Testing my optimism

I thought this would be a fun exercise. I'll project every player's goal, assist, and point total. At the end, I'll add them up and see whether the totals make sense.

Ovechkin—40-50-90
Backstrom—25-55-80
Johansson—17-35-52
Erat—17-35-52
Grabovski—25-25-50
Brouwer—17-15-32
Laich—15-20-35
Perreault—15-25-40
Fehr—15-10-25
Chimera—10-10-20
Beagle—5-5-10
Ward—10-15-25

And throw in a little extra from Volpatti, Latta, and the other irregulars.

Green—15-40-55
Alzner—2-15-17
Carlson—10-30-40
Erskine—2-3-5
Hillen—2-8-10
Oleksy—1-9-10

And throw in a little extra for Strachan, Orlov, Kundratek, and other irregulars.

Holtby—0-2-2

Total: 243+ G, 407+ A, 650+ P

Let's say the irregulars bring that up to 245 goals. That's 2.99 goals per game—pretty reasonable, actually. In 2011-12, it would have ranked fourth in the league, and in 2010-11, fifth. (The Caps were fifth in the lockout-shortened season.)

Yeah, so I'll stick with these.

Pacific Division Thoughts

Lots of interesting storylines in this division, from potentially the last hoo-hah of Thornton, Marleau, and Boyle in San Jose, to seeing if Phoenix can rebound with Mike Ribeiro in the mix, Edmonton's experiment with saying they'll do things their fanbase loves (puck possession), seeing if Anaheim can become that decent puck possession team we've seen glimpses of each of the last two seasons, and, of course, John Tortorella versus Canadian media.

I vacillated a lot between Anaheim, Phoenix, and Edmonton—I can see a good case for any order there. I felt there was a lot of uncertainty with Vancouver. Other than that, I feel pretty good with my picks here...unless I missed something huge.

The Magical Metro Effect

A lot of people have discussed about how the Capitals will struggle in the new Metropolitan Division, being a borderline playoff team at best. Their arguments basically are derived from this:

Caps vs Southeast, last two seasons: 27-11-4 (a 113pt pace)
Caps vs Metro, last two seasons: 19-20-7 (an 80pt pace)

I have several issues with that reasoning.

AO/Backstrom WOWY

In the vein of what MC79 did here:

It's probably worth noting that the decline in 2011-12 was in large part thanks to Backstrom's injury—it led to Ovechkin being centered by players like Brooks Laich and Marcus Johansson instead. I'm guessing Green's injuries had to do with the downturn in 10-11 and 11-12, too.

Regardless, not a pretty picture.

TOIComp Effects, Part 1

When I ran the numbers for TOIComp, I was a little disappointed—but not surprised—that the spread between top and bottom competition (for valuable regulars) was so small. After all, we observe the same thing for Corsi Rel QoC, and differences at the season level in that metric don't appear to appreciably alter players' results. I felt that a similar study on TOIComp would be more work for the same result, but I'll do it anyway (after prompting from @garik16 and @pcunneen19).

Hopefully, there's something interesting in the data this time.

2013 TOIComp leaders

Here are the top 30 skaters by TOIComp. I only included the 609 skaters who played at least 36,000 man-minutes versus forwards—at three forwards per second, this is about 200 5v5 minutes. You can find the complete lists here, and I posted a preliminary version of the code here.
Top 30 vs F:

Rank	Player	F TOIComp
1	Phaneuf	16.58
2	Chara	16.47
	Girardi	16.47
4	Z. Michalek	16.41
5	Ladd	16.40
6	Marleau	16.39
7	Zetterberg	16.38
8	B. Gionta	16.37
9	Little	16.36
10	Kulemin	16.35
	Plekanec	16.35
12	Wheeler	16.33
	Brouwer	16.33
14	Kopecky	16.30
15	Ekman-Larsson	16.29
	Dupuis	16.29
	Fleischmann	16.29
18	Goc	16.28
19	Bogosian	16.27
	Bouwmeester	16.27
21	Pominville	16.26
22	Stepan	16.25
	Orpik	16.25
24	Carlson	16.24
	Giroux	16.24
26	Backstrom	16.23
	Weiss	16.23
28	McDonagh	16.22
29	Datsyuk	16.21
	Couture	16.21

The entire spread here is about 20 seconds—not exactly a lot. I'm a little more impressed by the offensive options here, since those guys will get ice time against the low-TOI defensive players when their team is down by a goal, meaning that in their tough minutes, they played an elevated TOIComp.

If you're surprised to see Backstrom here, given my post the other day, note that he still ranks behind Brouwer and Carlson, and he would have ranked behind Brooks Laich, but Laich didn't make the TOI cutoff.

And vs D:

Rank	Player	D TOIComp
1	Giroux	21.10
2	Pominville	21.08
3	St. Louis	21.04
	Stamkos	21.04
5	Vanek	21.01
6	Hodgson	20.99
7	Crosby	20.94
8	H. Sedin	20.90
	D. Sedin	20.90
	Voracek	20.90
11	Bozak	20.89
12	Ovechkin	20.88
	Moulson	20.88
14	Kessel	20.85
	Malkin	20.85
16	Tavares	20.84
17	E. Staal	20.83
	Van Riemsdyk	20.83
19	Hartnell	20.82
	Benn	20.82
	Perry	20.82
22	Kunitz	20.80
23	Boyes	20.79
24	Duchene	20.77
25	Conacher	20.76
	Semin	20.76
	Toews	20.76
	Burrows	20.76
29	Timonen	20.75
	Tlusty	20.75
	Saad	20.75
	Hossa	20.75

Lots of linemates here—no surprises. The spread is again only about 20 seconds from 1 to 30. A little interesting to see both Crosby and Malkin (I'm guessing that's a result of Malkin taking top opposition with Crosby out).

Caps TOIComp 07-10

In case you missed it, yesterday I broke down TOIComp for the three recent Caps coaches (Boudreau, Hunter, and Oates) to see how they deployed their players. To follow up, I want to look at Glen Hanlon's team in 07-08, followed by Boudreau's habits during the Ovechkin-led Caps' peak.

Caps TOIComp

It took awhile, but I finally got this done. (I'm still tweaking the code, so it'll be a few days before I publish it here.)

A few notes:

a) I calculated TOI/60 by dividing individual 5v5 TOI by team 5v5 TOI (only counting games in which the player played). This differs from Behind the Net's TOI/60, which is 5v5 (and 6v5) TOI per game.
b) The bubble size is total 5v5 TOI this season (well, almost—it's actually the amount of man-seconds played against forwards. Let's just say that this only differs from time on ice when a team does not put three forwards on the ice).
c) Small sample caveats apply to the smaller bubbles, and remember context and line changes and such will play a role.

Red is forwards, blue are D. Hover over a bubble for additional information.

Ideas for a touches app

With all the coding I've been doing recently (both for my NHL code and for real-life projects) I got to thinking about maybe writing a puck-tracking app. I've written something similar for tracking shot locations for basketball, and I thought the only changes I'd have to make would be to track the location of the mouse, not just clicks, and somehow incorporate a clock as well as figure out a way to separate carries from passes and dumps as well as changes of possession. One person could chart the movement of the puck, and someone else, watching later, could match that information up to which players handled the puck. Not only do we quickly consolidate the scoring chance, zone entry, and zone exit projects (the latter two of which are looking for help for next season), but we add a ton of data on top of that.

Then, I remembered this article from Arctic Ice Hockey. Tracing the path of a puck on a tablet is much faster and more accurate, I'm guessing, than tracing the path on a computer screen. One person could track the movement, and one person the players, as before. Since so many people have iPads, I thought about writing an app, but then I saw it costs $99 to get a developer's license for a year—more than I want to spend for just one app. But it's free (I think) to put up Android apps, a lot of people have Android tablets or phones, and thanks to this tool I discovered from MIT, it might be surprisingly straightforward to get this thing up and tested relatively quickly.

Before I start, I'd like some feedback.

a) Do you think it's feasible to track touches for entire games? (It would basically need to be done without looking at the tablet/phone at all.)

b) How would you design the app?

Obviously, I think the answer to (a) is "yes." To (b), here's my vision:

Ribeiro will be missed

One thing I've been meaning to do for awhile is look at how good a playmaker Mike Ribeiro is at even strength (along the lines of this post examining other top playmakers, like Sidney Crosby, Henrik Sedin, and Pavel Datsyuk).

If you look at Ribeiro's Behind the Net player card, you'll notice that he consistently has a very good on-ice shooting percentage. That does not mean that he is a good playmaker by itself, though: good players play with other good players, and good scorers can elevate shooting percentage though their own efforts (shooting skill, like Steven Stamkos and Ilya Kovalchuk, or getting to better locations, like Alexander Semin with his little toe-drag before every wrist shot). But Ribeiro in particular doesn't really shoot or score enough to elevate that on-ice shooting percentage himself, and he's usually been a second-line center, so it's likely that he does have some significant playmaking skill that elevates his on-ice shooting percentage to top-line level. The question is, how much, and how much will the Capitals suffer as a result.

Picking the European contenders

To follow up from my post over the weekend picking USA and Canada, I continue by picking Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Admittedly I'm not familiar with the talent in the SHL, SM Liiga, and KHL, so I'll leave some roster spots open. In Vancouver, Sweden brought one G, one D, and two F that were not playing in the NHL (and one of them was Peter Forsberg), and Finland brought one G, one D, and three F, so I'll leave one roster spot open at each position for the the two top Scandinavian teams. Russia, on the other hand, brought nine KHL players—three D and six F—but four were in the NHL the previous season (Dmitri Kalinin, Sergei Fedorov, Viktor Kozlov, Alexander Radulov). I'll just leave at least three forward and two defense spots open, maybe more.

Pretending to be an Olympic GM

Since everyone has been doing these now that an agreement for NHLers to go to the 2014 Olympics has been reached, I figured I'd have a go, too.

Division D is rough

Some of the yellow ones could have gone either way, and I might have been a bit generous with the greens. It's also worth noting that it's tough to judge the West teams moving east because there was no interconference play. (If you follow the people that I do on Twitter, you know that quite a few fans of Western Conference teams thought the West was much better than the East this year. Not sure I believe that, especially with the emergence of Montreal as a strong possession team.) That being said, certainly looks like the Capitals got stuck in the tougher conference—the one with better team quality and more teams competing for the same eight playoff spots—and perhaps in the toughest division as well.

Unless George McPhee makes a major upgrade to the team between now and October (hint: signing Grabovski would do the trick), the Capitals don't stand out from the many second-tier teams in the East. (The first tier would be Detroit, Boston, Montreal, Pittsburgh, and maybe Ottawa.) That means that there's a realistic shot Washington misses the playoffs. The same goes for every other second-tier team.

I really hope this is somehow all worth it in the end for Caps land.

• Boston—lost Seguin, Peverley, and Ference, added Iginla and Eriksson. Not sure they covered their losses, exactly, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt: they have young D that could step in.
• Montreal—did the Canadiens do anything?
• Tampa Bay—added Filppula, lost Lecavalier. Meh.
• Florida—lost Weiss, but he was hurt most of the year, anyway. Young team, but I'm not convinced their youth will lead to rapid improvement immediately.
• Detroit—lost Filppula, added Weiss and Alfredsson. Sounds like a win.
• Buffalo—Re-acquired Tallinder.
• Ottawa—lost Alfredsson, but signed MacArthur and should have Erik Karlsson healthy again.
• Toronto—net loss of talent up front, but Randy Carlyle will actually play Clarkson more than he did Grabovski and MacArthur (who couldn't do much good on the bench or in the bottom six).
• Columbus—added Horton, get a full year of Gaborik.
• Washington—full year of Erat and Laich, no slow start again (probably)
• New Jersey—lost Kovalchuk and Clarkson, got Clowe, who doesn't replace either of them. Old team, too.
• Philadelphia—added Lecavalier and Streit. Still need to dump a contract, but even if it's Coburn, I'm calling this a net win.
• Carolina—nothing to note here. Skinner should bounce back, and I anticipate better possession numbers from Eric Staal and Alexander Semin, but I'm not certain.
• N.Y. Islanders—young team got better as the year went along, but lost Streit and Boyes.
• Pittsburgh—will have more health from Crosby and Letang.
• N.Y. Rangers—new coach...dunno what will happen here.
• Colorado—MacKinnon is one of those guys I think will be a game-changer right from the start. Also, more from Ryan O'Reilly.
• Chicago—nothing much to note here. Don't like Handzus staying in the lineup, but they ditched Bolland (who wasn't as good last season as he was a few years ago) and have young players ready to step in.
• St. Louis—young team that replaced Perron with Paajarvi and added Roy, who may or may not be an impact player (he used to be, but he's been hurt a lot recently)
• Winnipeg—Yawn.
• Nashville—Added Seth Jones and a bunch of bottom-six forwards. Okay...
• Dallas—I like adding Seguin for Eriksson. Throw in Gonchar, Peverley, and Horcoff, and this team is better.
• Minnesota—Lots and lots of good youth here.
• Vancouver—Lost Roy, but he was hurt a lot.
• Phoenix—lost Gordon, got Ribeiro. Net possession negative.
• Anaheim—Yawn.
• Calgary—Already bad team, lost Iginla and Bouwmeester via trade, and not enough youth to compensate.
• Los Angeles—sometimes they seem like they build with Corsi, sometimes they trade for Robyn Regehr and sign him to extensions while letting Rob Scuderi walk.
• Edmonton—lots of really good youth (i.e. first-overall picks). Also may not have a single AHL-level D playing in the NHL this year, which is a departure from recent history.
• San Jose—Yawn.

Free agency targets--Sign Grabovski!

My take on notable UFAs and trade targets, and whether they may be a fit in Washington:

Thoughts on the draft

I only had the stamina to sit through the first round and most of the second, but luckily that's when most of the interesting stuff happened.