From Capstagram, which is what I call it now.
I don’t know if what I’m doing with the snapshot is really “analytics.” Hearing all the buzz at the Sloan Conference and this mostly inane Deadspin piece, there’s a lot of stuff wrapped up in that term that don’t really apply here.
The snapshot isn’t about decision-making (we don’t make any decisions), and it’s definitely not a branding effort (it probably hurts the RMNB brand by being so stodgy). For me, these statistics are just new ways to understand the game.
My educational background is in literary criticism. In that field, people discuss writing using different frameworks (formalism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, queer, etc.). The goal isn’t to decide what writing is good or bad, but to appreciate the writing in new ways and learn more about it and ourselves by looking from different– and deeper– angles.
It’s not that much different for hockey. For some people, the only metric that matters is championships. It’s a simple binary: yes you won, or no you did not. Some go deeper: how far did you make it in the playoffs: zero rounds, one round, two rounds, or more (As a Caps fan, I suspect the “more” is a myth). More nuance, more understanding, but still nothing too deep. And then you can get down to wins. And then goals. And then shots. And then– and for some reason people resist this– shot attempts.
And there are layers of rich and complex data even further below, new angles from which to look. And when we acknowledge how that low-level information can bubble up to high-level results– like championships– we create an intellectual scaffold for richer understanding of the sport. It’s miles from the championship binary.
I see why some critics consider analytics to be a retreat from complexity: because it uses numbers, which are finite, instead of descriptions, which are not. It can seem reductive. But the spirit behind the analysis is quite the opposite: it’s a framework for looking deeper, and more closely– not to blithely draw conclusions.
In this week’s snapshot: No blithe conclusions. I’ll try.
Previous snapshots: week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4, week 5, week 6, week 7, week 8, week 9, week 10, week 11, week 12, week 13, week 14, week 15, week 16, week 17, week 18
These are current as noon on Sunday, March 1. The sample is restricted to 5v5 hockey when the score is within one goal. There’s a glossary at bottom with an explanatory video.
Player | GP | TOI | SA% | Goal% | PDO | ZS% |
Burakovsky | 47 | 417.7 | 54.9 | 60.0 | 102.0 | 64.9 |
Ovechkin | 63 | 789.8 | 54.2 | 50.0 | 98.5 | 56.9 |
Backstrom | 63 | 782.6 | 53.9 | 48.4 | 98.3 | 55.3 |
Wilson | 50 | 470.2 | 53.4 | 50.0 | 99.4 | 55.2 |
Laich | 48 | 456.8 | 52.3 | 43.3 | 97.6 | 46.1 |
Ward | 63 | 659.1 | 51.7 | 39.5 | 96.8 | 46.3 |
Latta | 41 | 273.0 | 51.5 | 61.5 | 102.4 | 44.4 |
Beagle | 57 | 499.8 | 51.0 | 54.1 | 101.4 | 47.4 |
Fehr | 59 | 597.3 | 50.5 | 47.4 | 99.3 | 45.2 |
Johansson | 63 | 595.3 | 50.3 | 46.7 | 99.1 | 57.1 |
Kuznetsov | 61 | 500.3 | 48.3 | 55.2 | 101.8 | 54.9 |
Brouwer | 63 | 568.8 | 48.1 | 50.0 | 101.0 | 57.2 |
Chimera | 58 | 507.9 | 45.8 | 45.5 | 99.7 | 46.1 |
Player | GP | TOI | SA% | Goal% | PDO | ZS% |
Schmidt | 33 | 345.9 | 54.2 | 51.9 | 100.0 | 58.3 |
Green | 54 | 604.5 | 53.3 | 52.5 | 100.8 | 59.3 |
Niskanen | 63 | 878.2 | 52.8 | 55.6 | 101.0 | 59.2 |
Alzner | 63 | 820.5 | 51.3 | 52.1 | 100.6 | 51.3 |
Carlson | 63 | 890.0 | 50.4 | 46.6 | 99.5 | 50.0 |
Orpik | 63 | 931.0 | 50.1 | 46.2 | 99.1 | 51.0 |
Hillen | 35 | 334.7 | 48.0 | 47.4 | 100.1 | 58.8 |
Thanks to War On Ice for the stats and being generally awesome.
Russian Machine Never Breaks is not associated with the Washington Capitals; Monumental Sports, the NHL, or its properties. Not even a little bit.
All original content on russianmachineneverbreaks.com is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)– unless otherwise stated or superseded by another license. You are free to share, copy, and remix this content so long as it is attributed, done for noncommercial purposes, and done so under a license similar to this one.
Share On