Player Cards, Moving Forward, etc.

It's been around a year and a half since I put anything out. I have been busy with school and sports so that all got in the way of me doing anything with this blog. Heading into the summer, I am hoping to be more active and more involved in this blog moving forward.

In regards to blog posts, before now I have never really gone in depth of the statistical analysis, I was more just doing recaps of what happened and a detailed storyline. I am hoping to move this blog more in the direction of more stats related posts.

Also, since the start of the year, I have been working off and on on a project of player statistical cards. In order to be more in the eyes of people running statistical groups, I have always been told to make models and put stuff out there, so I think that this is my first real model that I have created, which I am very excited about.

I have created other things before:

• A theoretical playoff percentage simulator (basically just FanGraphs model just transformed into hockey)

• A formula for a set of team rankings (previously on this site)

• A formula for adjGAA (adjusted GAA)

• A formula to rank my high school baseball team's seasons from best to worst (check out MoeAnalytics on X)

but nothing compares to this in my eyes.

Some other things to note:

• In 2022 I was also crafting up a story on the history of goalscoring in hockey, I think over the summer I may pick that back up and post that onto here.

• I have also charted my first hockey game back in February. Will post a blog over the summer about charting a hockey game.
  

Without further ado, the Stick and Stats player cards!

The journey to creating this was very tough. I was very involved in sports and school work when I started this project, and I have always had aspirations of creating something like this, but the thing that got me inspired was my stats teacher asked me to create a project for my Sports Analytics club and I delivered. It took me a while to get it done, I would pick it up, then set it down for a month, then pick it back up. But since April I have been very motivated to get it done.

The card is very similar to the categories in many people's cards (Jfresh, Data Driven Hockey, etc.)

I get my stats from Natural Stat Trick mostly, and I get the logos from sportslogos.net

EV OFF - Even Strength Offensive Ability

EV DEF - Even Strength Defensive Ability

SHOOTING - All Situations Shooting Ability PP - Power Play Ability

PK - Penalty Kill Ability

GBR - Goals Before Replacement

The stats each show percentiles, so 98% means that McDavid is better than 98% of players.

This is very beta at the moment and could use lots of work, but just very happy to have something out there. In the future I plan on adding other categories, like teammates and competition, I just have to find a way to do it.

Most of the stats that I use I convert it into per 60, or per 2 for the penalties, so that we can sort of normalize it for each player and I base the stats about how above average they are.

I also did the cards for the 2022-23 season because, when I started this project, the 2023-24 season was still going on. I wanted my numbers to be consistent and stay the same throughout my journey, so I chose a previous season. As of right now, I only have player and not goalie cards yet, but that will be coming soon. I am planning to adding previous seasons into my formula and add graphs to my cards and make the cards look better (like I said this is very beta).

Now if you look at the McDavid card, you will see that around 2% of the NHL were better than him in 2022-23. Most people say that he is the best player right now, so how is this possible? Well because of outliers. There are many players out there that play a low amount of ice time which skews the data very high or low. All of the players above McDavid have played 5 games or less. If you set the parameter to at least 15 games, the top two players in the NHL are Connor McDavid and Jason Robertson.

Everything I did is through excel (my excel hates me) since I don't have the skills to code. So I just have to find out ways to connect the seasons from workbook to workbook and have one overall card.

Just overall, I am very proud of this accomplishment and I hope this can lead to more things moving on.