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 3 - Results

In Part 2 of this series on a new playmaking metric PLAY, we talked about "altruistic contribution" based on shots.  It is basically the difference in shots taken by a player’s teammates (excluding the player’s own shots) when he is on the ice versus off the ice.  It’s kind of like a shot-based WOWY that doesn’t include the player's own shots.  If a player's teammates take more shots when he is on the ice versus off the ice, his altruistic contribution will be high.

Now we'll use this altruistic contribution to build our playmaking metric PLAY, and show that PLAY 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.  

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. 

Trade deadline article at ESPN.com

Ryan Wagman (@RAWagman) and I recently wrote an ESPN.com article on trade deadline fixes for each of the Atlantic Division teams.  Check it out here if you have ESPN Insider, or here if you are a member at HockeyProspectus.com.  For the other divisions, there are links on the right hand side of the ESPN article.

Disclaimer: we finished the article before the Pens' flurry of trades.  We picked Adrian Aucoin for the Pens, suggesting the Pens biggest need was a depth defenseman.  Since then the Pens acquired a different defenseman, Doug Murray, so that sort of coincides.  Of course, the Pens did some other stuff too. 

Wired.com article on realignment

Samuel Arbesman (@arbesman) wrote a nice article at Wired.com titled Algorithmically Realigning Sports Leagues. The article is a nice summary of the realignment project that Bill Pulleyblank and I worked on. Check it out here, and the rest of our realignment stuff here. 

Analysis of NHL's realignment plan

I just finished up an article over at HockeyProspectus.com, analyzing the NHL's new realignment plan. 

At first glance, the new plan might appear bad for the teams in the northeast and the Florida teams, who are all in a division together.  But we show, among other things, that the new plan has a fairly small impact on their travel... just a small increase over what their travel would have been in the the "best" 4-conference solution (if by "best" we mean the solution that would minimize travel).

Links to all of the realignment articles are on the realignment page. 

 

More realignment figures

Just wanted to post some figures that are related to the discussion going on over at Tom Tango's blog about realignment.  I'd encourage you to read the discussion there first.  (I encourage you to read the rest of his blog regularly also.)

NHL Realignment

I recently finished a paper on realignment with friend and colleague Bill Pulleyblank.  The purpose of the project was to determine solutions to realignment that minimize travel for the league. We also compare our best solutions to the NHL 4-conference proposal from around a year ago. 

I also wrote a couple of articles about it on Hockey Prospectus.  Links to everything, plus some animations that are discussed in the second Hockey Prospectus article, can be found on the Realignment page.

Realignment Animations

I'll be writing some articles on realignment shortly.  In the mean time, here's a preview... I posted some animations related to this project on the Realignment page, including the top 100 solutions for each of the 4 major sports leagues.

Details about our method of generating and ranking these realignments is coming soon...