Columbus has more than its share of seasoned hockey fans. However, there are many who are still catching up on the sport, its rules and traditions. 1st Ohio Explainer is a series for those fans.
Advanced statistics aren’t a new fad in sports anymore; baseball adopted them decades ago and basketball is going the same route.
Hockey is no different, and though the inclusion of analytics in the sport’s lexicon has been anything but easy, there’s no denying the value provided by the data.
Gone are the days of looking at a box score for hits, giveaways and takeaways. The recording of those stats is inconsistent from city-to-city and, perhaps most importantly, they don’t give us a true indication of how a team (or a player) is performing on a nightly basis or over a specific period of time.
Hockey analysts have developed several methods of tracking puck possession, seeking to identify exactly what a team (or a player) does with the puck in the offensive zone. Which teams are particularly good at driving offense? Which players make things happen when they’re on the ice? We can now answer those questions and, better yet, provide context.
You will see these stats measured at even strength (3v3, 4v4, 5v5) but 5v5 is the most commonly used and holds the most value for analysts. Reason being: when a team is shorthanded, we are wise to assume it will yield more shots than it produces, and vice versa when on the power play.
On this website, you’ll see regular references to Corsi (CF%), PDO (a player or team’s luck) and Game Score (a comprehensive measure of a player’s single-game performance).
With the help of hockey writer and stats wizard Adam Gretz and hockey analyst Dom Luszczyszyn of The Athletic, we’ll provide background on these metrics in an effort to make sense of it all:
Corsi (description via Gretz): It's just like plus/minus, only instead of counting goals for and against it counts total shot attempts for and against. Goals, saves, shots that miss the net, and shots that are blocked…it's also a pretty good measure of puck possession and how much time a team or player is spending in each end of the ice. A player or team with a high Corsi is going to be spending more time in the offensive zone on the attack, while a player with a negative Corsi is going to be trying to defend and is constantly chasing the puck.
PDO (via Gretz): (If) there was ever a way to measure whether a team or player has been lucky or unlucky, PDO might be it. And it's not all that hard to figure out as it's simply adding even-strength save percentage and shooting percentage. If nothing else, it's a quick and easy way to look for teams and players that are maybe riding a hot streak and playing over their talent level over a short period of time, or teams that are riding a cold streak and are due to bust out.
**Note from 1st Ohio Battery: it’s generally expected that, in most cases, a team’s PDO will rise or regress to 100 over the course of a season.
Game Score: Admittedly, there’s a lot to unpack here and Game Score is probably hockey’s most complex piece of analysis. At the same time, you could argue it as hockey’s most telling and useful measurement; the concept of Game Score originated in baseball, then it was tweaked for basketball, and has now been refined and applied to hockey.
Here is Luszczyszyn’s approach to calculating Game Score:
“The stats I used are goals, primary assists, secondary assists, shots on goal, blocked shots, penalty differential, faceoffs, 5-on-5 Corsi differential, 5-on-5 goal differential. The second step is figuring out how to weigh each component. To keep things simple, I opted to weigh each stat by its frequency to goals and round up/down to keep the sig digs low.”
If it seems like a lot to digest right off the bat, you’re not alone. It takes a while to get used to, but the idea is to give you (the reader) an in-depth look at what happened within a game. You can read a box score or the scoresheet, but we’re committed to going to the next level and bringing you something you can’t get anywhere else.
