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On the Forecheck

Back to the 90’s?

by Forechecker on 10/27/08 at 03:30 PM ET
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Hockey stats guru Alan Ryder pops a few bubbles in today’s Globe and Mail:

Myth: Re-engineering the game after the lost season of the lock-out opened up the NHL’s game and resulted in more scoring.

Reality: Scoring rose, but is now back to pre-lockout levels and the game never became more wide open.

What follows is a vivisection of scoring data from the last few seasons, and a look inside what caused scoring to rise immediately following the Great Lockout, and why it has descended back to previous levels recently.  Despite goal-scoring coming back down, however, I’m not buying the argument that NHL hockey isn’t wide-open compared to what it was a few years ago.  And I might just have the numbers to back that up…

Ryder’s focus here is on the prevalence and effectiveness of the power play, which goes a long way towards explaining scoring trends.  However, one can also look at this question qualitatively in terms of up-and-down action, not just goals.  On that aspect, I think it’s clear by observation that the game today is much more watchable and entertaining than it was 10 years ago.  Just watch the NHL Network and see how things have changed since the days of clutch & grab.  But it would make us (well, at least me) feel a lot more comfortable to verify that hunch more explicitly.

Perhaps beyond looking at goals and power plays, what if we looked at Total Shots taken over time?  The following data are summarized per team for the seasons 1997-98 through the current one, with the exception of 2002-3.  For some reason the RTSS data on NHL.com for that season is wildly askew, with some numbers dropping by 75% compared to the previous and succeeding years.  With that in mind, here’s a look at Goals, Shots on Goal, Missed Shots, Blocked Shots and Total Shots (SOG + Missed + Blocked) across all teams for the time period in question:

And here’s a pretty picture of the same…

While the overall trend is similar to what Ryder found (post-lockout saw a sizeable bump, with 2007-8 showing a return towards previous levels), what appears to be happening here is that overall shot totals are indeed still up, mostly due to an increase in Missed Shots (averaging roughly 11 per game over time, and over 13 this season so far).  Maybe the game is so dizzyingly fast that today’s wingers are firing away, but high & wide of the mark all too often.  Shots On Goal are also particularly high right now, and will be worth watching over the next few months.

An entirely different take on this subject came in the form of a loooooong post by James Mirtle about a year ago.  He looked at goaltending and shots-on-goal trends, without taking special teams into consideration, and it makes for another fine read on this subject.

Filed in: NHL Statistical Analysis | On the Forecheck | Permalink
 

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