Skill or teammates? What really matters?

[Dabnad 173]

Hey everyone! Narnia Shaw is back this week with another article. While I may have another article I need to finish, we will ignore that for now. For this week, we will focus on a new topic which I was interested in for this week. Over the last week, the new VHLM season has started. I, of course, have been increasingly obsessed with Narnia Shaw’s statistics and how he’s doing as a player. Through this, I’ve noticed many things in the system, including the 3 star system being flawed, the really cool play-by-play system I just realized exists, and most importantly, the way points work and how they are influenced. For this experiment, I will be comparing Narnia Shaw and Slava Kovalenko (@OblivionWalker), both defencemen around the 170 TPE range, however Slava is on East, being on the Mississauga Hounds, while Shaw is on a mid-tier team in the West, being the Saskatchewan Wild. Slava also hasn’t put any TPA in passing, and 3 in scoring while Shaw has 81 passing, and 60 scoring, which can help you understand the situation better. By far, Slava is a better skater and defender, however this is the end of the major differences. I hope for this article to demonstrate how drafting by pure points is flawed, and there are a million and one factors involved. I wish no harm to any team, or player in this article, this is simply an analysis and for education and entertainment purposes.

 

The Beginning 

Alright, let’s start off with what we see on the front page of the basic book: goals, assists, and points. Here we see Slava is 6th in overall points, leading the league in d-man points, while being tied for 7th in assists. On the other hand, Shaw is also tied for 7th in assists, and he places 6th in the league for d-man points, however, he does not rank in the league for overall points. Overall, Slava has 9 goals, 16 assists for 25 points in 16 games, while Shaw has 2 goals, and 16 assists for 18 points in 16 games. Clearly from this, we can see that Slava is a better offensive player, ranking higher in points, and goals, however, how can we be so sure this is the case? While they have the same amount of assists, it’s clear for the skill metrics that Shaw is a clearly better offensive player. So why this large difference? Why does Slava have so many more goals, and an equal amount of assists while clearly not focusing on offence? This is the question which I asked my self. For this, i decided to dig deeper into the stats, and see why there was such a difference in the numbers.

 

The Second Part (Numbers)

From here, I started going to the index and looked at the numbers from there, after all, there were better numbers that we could look at. Firstly, I looked at the more basic number, P/20 or points per every 20 minutes played. This number helps us understand if a player is better because they have more minutes, or if they are just better. Here, we saw that Slava has a P/20 of 1.09, while Shaw’s P/20 is 0.8, so clearly that isn’t the problem here. The next number I looked at was shooting %, helping us see if a player is simply lucky, or if they are a good shooter, or they’re incredibly unlucky. For reference, the VHL’s goal scorer had a shooting % of 10.1%, with the others being around 9.5-10.5%. Usually, this range is average for a regular player. Here, Slava has an incredibly high shooting percentage of 18%! This number is 8% higher than the average shooter. If we adjust this number to 10%, which is around elite shooter range, Slava has 5 goals in the year, basically half of what he has at the moment. Now let’s look at the other side. Here, Shaw has a shooting percentage of 8%. While this is not incredibly low, it clearly puts him near the bottom of the league, only beat by bots and around 20 other players. Now, is this all luck by Slava and will his numbers come down incredibly by the end of the year? Not quite, we can’t tell how numbers will turn, however it’s common for numbers this high to come down by the end of the season (shout out PDO merchants Vancouver Canucks) and for numbers to average out. While this high shot % doesn’t mean a great deal of things, we should take a mental note of this a it’ll help us understand future metrics.

 

The Third Part (The Nitty Gritty)

This is the part where I started getting more confused as it went on, so I’ll try my best to compress the disappointments I anchiv  and give as much context as I can. Firstly, I looked at OSB and OSM, meaning own shots blocked or own shots missed, however this number essentially correlated directly with the amount of shots taken, meaning that this had no effect. Next I looked to see if there was a real difference in power play minutes, as that could explain the difference in Power-play goals, however, once again the difference was simply one minute, in favour of Shaw as well, so from here, you can tell that this was another non-factor. Similarly, PK minutes had a limited difference. From here I was incredibly stuck in proving my hypothesis, so I decided to take the long way
 

Part 4 - The Breakthrough 

From the last step, I was stuck, I had no method of proving that having better team mates and a better team is better for your stats by such a large fashion, so I decided to go though each game log and find the details for why the difference in the points between Slava and Shaw. Before even going into the game logs, I found the offensive and defensive zone starts. Here we saw that the Wild started in the offensive zone 41.2% of the time, while the Hounds started in the offensive zone 45.2% of times, with a 4% increase. The defensive zone starts were also 37.5%-32.3% for the Wild and Hound respectively. This meant that when Slava or Shaw were on the ice, even if they had similar effects, when they were off the ice,  Shaw’s teammates couldn’t start in the offensive zone, which harms his ability to pass and score. We also saw how the Hounds had a better GF compared to the Wild, by 11 goals, making it easier to assist on those numbers. From there, I looked at FOW%, this number was not able to be influenced by the defensemen, however has a great ability on the d-men’s ability to get the puck quickly and score off the draw. Here we saw the Wild having an Offensive FOW% of 46.92% compared to the Hound’s 53.41%, meaning that the Hound, and Slava, got the puck nearly 7% more than the Wild. This outstanding face off statistic is also seen in the d-zone, with the Hound being nearly at 60%, while the Wild are at 48.36%, meaning that the Hound also get more pucks in the d-zone, resulting in less goals/shots against them. This gave me a strong base to go from, and here, I decided to go through each game, and find the difference between the two players goals and assists. The results were contradictory to what I expected, however, I realized that these numbers help me prove my point. The numbers I looked at were top contributors to point total (who was on the scoresheet the most with the defenceman), primary and secondary assists, and how many times they were on the scoresheet with bots. I found that Slava was on the sheet most with Ozzy, being with Ozzy 8 times, and Slava had 9 primary assists, and 7 secondary assists. He was only on the scoresheet once with bots. On the contrary, Shaw was on the scoresheet 12 times with Leung, and had just 6 primary assists with 10 secondary assists. However, Shaw was on the scoresheet 3 times with bots. What this shows us is that often times, Shaw is getting the first touch before a goal, and this means that he doesn’t have control over how the goals are scored. The 3 times he was on the scoresheet with the bot also helps us see that Shaw is often with bots while on the ice, while Slava is on with real players. The high concentration of points with a single player is expected, as both are defencemen, making it harder for them to create by themselves, meaning they often need another player to create for them. It’s important here to note that both Slava and Shaw have a bot as their defensive partner. Let’s remember near the start when I exclaimed to remember about the high shooting percentage, let’s go back to that. We see in this paragraph how the better team is clearly the hound, and we can inference why Slava has such a higher shooting percentage. When we look at how the players are set-up, we see that the Hound start in the offensive zone, they have more options at all times, as the forward lines have limited bots. This means that Slava has the ability to shot whenever there is an open net, compared to Shaw who may have a bot in his forward line. This means that the net is less likely to be open, and the shots that go through can be saved easier. The high shot percentage can also be helped by simply having a better offensive face-off percentage, as there are more quick, point shots which make it easier to score against a goalie, and there are also more chances to pass the puck from the point. This is the main reason why I said to not discredit Slava for his high shooting percentage, as he performs his role perfectly, and there is a chance that this number doesn’t go down in the future. Overall, I think that Slava is a great player, and his build is done perfectly in accordance to what his team needs, on the other hand, Shaw is also developing well on a team that may be in the middle ground for now, meaning that his stats have been affected, however, this does not mean that any player is better than the other, rather they can be used in different situations effectively. All numbers are true as off August 16, 2024, at 12 PM.

 

Part 5 - Conclusion 

 

Through the research done, I have discovered three main points. Firstly, I found out how influential having an extra defence-man is to help the team. Despite not playing on the same line as Slava, just having the extra defence man on the team helps the Hound keep offensive possession, meaning that when Slava comes into the ice, he does not have to bring the puck up the ice. Another thing I discovered is the importance of the skating stat, as it’s especially important to be able to bring the puck up the ice as a d-man after you’re in the defensive zone. Lastly, I found out that points, assists, and goals are not stats which are determined from pure skill, as if this was the case Shaw would be miles ahead, rather the environment the player is put in, along with how the team is constructed has a huge affect on how points are scored. We see this through how the two players, put in completely different situations, with different builds, can have such similar stats. A strong rounded squad with 2-3 defensemen, along with nearly 2 lines of players, so all lines can be full, are more important on a lower level, as we saw here. In conclusion, we see how the team and its surroundings affect points more than the pure skills of a player, and this is incredibly important to know as a coach and GM, as deeming a build unfit because it didn’t create points in a rebuilding year is not a bad thing, rather a result of teammates, and those players must be treated as such. I want to end this post by saying that this post is strictly an analysis on how the two different situations led to such similar statistics for the defencemen, and I would like to emphasize that if I had accidentally said something about the teams, or players, I would like to apologize. Thank you for reading, and this is Narnia Shaw, signing off, until next time.

 

2110 words

Week ending August 18 2024- September 8 2024

[OblivionWalker 245]

As a first gen player, this was really interesting to read through, especially since I haven't been around very long yet. I hadn't built Slava really for offense and was kinda wondering myself why he was getting so many points but the breakdown you did really shed some light on that.

[tcookie 902]

To add something to this -- important context about the simulator that isn't necessarily very intuitive -- the DF rating isn't just a measure of how good you are at playing defense, but also a measure of how good you are at getting to loose pucks.

 

And there are a lot of loose pucks, so DF is actually crucially important to scoring points, too -- because a player with higher DF will get far more opportunity to have the puck than a player with lower DF will.

Edited August 16 by tcookie

[Dabnad 173]

17 minutes ago, tcookie said:

To add something to this -- important context about the simulator that isn't necessarily very intuitive -- the DF rating isn't just a measure of how good you are at playing defense, but also a measure of how good you are at getting to loose pucks.

 

And there are a lot of loose pucks, so DF is actually crucially important to scoring points, too -- because a player with higher DF will get far more opportunity to have the puck than a player with lower DF will.

That’s really interesting! I didn’t know about that! That definitely helped Slava’s ability to pick up the puck in the offensive end.