PLAY - More analysis and top 10 PLAYers

In Parts 1 thru 3, we developed a new playmaking metric that is (1) more consistent than assists and (2) better than assists at predicting future assists. @spamventura had an observation about the results that we'll study a little further in this article.  Along the way, we'll give the top 10 PLAYers (capitalization and pun intended) from 2009-10, and how they did in 2010-11.

PLAY: A playmaking metric, Part 2 - Altruistic Contribution

Part 1 of this series on a new playmaking metric PLAY, we gave an overview, and discussed marginal contribution, which is basically some form of WOWY.  See here for Part 1 and here for the full paper.  In this part, we'll discuss competitive and altruistic contributions.  Altruistic contribution is what we'll use to compute PLAY.

PLAY: A Playmaking Metric, Part 1 – Intro

I wanted to share a recent project I did with friends and colleagues Chris Weld and Chris Arney titled "Quantifying playmaking ability in hockey".  The one sentence summary is that we developed a metric for quantifying playmaking ability in hockey that is better than assists in two quantifiable ways: (1) it is more consistent than assists, and (2) it is better than assists at predicting future assists.  

In this article, we'll give an overview of what we're doing, and the motivation behind it.