Comments on: Which teams really had the best and worst power plays last season? (Power play +/- in 2010-11)

By: James O'Brien

James O'Brien — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 06:35:07 +0000

Yup, I saw that NHL.com has those numbers shortly after posting my comments.

By: crownedroyal

crownedroyal — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 04:46:25 +0000

NHL.com has the stats. For example, the Canucks had 444:27 of 5-4 power play time (which I also like splitting the different man advantages into) and 69 goals. That is 280 actual opportunities, but using it at a percentage of 2:00, that would actually be only (roughly) 222 full two-minute power plays.

This could be expressed with a modified percentage of 31.1% per full 2 min 5-4 power play and 28.6% per full 2 min 5-3 power play (7:07 time 5-3 and 1 goal scored).

Guess I’ll be writing a blog post on this…

By: James O'Brien

James O'Brien — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 04:16:08 +0000

You make some strong points as well. My general feeling is “the more the merrier” when it comes to stats. Power play percentage can have it’s place too, I just feel like this is a better bottom line way of looking at things. Per minute would be an intriguing thing to look at if the information is easy to locate (as I discussed with crownedroyal).

By: James O'Brien

James O'Brien — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 04:14:00 +0000

Oh, I like that idea a lot. Might be easier for people who write for individual teams to work out than to go by the full league, but it’s definitely a great point.

By: eklundssource

eklundssource — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 03:56:43 +0000

Isn’t the ability to draw penalties very different than the ability to convert goals on the resulting powerplay? Not that good can’t come from measuring them combined, but imagine a team that spent 60% of each game on the powerplay yet ‘only’ managed 96 goals? They would have likely ‘won’ this analysis despite being pretty poor on the powerplay..

Alternatively, a team with just 30 powerplay goals would fare poorly here, but if they were awful at drawing penalties and had just 60 attempts, that’s really not the powerplay unit itself that is a problem..

A more interesting analysis would be, to me, powerplay goals per minute, average time to convert, etc – to my naked eye that seems a different way to evaluate efficiency than chances converted or +/-. May start putting together that data, come to think of it. Thanks for the post!

By: crownedroyal

crownedroyal — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 03:52:21 +0000

It’s about time we started modifying power play stats. Kudos. My biggest problem with the percentages, however, is still the measurement of ‘opportunities’ in the way that they are qualified- sometimes, power plays are only 10 seconds (due to other penalties expiring) yet this is still counted as ‘one’ opportunity just as a full two minutes would be.

Percentages should be based on a calculation of time, wherein two min of power play time counts as one opportunity, or simply by expressing it as a ration of PPG/2:00.

Just a theory.