middling through the first 2 weeks with just 13 points, it looks like the B’s will be hard pressed to put up the absurd 116 points as last year’s President’s Trophy runners up. The loss of Savard and Looch have certainly not helped the scoring, as the B’s have mustered just three goals in their last four games (1-3).

As a casual (gasp!) hockey fan, one of the aspects of the game I find most endearing is violence. By violence, I mean cheap shots and fights. By cheap shots, I mean Marty McSorely (little known fact: Marty McSorely appeared opposite recently bankrupt Nic Cage in the 1997 epic Con Air!) and by fights I mean Milan “Looch” Lucic.



With McSorely last seen on Spike TV’s Pros vs Joes and Looch out 3-5 more weeks with a broken finger, it’s been tough to get my B’s violence fix. Luckily, other members of the Ursus genus have been more than picking up the slack…with that, we head to outer space.

If you are confused by that transition, I don’t blame you. Or you don’t watch enough youtube, in which case it is entirely your fault. Either way, you would be remiss if you have not seen the 2007-2008 pre-game video for the Alaska-Fairbanks Nanooks.



The video captures rare footage of a Space Bear, and the bear is SUPER pissed. He must have had the premonition that the B’s would get out to such a shitty start in ’09, and he decides that the only place to make sure the B’s know how he feels is, you guessed it, Alaska! Over the course of his journey from deep space to Alaska, he/she manages to destroy the Hubble Telescope ($6.0 billion); the city of Anchorage (which had not seen such a disaster since the Good Friday Earthquake of 1964); the Port of Anchorage (which receives 95% of all Alaskan imports); and the roof of the Carlson Center (which hosts, among others, the University of Alaska-Fairbanks Nanooks hockey team and the Larry the Cable Guy comedy tour). Conservative estimates put total damage inflicted at $56,600,450,965. An intergalactic menace hasn’t had this big an effect on Alaska since Sarah Palin!

Not to be outdone, Earth Bears are also wreaking havoc.



If you step out onto the Palin’s porch and glance across the Bering Strait, you might catch a glimpse of one of our planets most dangerous creatures. I write, obviously, of the Grizzly Bear on Hockey Skates. Russians, with their flair for the dramatic, asked the question that was on the rest of the worlds mind, but were just a little non-Communist to ask: “If humans can play hockey, why can’t we have bears play hockey?” Unlike in America, Russia is completely covered in ice. For this reason, they host their circuses on ice. I use the term “their” because it is in fact a Russian State Circus company who puts on these shows. While training for an upcoming performance of the impeccably titled “Bears on Ice”, 25 year old Dmitry Potapov was killed by a 5-year old Grizzly bear. Though the Krygyztan Ministry of Culture and Information stated that it was unclear why the bear attacked, nearly severing one of Potapov’s legs while dragging him across the ice by his neck, I think it is fairly obvious. Potapov had to have been a Canadiens fan, amirite!?!

Ahhhh...The Return of Captain Blood

I know this post is a bit late in timing, but I wanted to drop my two cents on the issue of the low bridge hit. First off we saw two prime examples recently of well executed hip checks by Steve Ott and Rob Scuderi. Unfortunately both the Ott and Scuderi hits have been removed from you tube, so I will just have to verbally describe them.

The Ott hit was an open ice hip check directed at the thigh region of Carlo Colaiacovo, which was inflicted about one second after the puck was gone, and resulted in Colaiacovo flipping over Ott's back and landing on the ice. Carlo got up pretty gingerly after the hit and has been out since with an "upper-body injury."

The Scuderi hit was a well-timed hip check on Jason Chimera that happened along the boards near the attacking blueline. Scuderi, to gain the most leverage, got very low and hit Chimera right below the knee, sending him over top of him and landing face first into the ice. Chimera was cut, but was not injured on the play.

My thoughts were that both of these hits were good old-fashioned hip checks that have been a part of the game of hockey as long it has been around, and is a crucial part of the physical aspect of the sport. I understand that the league has a clipping penalty for delivering a hit at or below the knees of an opposing player, but in the split second that Scuderi had to deliver the hit, his training as a hockey player tells him that unless he wants to get trucked over by a forward coming in at full speed, he had better get himself low to the ice. Is that a dirty play? I really don't think so.

Ott's hit was a little bit of a different story. He was skating towards Colaiacovo and delivered the hit about a second after the puck had been moved. After watching the video a few times through, it was clear to me that Ott went into a hitting motion prior to the puck leaving Colaiacovo's stick, and there was really no way that Ott could have pulled back. Furthermore, even if Ott had the ability to pull back in that one second, I don't really think that he should have. Part of playing an aggressive style of hockey, which Marc Crawford certainly promotes, is for your attacking forwards to be as physical as possible with the opposing defensemen, so that they not only have less time and space, but so they are slower mentally because they have to think about taking a hit. If Ott does not finish his check there, and let's be honest, players finish checks all over the ice seconds after the puck has been moved, it's what you are taught the second you are allowed to hit in youth hockey, than he is giving up on his team's system and is diminishing his value on the ice.

The aftermath of these two scenarios left Ott with a two game suspension and Scuderi with just a fine. I can more or less understand Ott's suspension as he is a repeat offender, but Scuderi really is as well (See his hit last year on Keith Ballard) and so the inconsistency between the punishments is both puzzling and frustrating, but that inconsistency is the consistency with NHL discipline. I don't really like getting into that debate, but Greg Wyshynski at Puck Daddy does, and has something to say in this circumstance.

All in all, I hope that the suspension and fine for Ott and Scuderi do not creep into their hockey playing minds the next time they are going to deliver a hit, because this type of physicality is a traditional part of hockey, a fun part of hockey (for players and fans) and with out a doubt belong in the game.

An Update on Faceoffs

My last post discussed the importance of faceoffs on winning in the NHL, and looked at data for the current season to see what was happening at the empirical level. As we discovered, winning faceoffs had only a slightly positive correlation with winning, and that the variability around the estimated effect was very high.

As promised I took a look at a larger data sample to see what effect winning faceoffs had on winning games. I used data for the 2006-07, 2007-08 and 2008-09 seasons and found some interesting results. Below is the chart showing estimated standings points based on the coefficients estimated from a regression using face off wins and number of face offs taken as control variables. While the coefficient of determination for this regression was low with an R-Squared was around 9% (meaning that around 90% of the variability in the model was not captured by winning face offs), all of the dependent variables were statistically significant at the 5% confidence level.

As can be seen, the positive correlation seen in the data from this year is emphatically washed out by data for a 3-year period. There is really no discernible conclusions to draw from the statistics over time other than face offs do not have a very meaningful effect on winning, as a stand alone measure.

I have some trouble accepting the conclusion that consistently winning face offs through out a season does not lead to more opportunity to win. Perhaps a more telling statistic would be percentage of games that a team wins the head to head face off win category, as that may smooth out any noise introduced into the model by specific games which feature a lot of face offs (this is, on a team by team basis controlled by the model, but not on a specific game by game basis) and will isolate who was better that game, which have more implications on winning. As it is measured now, as a summation of wins across a season, may erase the descriptive value of the statistic.

Also, face off wins are not seperated by a win in a scoring zone versus the neutral zone. If the neutral zone face off wins were taken out of the model, thus removing face off scenarios which are less likely to lead to scoring situations, we may see more correlations to face off wins leading to wins. These are studies which are heavily data intensive and thus are time consuming to execute, however I think that this is a fascinating aspect  of the game to examine, and that there are value-centered results that can come from finding meaningful analysis to what the data show. Time to dig deeper.

The Importance of Faceoffs

A statistical topic that I have frequently heard arise in conversations about this young season is the importance of winning faceoffs. Anyone who has played the game at a high level, and really anyone that is an experienced spectator of high level hockey understands that winning faceoffs are one of the little things that have a tremendous impact on the game. However, I started thinking, what can winning faceoffs really show in terms of winning (measured by standing points) in a statistical sense. Taking the faceoff data for this year (yes i know it is a small sample size), I ran a regression which estimated standings points controlling for faceoffs won and the number of faceoffs taken. From there I plotted the number of faceoffs won by each team and their actual standings points, along with the estimated standings points derived from the linear coefficients from the regression.

As you can see from the line showing estimated points, there is an overall slightly positive correlation between winning faceoffs and winning games. However, looking at the line showing actual points, there is a high degree of variability as a team wins more faceoffs. While heavily robust conclusions cannot be drawn from this data because of the sample size, my initial thoughts are that simply winning faceoffs really does not have a profound effect on winning games, and is a statistic that while may help proxy for who is working harder in the circle, or even which team is controlling puck play, does not capture enough intangible exogenous factors to be significant in terms of wins. If this is accurate, than the next time an analyst blames a clubs poor play (or some aspect of their play, i.e. power play or penalty kill) on the inability to win faceoffs, you may want to question whether that is really the issue, or if there are more significant factors that are causing that team to lose games.

I plan on expanding on this study throughout the season, and will perhaps venture to look at seasons past as well.

Stars-Bruins Rematch

Yes I know that Steve Ott is hurt, and that Sean Avery is back in the Big Apple, but I think there will be some fire from the Stars for sure to avenge the loss from last season that started their downward spiral into an out-of-sync hockey club.

If you remember, after this game, which featured a combined 146 penalty minutes, Mike Modano, a generally quiet guy called out his team for turning the game into a circus. While I don't see a similar outcome happening this year, in terms of shenanigans, I think this will be a spirited game. If we are lucky Krys Barch will continue his best big bully impression by beefing with Milan Lucic. Barch has only dropped the gloves once this year, and it did not go well, but look for him to bounce back with a big bout. To his credit, Barch did take on Sheldon Souray (or Studly McWonderbomb if you have ever heard Daryl Reaugh call a Dallas - Edmonton game), who tossed him around a bit before they were seperated.

Anyway, look for the Stars top 6 to overwhelm the Bruins defense, and for Turco to continue the top form of play that he displayed on Wednesday against the predators. If the Bruins are going to break out of their early season funk, they are going to need to capitalize against the Stars shaky penalty kill, and limit the Stars forecheck by having Tim Thomas help move pucks out of the zone. While the Bruins power play may help keep them in the game, I dont think the Bruins are ready to handle the Stars forward pressure in their first road game, especially with the confidence that the Stars wingers have shown early one. My prediction is a 4-1 Stars victory.

Enjoy the game.

The Blog

As can be seen from the title and the about me, this blog will be devoted to the intersection of hockey, business and economics. I hope that my ideas about how the game is played and is measured and analyzed are both interesting and thought provoking and contribute to the enrichment of the hockey universe. Enjoy!

Ian