A Regression Analysis On How Attributes Impact Regular Season Stats

[eaglesfan036 4,598]

Eviews Regression on VHL

 

I recently took a class called econometrics where I learned how to use a program called Eviews to run a regression analysis on a large set of data. For example, I wrote my final paper on how NFL spending on each individual position impacted regular season wins. I decided to apply the same concept to the VHL, because I wanted to see how well upgrading each attribute could predict regular season statistics. If you want a quick summary because you are too lazy to read the whole thing, just go to the conclusion at the end. 

 

Background

 

I used the data from the latest season, S63, using end of season attributes and statistics from all 72 games. Admittedly, this isn't a perfect way to do it because I don't account for players upgrading their attributes from season start to end, but there is no better way to run the regression that I can think of. For consistency, anyone who didn't play in 72 games was excluded from the study, but this only resulted in two bots being excluded so that cutoff worked out well. In looking at player attributes, I decided to take out endurance, confidence, durability, potential, morale, and overall because they do not apply. 

 

Goals (And Summary on how to read these tables)

 

 In this table, C is the constant, and all the other variables are player attributes, like ck = checking or sk = skating

 

As an example of interpreting these coefficients, a one tpe increase in scoring will result in an additional 0.414 goals scored in a 72-game season. So if a player has 99 scoring and 0 in all other attributes, their expected goals would be -15.51 (the constant) + (0.414*99) = 25.5. Some coefficients are negative like passing being -0.17, meaning a one tpe increase in passing results in -0.17 expected goals scored, which would be expected because a player who passes more shoots less and scores less goals. 

 

My first regression looked at how player attributes predict goals over a 72 game season. The adjusted R squared is 0.81, meaning 81% of the variation in the dependent variable, goals, is explained by the variation in the independent variables, which are all the different player attributes. This is a pretty good adjusted R squared and higher than I was expecting, so this data is meaningful. In finding which variables are statistically significant, you want to look at the probability column, and find which ones are significant at least at the 10% level, but ideally should be significant at 5% or 1%. In the case of goals scored, scoring and passing are significant at the 1% level, penalty shots, puck handling, and experience are significant at the 5% level, and leadership is significant at the 10% level. According to this regression, if you solely want your player to score goals and care about nothing else, you should solely focus on putting your tpe into the scoring and puck handling attributes, as they have the best combination of highest coefficient and are statistically significant. I somewhat doubt the validity of experience being correlated to goal scoring, because players with high experience tend to have high levels of tpe in general because they are older players. 

 

Assists

 

 

Assists also had a high-ish adjusted R squared at 0.84, so I think this data is useful. For assists, puck handling is significant at the 1% level, defense is significant at the 5% level, and penalty shots are significant at the 10% level. I find this very interesting because one would think that passing is the most important stat in racking up assists, but that does not appear to be the case at all, as passing is not statistically significant and doesn't even have a very strong coefficient! Puck Handling is the most significant and has the strongest co-efficient, which leads me to believe that this stat is way more important than most people believe. Defense makes sense in generating assists as it probably helps win puck battles and bring play the other way. I'm not sure how penalty shots got such a high correlation, but I'm just going to assume that people who points into penalty shots probably just have super high tpe in general, so I am discounting that. I wonder if instead of most assists coming from a pass, they come from a shot that creates a rebound or deflection, or a pass from someone using their skills to move into a higher danger scoring chance area, instead of the actual pass itself. 

 

Points

 

 

Points has a high adjusted R squared of 0.88 which means this data is useful. For points puck handling is significant at the 1% level, and scoring is significant at the 5% level. It appears that puck handling and scoring are by far the two most important attributes for total points in a season, as they are both statistically significant and have the highest positive coefficients. Discipline and fighting unsurprisingly have a negative correlation to points, as you are just wasting tpe putting your points into those. I think it's really odd that passing and skating have a negative coefficient as that means putting tpe into that decreases your total points, though the statistical significance is low. Maybe that is just suggesting you should put your tpe into other areas rather than those ones. Defense also has a high coefficient, and maybe it makes some sense putting some leftover tpe into there to score more points as well. 

 

Conclusion

 

Conventional wisdom around the VHL has always seemed to suggest that skating is the most important secondary attribute, and one of the most important attributes overall. My findings here completely debunk that myth, as the numbers show that skating is statistically insignificant and has a low correlation to scoring goals, assists, or points. Instead, puck handling is the most important attribute for scoring points, followed by scoring. If you want to focus only on setting up your teammates with assists, put your tpe into puck handling and defense. Putting tpe into passing surprisingly does not help you earn more assists! Please let me know your thoughts on this, as there are so many other areas I can explore in future media spots. What attributes create the most hits, the highest shooting percentage, the most blocked shots, or the best save percentage for goalies? There are so many great ideas for future articles I am excited to do. 

 

1,073 words - to be used for 2 weeks, to be used weeks ending 12/30 and 1/6

Edited December 31, 2018 by eaglesfan036

[BOOM 8,719]

Good work nerd. 

[eaglesfan036 4,598]

1,073 words - to be used for 2 weeks, to be used weeks ending 12/30 and 1/6

[Exlaxchronicles 415]

Very interesting! Thanks for the read.

[McWolf 3,115]

brb putting everything i got in PH

[Victor 10,911]

Dunno mate my PH is at like 70 and I'm doing alright.

[BOOM 8,719]

Well, you could put your first 100 TPE into fighting, and still contend for the ROY. 

[Ahma 1,425]

too much text sorry didnt read but still interesting read.

[Beketov 8,996]

1 hour ago, Victor said:

Dunno mate my PH is at like 70 and I'm doing alright.

Meanwhile mine is maxed and well...

 

Clearly @eaglesfan036 has flawed data. Actually STHS just hates me.

[oilmandan 688]

Very interesting stuff. Watch, now everyone will be off to the player store to re roll their tpe 

[eaglesfan036 4,598]

8 hours ago, McWolf said:

brb putting everything i got in PH

That's my plan

[eaglesfan036 4,598]

4 hours ago, Beketov said:

Meanwhile mine is maxed and well...

 

Clearly @eaglesfan036 has flawed data. Actually STHS just hates me.

It is just one seasons worth of data or maybe sths does just hate you

[McWolf 3,115]

2 minutes ago, eaglesfan036 said:

That's my plan

Gritty with the slick hands. Love it!

[Beketov 8,996]

2 hours ago, eaglesfan036 said:

It is just one seasons worth of data or maybe sths does just hate you

Oh it most definitely hates me. Any time I have a good player it has to screw me some way (such as Holik being worthless in the playoffs) or it just decides to randomly give me giant chunks where I’m worthless such as my 15 game pointless streak last season.

[Devise 4,475]

11 hours ago, Victor said:

Dunno mate my PH is at like 70 and I'm doing alright.

 

@eaglesfan036 Turned into Season 24 Devise. Now a slew of players are going to ignore skating and be bewildered by their lack of results. 

 

It's all on you now Eagles.

[eaglesfan036 4,598]

30 minutes ago, Devise said:

 

@eaglesfan036 Turned into Season 24 Devise. Now a slew of players are going to ignore skating and be bewildered by their lack of results. 

 

It's all on you now Eagles.

Skating does nothing

 

#math

[Devise 4,475]

11 minutes ago, eaglesfan036 said:

Skating does nothing

 

#math

 

The only #math I see here is you trying to start some sort of re-roll war as players try to figure out if skating, or puck handling is the most important attribute. If it does absolutely nothing, then you should find me all the HoF forwards or D who never updated to skating. Or better yet, find more than a handful of them where skating wasn't their primary attribute? 

 

Consider me the head of the anti-anti-skating brigade, as I'm Pro-Skating all the way. Nobody has learned the hard way like I have. Just ask Logan Laich. One of many a causality. 

 

Also if you really want to get technical about what stats actually matter, it's the stats a GM sets. Sorry to tell you. Great players do have good stats in things like skating, passing, defense, etc. But by a certain point in the careers that people do good 3-4 of those attributes are all so high that the builds/chemistry players have on teams has more of a greater influence on who is doing better. Which is probably why you have to invest in skating. Because everyone else has it, game plays at a higher pace your too slow without it. 

[eaglesfan036 4,598]

I mean I'm exaggerating it for fun. I'm not advocating being extreme enough to leave skating at 40 or anything, I'm just saying the puck handling is more important than skating and skating should be treated as a lesser attribute than it's currently. Still should be upgraded though.

[Baozi 1,658]

@jRuutu 's player has high PH but it doesn't seem to correlate to assists.

 

Also remember the time when goalies didn't use skating at all in their builds? Then Devereux used it and Kanou used it.

Edited January 2, 2019 by tfong

[jRuutu 2,462]

4 hours ago, tfong said:

@jRuutu 's player has high PH but it doesn't seem to correlate to assists.

 

Also remember the time when goalies didn't use skating at all in their builds? Then Devereux used it and Kanou used it.

I have mostly played in second line and in quite low scoring team lately. Despite playing a lot, the ideal ´testing´ situation would be to play on the first line and everything runs though me for like full season.

 

But what I can say from personal experiences from here and from other leagues: PH, SK and DF are keys to glory, no matter what kind of player you build. Rather boring in a way, especially here when endurance is not a factor, but also in other leagues where people won´t put anything to checking - eventually you have who knows how many clones - everybody looks the same, no real diffence between players, no characters no nothing - just same player builds time after time.

 

And I get it, no point in focusing on checking for example. You would think it just bumps your hitting numbers, but for whatever reason - you also take shit loads of penalty minutes.

 

If you want to be a top player, it´s SK, PH, DF at whatever order - as high as possible and then whatever you want to do, shoor or pass in a decent ratio, some use 9 in between the two, some more, but either way =  only way you can fail is to not update your player.

 

(never tried goalie in any league)

Edited January 2, 2019 by jRuutu

[Baozi 1,658]

But thats also why forwards with high checking turn out to be high impact for their teams.

[jRuutu 2,462]

5 minutes ago, tfong said:

But thats also why forwards with high checking turn out to be high impact for their teams.

Could be, but they also take a lot of penalty minutes. With one of my players who was a proper heavy hitting winger I got 811 minutes in 854 games, ( in another league) 35 of those minutes is from majors, so ´few´ minor penalty minutes in there.

[Beketov 8,996]

26 minutes ago, jRuutu said:

Could be, but they also take a lot of penalty minutes. With one of my players who was a proper heavy hitting winger I got 811 minutes in 854 games, ( in another league) 35 of those minutes is from majors, so ´few´ minor penalty minutes in there.

FWIW when I increased my checking to try and act as more of a two-way forward my hits did go up. My PIM did to as you say but not as dramatically as my hits did I would say. I think it’s just a natural thing, hitting more means that more of those hits are bound to be penalties. I don’t think it’s always the case to assume checking = PIM though. 

[jRuutu 2,462]

2 minutes ago, Beketov said:

FWIW when I increased my checking to try and act as more of a two-way forward my hits did go up. My PIM did to as you say but not as dramatically as my hits did I would say. I think it’s just a natural thing, hitting more means that more of those hits are bound to be penalties. I don’t think it’s always the case to assume checking = PIM though. 

There are some ´sweet´ spots I´m sure with checking and what kind of team you play in going to have a effect, (in some leagues I think the size of your player has effect as well on how much you hit),  but if you go ´all in´ and really make your guy a heavy hitter - going to sit in the box.

 

Thompson if it´s the player you are talking about,  274 hits and 83 pims, and the other season 178 hits with 88 pims. Even in your rookie year you got over 100 hits with 35 pims, but I´m guessing the checking was not as high then as it was now? And I don´t know how many of those pims are majors, but to me 88 and 83 sounds like a lot - even on 72 game seasons.  Just for one player. Imagine if you got couple other players on the team who have even 70-80 on checking, your team is going to be on the PK multiple times every game.

[Victor 10,911]

20 minutes ago, jRuutu said:

Imagine if you got couple other players on the team who have even 70-80 on checking, your team is going to be on the PK multiple times every game.

But hits do lead to more turnover and therefore more puck possession, hence there is a good side. Obviously all about the balance, but there's definitely a pattern of 1 good hitting forward working very well with one pure scoring forward.