A twist on the All Star game

In theory, the All Star Game should be exciting. The top 48 players at their positons, going head to head, for the right to claim the title “best of the best”, the game should be competitive. But in reality, the All Star game is an exhibition game put on by the league to increase revenue. The game itself can be quite boring with little competitiveness. When I was younger, it was an event I did not want to miss, and now I may check out the highlights if I happen to be busy during the game. When the league decided to have a fantasy draft to decide the teams, they had my interest. After many years of doing my own fantasy drafts with online pools as well as the franchise mode, this twist was new and fun. Did it make the game anymore exciting? Maybe, but the competitiveness or the game was still about the same. Now I’m not sure there is much you can do to the game itself to change it, without going super gimmicky or make the game worth something, like in baseball, which I think it is safe to say, no one agrees is a good idea.

This may check the box off for being gimmicky, but what if the All Star Game became an All Star Tournament.

Make the games 3 on 3 with a 10 minute running clock. With 6 teams, there would be no reason to add more players than 48 already selected.  Each Goalie could be the captain of their team and make the selections in the same draft format the league currently use. They would be required to draft 4 forwards, 2 defencemen and one rookie. 

Each team could play a 3 game mini round robin with the top 2 teams earning a bye into the semi-finals while the bottom 4 play the extra game to see who moves on.  With up to 6 games, I think the competitiveness would come out. Being 3 on 3, the creativeness should come out too. A lot of scoring changes, a lot of big saves.

Rather than just cheering for whatever team your hometown player was on (although they still might), I could see fans jumping on board with one or two of the teams and really get behind them. 

My concerns however are how it would look on TV. How would the transition be between games as well as to when the Zamboni comes out to resurface the ice. I guess that can be left in the hands of those who make the big bucks. Speaking of money, instead of 2 All Star Jerseys, there would be 6. After the Winter Classic between Detroit and Toronto, we know that there is no need for a white jersey.

I think the tournament would be a big success. Teams would get more competitive the more games they played. 3 on 3 would make for the game to be quick and entertaining, something that seems to be lacking in previous All Star Games.

GRIT

I have always loved numbers. Growing up, I couldn’t wait to get the Hockey News Yearbook and just go through the pages of stats. I’d probably still be just as excited for the yearbook if it wasn't for the internet and the quality of the Hockey News in the last few years; although, this year’s issue did include Corsi and Fenwick team stats. The acceptance of “Advanced Stats” in the NHL is growing and I could not be happier. I would like to think I understand most of the new stats but I would consider myself really green when it comes to them.

I am a Flames fan, so all I ever hear about is Grit. Over the last year, I thought it would be great to be able to track Grit. What is Grit though?

gritchart.com

Thanks to Sportsnet and likely more credit to @bookofloob, there is the GritChart.

According to the rankings on the graphic, it would suggest that Grit consists of Hitting, Fighting and Blocked Shots, while being disciplined by avoiding the penalty box.

During the 2014 NHL playoffs, I thought I would try and come up with a formula for Grit. It took some toying around with, and by watching the games, it made me understand Grit more. Now as far as formulas go, I can’t say this one is foolproof or even accurate, but it does give a number where each player can be ranked using the same stats.

To further the point about in-accurateness, the Grit Stat relies on some of the worst tracked stats in the NHL. Every arena has a different definition of a hit, so right there it is already flawed, but there is no other option, so I will have to go with what is available to me.

Because the formula includes all four stats from the GritChart, some adjusting was needed. How can the stat reward the player because of a fight, but then also hurt them by getting a 5 minute major attached to it. Why should a player lose out on Grit Points when they get a 10 minute misconduct in the last minute of a game because the referee wants to regain control of the game.  Also I noticed in the playoffs, when there were coincidental minors, most of the time it was because both players were being “gritty”, and neither player really hurt their team by spending the next 2 minutes in the penalty box.

When I attempted to track Grit during the playoffs, I omitted those penalty minutes. I was tracking the total Grit for each team rather than each player. Over the 93 games, the team with more Grit won 52 of those games, or 56%. When I started to look at individual players, I found the formula to be more player friendly than team friendly.

This summer, I entered the data to try and rank players by Grit. At first, I thought the results would end up being basically the anti-Fenwick stat. In theory, when a player does not have the puck, they will be doing other things on the ice to get the puck back; hitting, blocking shots and when all else fails… fighting. As for the penalty minutes, because I took the data from the 13/14 season, I did subtract 5 and 10 minute majors but not any coincidental minors as I did not go through every boxscore. If you split the 620 players in half, the top half in Grit had an average FF% of 48% and the bottom half 52%.

After entering all the data, I noticed that penalty minutes were quite influential to the stat. I left it that way because it makes sense. I would think that taking a bad penalty is the opposite of having positive grit. Because of the focus on penalty minutes, the top 10 players have less than 20 minutes of adjusted penalties on the season. Fighting also had a big influence on the stat as you would need to scroll down to 67^th in least amount of Grit to find the first player to have a fight last year. One result that surprised me was how low the Grit Score was for the so called “Pest”. This made sense though after because of all the bad penalties they do take.

As mentioned above, I thought Grit would be the anti-Fenwick stat, so I thought I would compare the two.

I then came up with 4 categories.

1.       Players with High Grit and Low FF% (Under 48%) - Low possession but is able to make up for it with Grit

1.       Keaton Ellerby

2.       Kevin Klein

3.       Rob Scuderi

4.       Luke Schenn

5.       Matt Martin

6.       Tom Sestito

7.       Dan Girardi

8.       Luke Gazdic

9.       Rich Clune

10.   Chris Tanev

2.       Players with Low Grit and High FF% (Greater than 52%)  - Not showing Grit because they are too busy trying to score

1.       Jaromir Jagr

2.       Evgeni Malkin

3.       Jason Spezza

4.       Alex Semin

5.       Matt Cullen

6.       Eric Staal

7.       Jeff Skinner

8.       Justin Williams

9.       Patrick Kane

10.   John Tavares

3.       Players with High Grit and High FF% (Greater than 52%) - The kind of Gritty players you want on your team

1.        Patrick Maroon

2.        Ryan Clowe

3.        Marcus Johansson

4.        Ryan Getzlaf

5.        Kyle Clifford

6.        Milan Lucic

7.        Brent Seabrook

8.        Rob Klinkhammer

9.        Jarome Iginla

10.    John Michael Liles

4.       Players with Low Grit and Low FF% (Under 48%) - What are they doing on the ice?

1.        Radic Dvorak

2.        Justin Fontaine

3.        Saku Koivu

4.        Erik Haula

5.        Ed Jovanoski

6.        Ryan Smyth

7.        Dave Bolland

8.        Nate Prosser

9.        Eric Condra

10.    Marcus Kruger

I also thought it would be fun to see other categories.

1.       Top Grit from the Facepunchers (Minimum 7 fights)

     1.       Mike Brown

     2.       Matt Martin

     3.       Tom Sestito

     4.       Luke Gazdic

     5.       Rich Clune

     6.       Patrick Maroon

     7.       Chris Neil

     8.       Krys Barch

     9.       Tom Wilson

     10.   Matt Hendricks

2.       Least Grit from the Facepunchers (Minimum 7 fights)

     1.       Zac Rinaldo

     2.       Adam McQuaid

     3.       Fraser McLaren

     4.       Eric Gudbranson

     5.       Matt Carkner

     6.       Anthony Peluso

     7.       Clayton Stoner

     8.       Antoine Roussel

     9.       Jay Rosehill

     10.   Jared Boll

3.       Most Grit from Goal scorers (20+ goals)

     1.       Ryan O’Reilly

     2.       Ryan Getzlaf

     3.       Milan Lucic

     4.       Jarome Iginla

     5.       Brayden Schenn

     6.       Joffrey Lupul

     7.       Ondrej Palat

     8.       Frans Nielsen

     9.       Wayne Simmonds

     10.   Troy Brouwer

All the stats I got from NHL.com and war-on-ice.com . I will try and get the spreadsheet up on google docs at some point for everyone to explore.

Grit Chart

Hi Mike! (you will probably be the only one reading this) I didn't want to try and fight with 140 characters to explain all my thoughts about GritChart on twitter so here we are.

So I base everything off this graphic. At first glance it is just 4 stats, well 3 stats and one that isn't tracked very well. I had fun at the beginning of the year, and photoshopped what 2013 would look like and noticed that with the rankings, the ability of not getting penalty minutes is considered grit. Which makes sense.. You have all the hitting, and fighting. being nasty without taking the penalty (although 5 for fighting); Grit could help you win the game.

So after a lot of tweaking to get a formula to calculate Grit, I came up with this:

       (Hits) + (Blocked Shots)
 (((Penalty Mintues - (Fights X 5) +1 ) /2)      + (Fights X 2))


Now explained in English. I would consider Hits and Blocked Shots equal stats in the GritChart, therefore add them together. Then divide it by the number of Penalty minutes (took all the 5 minutes fighting majors out) divided by 2 because it shouldn't be twice the stat Hits or Blocked shots is. The addition of 1 in the formula is in case a team goes without taking a penalty and then you are unable to divide by 0. In that case, it would just be Hits + Blocked Shots = Super High Grit!!! Then lastly you add the number of fights multiplied by 2 because it should be considered the most Grittiest stat of them all.

Example -

Game 4 of Tampa Bay and Montreal

Lots of hits and blocked shots with low penalty minutes created a high grit number. Everything looks fine.

Here is my problem with Sportsnet's GritChart. It doesn't take in consideration the type of penalty. The last 2 games of the Anaheim/Dallas series has been really chippy near the end with lots of visual Grit. The ref's and linesmen have been breaking up the fights before they happen and handing out 10 minute game misconducts like candy on Halloween. So the more penalty minutes lead to a smaller Grit number.

Game 3 of Anaheim and Dallas

Letting them fight would triple the GritChart score, but they probably would still get the 10 minutes misconducts anyway. So maybe to get an accurate GritChart score, you would only need to use penalty minutes which put the team on the penalty kill. Any time two guys get kicked out, for wanting to have more grit, shouldn't count. Anytime two players both get roughing calls, the team's GritChart score shouldn't be penalized for showing that grit.

This seems more accurate to me, or am I thinking too much into this. Should it just be straight numbers found on he stat sheet or should the type of penalty be in consideration. Either way, Sportsnet's Grit Chart is just too simple and not well explained.

NHL Realignment

 

Elliotte Friedman mentioned during the Satellite Hotstove on Hockey Night in Canada about the potential changes to the divisions for next year.

Winnipeg needs to move to a more western schedule while Detroit and Columbus have been begging for an eastern schedule for a while now.

Here was the potential changes:

Conference A - Detroit, Boston, Buffalo, Florida, Montreal, Ottawa, Tampa Bay, Toronto

Conference B - Carolina, Columbus, New Jersey, New York, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington

Conference C - Chicago, Colorado, Dallas, Minnesota, Nashville, St. Louis, Winnipeg

Conference D - Anaheim, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Jose

 

Although this is a lot better for the Jets, Red Wings and Blue Jackets, I can’t imagine Florida and Tampa Bay are to thrilled about it.

It seems like the NHL is wanting to keep rivals together as much as possible. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh need to be together, but they still want a Penguins/Capitals rivalry. And obviously they can’t split up the Rangers, Devils and Islanders.

I think the biggest problem with the realignment is the idea of East/West conferences. If you group teams based on location/time zone, it makes more sense, at least to me.

With the current teams, you could break down the league into 5 – 6 team divisions.

Division A – Anaheim, Colorado, LA, Phoenix, San Jose, Vancouver

Division B – Calgary, Dallas, Edmonton, Minnesota, St Louis, Winnipeg

Division C – Chicago, Columbus, Detroit, Nashville, Ottawa, Toronto

Division D – Carolina, Florida, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Tampa Bay, Washington

Division E – Boston, Buffalo, Montreal, New Jersey, New York, New York

For the regular season, teams would play within their division 8 times (4 home/4 away), for 40 games, then 2 times against the rest of the league (home/away) for 36 games. With the remaining 6 games they can be saved for teams outside the division with a rivalry, ex Toronto/Montreal or a new playoff rivalry from the previous season(3 teams, 2 times a year, home/away).

Playoffs seem to were it gets tricky. How do you run playoffs when there is an odd amount of divisions. But like I said before, forget the east/west (for a minute).

For playoffs, take the top 16 teams in points. 1 vs 16, 2 vs 15 etc. Tie breakers can be determined by best case scenario for distance.

Travel will probably be increased for the playoffs, but after a regular season with less travel, it is probably still less for the entire season. For playoff matchups that do require lots of travel, the team with the home ice advantage can have the option of 2-2-1-1-1 or 2-3-2 format.

With the potential changes that the NHL appears to be wanting to change. There should be no reason why Tampa Bay and Florida are playing the majority of their games in the Northeast, it is really not that much different from what Winnipeg is doing now playing in the Southeast division. The NHL seems to want to forget about the North/South, when they should be forgetting about East/West.

 

This realignment will also help for if/when the NHL decides to relocate Phoenix and expand to 32 teams. There is a lot of talk about Seattle and Quebec City getting a team, also another team in the Toronto Area.

Go to am 8 - 4 team division league (like NFL). Again forget East/West

Division A – Calgary, Edmonton, Seattle, Vancouver

Division B – Anaheim, Colorado, LA, San Jose

Division C – Dallas, Minnesota, St Louis, Winnipeg

Division D – Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Toronto Area

Division E – Columbus, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington

Division F – Boston, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec City

Division G – Buffalo, New Jersey, New York, New York

Division H – Carolina, Florida, Nashville, Tampa Bay

Regular Season, increase the division rivalries, 9 games interdivision for 27 games, and 2 games against the rest of the league or 56 games. Yes, that is an 83 game regular season, I don’t think more game will matter.

Playoffs, top 2 division leaders play against each other in the first round, then next 2 rounds can be determined by points (tie breaker to location and same rules as above, home team having choice of format).

Obviously this 8 division is somewhat fantasy as there are 3 different teams with two of them being expansion teams. I would say, even if this is the direction the NHL is heading, it could be a few years before they get to this point.

"It was the right thing to do" - Renney

It is not often you see a team pull their goalie when they are down by 3. This was the case Saturday night in the Flames/Oilers game. Honestly I wasn't surprised when Renney pulled Dubnyk, I had actually joked around saying it was about time for him to do it right before the decision was made. I had a good laugh and didn't think much of it until after the game when Renney said

“I bet you if you asked him right now how he felt about pulling the goalie, he’d say I think it was the right thing. . .because it was the right thing to do.

“We’re not going to quit behind the bench, either. We have to coach the game, we have to coach to win, period.” - Tom Renney, Head Coach Edmonton Oilers.

I then wondered if he had done this before this year, if it was the right thing to do, then he must have pulled his goalie being down by 3.

The Oilers have pulled their goalie 20 times this year. 10 times when down by 1, and 9 times while down by 2. Never has he done it when down by 3.

There has been 4 other opportunities for Renney to pull the goalie when down by 3 (Boston, Detroit, New York Islanders, Ottawa) and not once has he tried to win with the extra attacker.

I really wonder about Tom Renney, he really doesn't make much sence

NHL's Historical First Round Busts

Which team has had the best regular season and lost in the first round?

I never looked at if a team was favored to win the series and never put more emphasis on their seeding (Most disappointing if a #1 seed looses to a #8 rather than if the 8 looses to 1).

All I looked at is Points Percentage (Points divided by max possible points) in years in which they lost in the first round.

Obviously teams who have only played in a small number of playoffs are going to have a higher percentage of those teams who have played in more.

MIN 0.616

NAS 0.607

PHI 0.601

ATL 0.591

WAS 0.589

OTT 0.587

BOS 0.584

COL 0.582

BUF 0.574

FLO 0.571

NJD 0.567

DET 0.565

ANA 0.564

SJS 0.564

CLB 0.561

CAL 0.558

TBL 0.555

EDM 0.542

STL 0.539

NYI 0.535

LA 0.532

NYR 0.529

PIT 0.528

DAL 0.526

MON 0.516

CHI 0.514

PHO 0.509

TOR 0.498

CAR 0.496

VAN 0.477

Take away the Wild and the Trashers, and the top of this list makes a lot of sence.

Nashville has yet to win a first round yet always seem to be making the playoffs. The next 3 are Philly, Washington and Ottawa, again no real surprises there.

The bottom of the list is interesting too. These teams have had the least expectations to win in the first round and didnt.

Phoenix/Winnipeg, Toronto, Carolina and Vancouver.

The Best Historical Teams Who Don't Make the NHL Playoffs

I took a look at each teams Points Percentage (Number of Points divided by Number of Possible Points) when they have missed the playoffs. Who has had the best seasons while missing the playoffs?

Minnesota - .493

Calgary - .472

Buffalo - .466

Florida - .466

Montreal - .458

Nashville - .451

Anaheim - .466

Edmonton - .445

Carolina - .440

Columbus - .438

Philadelphia - .438

Toronto - .438

Atlanta - .434

St Louis - .430

Dallas - .421

Phoenix - .415

LA - .414

New York Rangers - .412

Vancouver - .407

Detroit - .402

Pittsburgh - .394

Boston - .392

New York Islanders - .391

Colorado - .386

Chicago - .379

Washington - .377

New Jersey - .344

Tampa Bay - .308

Ottawa - .303

San Jose - .299