jacobcarson877

I would like to think this is also recruitment team's job? I know they often pop by the Create a Player threads at least.

best goalie ever confirmed

Welcome!

welcome!

Every single sentence I read of your description I learned something new! THE POCKET TAGS! Incredible work as always!

claim 2

welcome back!

Bring back VHL's really strange rap era!

couldn't agree more

Landon Wolanin, United States Outlying Islands’ greatest achievement. A VHL superstar borne on an island in the middle of nowhere, with not a rink in range. The people on his island did bond over hockey however and joined together daily at the ball hockey rink to play. Landon was holding a stick from an early age, but never really had the competition to develop in any meaningful way as a kid. He was also a multi-sport athlete, as there wasn’t much else to do but play sports. He learned basketball and football, and played really whatever the other kids and even adults were playing at any given moment. Hockey was his true passion though, and he always tuned in to watch VHL games. He grew up watching the greats like Mikko Lahtinen, Aloe Dear, Taro Tsujimoto and Duncan Idaho. He aspired to get on the ice, and see what he could do. It wouldn’t be for many years that Landon would learn to skate. After moving to Canada he took his ball hockey talents to the rink and began the rigorous battle to stay standing on a slippery surface. Even after that, learning to handle a puck the same way as he had handled the ball before was a challenge. But eventually he made progress, overtaking the other kids his age and getting some attention from travel squads. It was San Diego that finally caught his attention however, the squad hailing from the VHLM, the premier league for VHL-aspiring talent. He had a lot of work to do, and he immediately set aside everything for his dream. He would outwork everyone, and overtake like he always had, and always would. He started rather low in the draft projections, but over time worked his way up and up, showcasing his work ethic, and scoring touch along the way. It was Calgary that took interest in his talents, and assembled their core for the future. But all that time, it was a little boy from an island you couldn’t even see on a map. A future World Junior and World Cup player, a world class winger, and a force to be reckoned with on both ends of the ice. He was taught at a young age that if he put his mind to it, he could accomplish anything. And his mind has only been put to one thing, and that was making an impact in the VHL, and hopefully becoming the best player of his generation. So far he has found himself playing with lots of legendary talent. Ivan Retoslav was his center during his time as a Marlin. He played alongside the great Pete Mitchell, PJ Daniels, Fraser Wallace and VHLM legend Juan Ceson in his short stint in Las Vegas. He found himself on a star studded roster with Siyan Yasilievich, Ryuji Sakamoto and Tomas Sogaard as he took his talents to Europe. And now in Calgary he has already played alongside Saku Kotkakoivu, Erlantz Jokinen, Luc Tessier, Daniel Janser, Leandro Goncalves and AirRig GoodBrandSun. There has been no shortage of talent for Wolanin to work with, but as time goes on, he remembers he will have to work even harder than his teammates to become the best. This doesn’t mean he won’t work with them, in fact he wants to work such synergy that he can stand above what he could alone. He has a goal of winning a championship, and has so far been unable to do so in his first few seasons. He never had the chance to play for anything meaningful as a kid, so he has a lot of pent up competitiveness lying in wait. He needs to win, more than wants to. Calgary provides him with this opportunity and he has committed to that cause for a long time. There is no end in sight for their chances, so one of these times he will get to fulfill his boyhood dreams. It is hard to wait, especially after having to wait to even get on the ice for so long, and he knows he doesn’t have forever. He has already experienced too many heartbreaks, particularly in the first round. He knows he has been more than just a first-round-exit level talent and he has so much more to prove. Landon Wolanin has finally joined the top of the league in scoring, battling old teammates and bitter rivals. His team is dominating, as they should be, and Wolanin is becoming a household name. Back home his family cheers him on, as they always have, and one day he will bring a cup back to them, to reward them for their years of effort, and the years he has spent away from them. It has been hard for everyone, and soon, in a couple of years he will return, hopefully with a large trophy case, to return to his humble roots. An Island man, and the pride of his people.

Why not take a look at how things are going? San Diego looks dominant as ever, bringing Don Aven back into the fold to finish off what may end up being one of the best C trios ever assembled. Everyone is earning steadily, and even the capped players are building themselves a really strong bank for their VHLE seasons. Somehow the Marlins have also acquired the talents of a backup goaltender, to the frustration of all of the teams without a starter. It seems only fair to allow Stefan Norris a healthy amount of starts considering the standings, and just how much they’ve put into the team so far, asking great questions and earning TPE well. Calgary is also looking great, and Landon Wolanin has left me very little to complain about. The Janser-Wolanin duo has sat in the top-10 of point scorers for most of the season now, and ideally that’s how it stays. Calgary continues to pile on the points, and their stars continue to grow in value heading into their peak value. Landon has put a pause on his checking for now, due to the abundance of physicality already on his unit, and has redirected his efforts towards goalscoring. There is still a bit of room to grow, and hopefully it can make the difference.

@Novanod WELCOME BACK BUDDY!!! @CoolLuigiBro14, @woog thank you both for your work so far, I hope the better opportunity to showcase your talents does you well! thanks @Grape for the talks!

fun fact: whatever events led up to this phrase were actually before my time and I've only managed to piece together the joke bit by bit over the years so I think a true veteran explaining it would be incredible.

Praise be to Simon

much better! awesome work, glad a project like this is coming back!

It appears the team and position columns got a bit wonky but nice to see the Marlins doing so well!

I had originally written out the R2 values I got from the functions, but then I really didn't want to then explain that R2 doesn't actually tell you whether the relationship is positive or negative, simply how much of the variance the attribute can explain. So in the effort of saving space I just kinda loosely grouped attributes together. The +++ were positive relationships that explained at least 30% variance, (some upwards of 45%) ++ was positive and roughly 20-30% variance + was anything else positive and above 10% variance -/+ is anything between like 7-10% variance - was honestly anything above 10% variance that was negative (not much) Secondly while goalie attributes haven't changed, that's correct, their stats have. Since we're not breaking the sim with mind-boggling offense, the goaltenders actually have a fighting chance now. I did get very similar trend to those in the past, but I think I got much more solid answers than those before, just due to the state of the current meta.

gotta cause my own new era

Introduction I have always been interested in hockey analytics and data science as a whole. I took a stats class a couple years ago and that got me interested in the idea for the first time, but it wasn't until I took a data science course last year and worked with regression for the first time that I started to really put together the resources I would need to undertake this project. I had meant to start it a while ago, when Nykonax first pointed out to me the work done by the likes of and Eaglesfan and Motzaburger done in 2019, and thus began my path towards this attempt to update those resources according to the hybrid attributes. While I didn't actually use the hybrid attributes themselves as part of the process (because they aren't real and would bring out some even more wonky conclusions than I already have), there are obviously some major changes regarding how we can and do build. How the Data was Gathered I took the season-ending attributes for each player for each regular season between 83-85. I obviously cannot track everyone's spending live during the season and I wouldn't want to anyways. I originally had bots in the mix, just to fill out the dataset more, but they were skewing the results too much so I scrapped them. I still ended up with 448 season totals, so I'm alright drawing some conclusions from those. Anyways, I'll be breaking a lot of the rules of data science here, so don't expect this to pass peer-reviewing or anything. I'll mostly just be commenting on trends, surprises and my thoughts on why those things happened. I used an old homework assignment of mine as the basis of doing this analysis. It uses an optimization function to reduce residual sum of squares, or essentially the sum of all the distances away from each real point from the regression line. I used this for plotting mostly so I could visualize the relationships, but I gathered most of my R2 values (how much variance each independent variable explained), for both linear and multiple regression using Leave One Out Cross Validation and Bootstrapping Confidence Intervals to once again check the directions of relationships. I also made sure to use the corrected assignment that my prof returned to me and not the one I submitted. I did all of my coding in Python, although I probably would have attempted this in R if I didn't have nearly completed code sitting in my documents folder. Goals/Shots SC is king here, as we all likely expected. PH and SK had a decent showing here, but PH was more impressive, and SK likely did as well as it did due to the fact that we've all just been upgrading SK because what else is there to upgrade. DF and FO both did well, because both establish possession, meaning you had a puck to shoot and score with. I expected a bit more from DF, but it will have its chance to shine later. PS and ST get a little messy here, as the model can interpret increasing ST and PS as positives, where it is really just the act of building a gap between PA and SC that matters. PA alone however doesn't seem to really have an effect either way, which is reassuring. I lumped goals and shots here together because they are generally affected by the same attributes, and generally shots linearly affect goals, since every shot in STHS is as likely as any other to go in. SC +++ PH++ SK/DF/FO + ST/PS ? Assists There seems to have always been a debate as to what makes a good playmaker, or what makes you get more assists. It is hard to really tell, as the assist isn’t the end result, the goal is. You can’t necessarily achieve an assist on your own. But it seems as though someone who holds and doesn’t lose the puck tends to get more assists. What is interesting to note, is that despite pre-hybrid testing, PA does in fact have somewhat of a minor positive correlation with assists. Now PH, SK and DF are definitely much more important, but PA may not be as detrimental as it used to be. PH/DF +++ SK/SC ++ PA + Hits/PIMs So basically CK is the only thing that matters here. SK and DF seem to correlate a bit, but I assume that is mostly due to people's previous assumptions as to how they should build a defensive player. Hits are rather controversial as a stat anyways, at least without the assistance of takeaways as well, as every contact made in STHS counts as a hit, regardless of who retrieves the puck afterwards. One could reasonably assume that someone who hits a lot recovers the puck a lot, but that simply isn't a definite fact. While CK obviously will result in puck retrievals, it also is the leading contributor to PIMs. In fact it is the only really relevant attribute when talking about PIMs. One thing to note is how DI affects both stats. DI does effectively reduce PIMs, but it reduces Hits at a much greater level. So when it comes to ratios, you will find your Hits:PIMs ratio get worse, while both of the totals go down as well. Regardless of whether you want to get Hits or not, DI is likely a waste of your TPE. Sorry everyone. CK +++ DF/SK + DI - Shot Blocks This one is probably the least pleasant result I found. In previous reports, there was some lack of meaningful results, but nothing like mine. While attributes like DF do have some reasonable correlation, nothing really added up to a reasonable sum that would be enough to describe the trend. So I was forced to come up with another answer here, that some of our particularly defensive minded players may not like. It seems as though the best way to earn more shots blocks, not shockingly, is to have more pucks shot at you. And by that I mean be on a worse team. Obviously even playing on the PK on a good team will get you some extra shot blocks, but seriously, no combination of attributes even came close to explaining the variance of shot blocks. Perhaps if I isolated just D, there would be a trend, but that sounds like too much extra work (it really wouldn't be). DF + Save Percentage Alright so here is where the real fun begins. So many people have no idea what the goalie attributes do or mean (me included for the most part) so we can actually glean some moderately interesting information from this. I know Save Percentage is an inherently biased stat, and tends to help overworked goalies feel better. But we don't have a lot to go on here so we have to make do with what we have. Right off the bat HS starts working its magic. In the next tier though there is a lot of competition with SC, RT, AG, RB and SZ are explaining 25-35% variance by themselves. HS/SC +++ RT/SZ ++ RB/AG + Goals Against Average This one is somewhat similar to Save Percentage, but with somehow a little less certainty. Obviously our data set is rather small, and I had to take out bot goalies but I couldn't remove player backup goalies and still pretend any conclusions would be remotely valid. Goals Against Average is also largely not the goaltender's fault, usually just reflects how the team in front of them is. But I do have some conclusions here, that might mean something. Somewhat surprisingly it is the typical secondary attributes that dominate explaining the variance, but it isn't too hard to put together why. There isn't a lot of build variety when it comes to goaltenders, and it isn't a particularly large feat to hit very high values in all the core 4 stats. What then makes the difference is the secondary stats, that the highest TPE players can afford. Are AG and SZ suddenly super-stats? Probably not, but they definitely shouldn't be ignored. AG/SZ/HS/RT +++ RB/SC ++ Wins If you wanted more subjective stats that may or may not imply anything at all about a goaltender's talent then here you go. AG, SZ, HS, RT +++ RB, SC ++ Conclusion I managed to solve a lot less mysteries than I hoped to with this, but I figured I may as well share my rather mundane conclusions with you all. - Puck Handling is super underrated. - Skating is moderately overrated, I think so long as you have like 83-85+ , you should be fine, I have noticed that people not meeting that threshold do have uncharacteristically bad results. - DEFENSE IS GOD (although more so on than one can really show using the scoreboard stats) - Passing isn't bad, but building a 15+ gap between Scoring and Passing is an absolute must, or a 10-20 point gap the other way between Passing and Scoring, although I'd still recommend continuing to crank up the OV. - Leadership unfortunately has no real measurable effect in this era. Now I must say there are so few people in the VHL with it increased that it could very well be useful but we don't know. - Same with experience and Strength in my opinion, it is really hard to tell whether it is correlation or causation with these two attributes, since SS increases SC and the gap, and EX is gained by doing well. So of course both make you appear to be doing well. - If you're going to increase Checking, just accept the PIMs. - Agility and Size are potentially majorly underrated, perhaps even better than Rebounds. - Hand Speed, Style Control and Reaction Time are a step ahead of Rebounds. - Best way to look like a great goaltender is to play on a hot offensive team with mediocre defense, so you can win games, have the puck mostly in your opponent's net and still face a few shots. That's honestly it. If you want to ask how certain attributes relate to stats let me know and I can run something for you, it doesn't take much effort now that I've set up the file nicely. I may at some point suck it up and buy STHS and run some dummy data through it just to see what I can find with more normalized data, instead of the obviously biased data we have created. I thought about doing this for the VHLM as well, as that is likely to be far more normalized, but I imagine it will likely result in some very wacky conclusions due to the funky nature of the VHLM to begin with. 1800 words, but I'll be writing something else soon so I may or may not come back to this in a few weeks to claim!

Yeah I definitely still agree with the point of your article, DI is too good at reducing hits, and not good enough at reducing PIMs. There is certainly still a weak correlation but at least if you invest in just CK you know what you're getting. Even the graph I sent was dominated by players with CK and not much DI, so the obvious correlation between CK and PIMs/Hits showed still.

you're absolutely correct!

one day I'll buy STHS to do better testing but using hybrid era data this is the obviously flawed relationship between DI and PIMs