Sports Opinionated » NHL

Thrashers relocation to Winnipeg: we had it Feb 17th, 2010!!

Ryan P — Fri, 20 May 2011 03:09:06 +0000

Occasional S-O writer, Peter Aiello, had the Thrashers relocation story back in Feb of 2010. He had a source related to True North and posted his hunch. It’s kind of cool to look back at it now.

Pete’s original article.

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The NHL Trade Deadline – a few opinions

Ryan P — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 02:53:52 +0000

With all the deals that went on in the last month, we’ve been debating it a lot over at Hockey Prospect. Below are a few links to some articles I wrote and a few by others.

My articles:

Why I didn’t like the Leafs trading Versteeg

The Big Blues-Avalanche trade

The Penguins Getting the Best of Dallas Stars in the Goligoski-Neal Trade

Articles by others:

An HP Roundtable on the Best and Worst deals (including my picks)

Richard Pollock’s take on the Canucks’ moves

Jonathan Willis’ post on the Brad Boyes deal

Derek Zona’s Dustin Penner tribute

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NHL’s Best and Worst Free Agents So Far This Year

Ryan Popilchak — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 04:31:02 +0000

My take on the season’s free agents who have most outperformed or underperformed their historical levels. I posted it over at Hockey Prospectus this weekend. For those who follow the Flames, it should be especially interesting.

The article is here.

A quick excerpt is below:

“Lydman is playing drastically different ice time than Jordan Leopold though. He is facing the hardest competition among the Ducks d-men (1.778 Corsi Rel QoC) and the worst zone starts (42.0%) as well. Despite being thrown to the bottom of the canyon at the start of every shift, Lydman has been a much better possession player than his teammates (9.4 Corsi Rel) and his results on the ice have been much better as well (Relative Plus-Minus of 2.38). If he keeps this up, Lydman could be the king of the HLI for defensemen this season.”

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Jack Johnson’s contract, Heavy Lifters on the Blue Line and a Flames Rebuild

Ryan Popilchak — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 03:54:35 +0000

Contrary to what it may seem like here on S-O, I have still been writing the last 3 weeks. I just forgot to link to some of the material here.

Over at Hockey Prospectus, I managed to take the L.A. Kings to task for the Jack Johnson contract and also used my Heavy Lifter Index to evaluate the NHL’s best matchup defensemen.

At Matchsticks and Gasoline, we’ve been busy discussing everything from the Flames need to reinvigorate the roster to the recent winning streak.

The two pieces I contributed were a post about the Flames lack of a matchup line and contributed my views to the Flames potential rebuild.

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The Heavy Lifter Index – measuring hockey’s hardest job

Ryan Popilchak — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 17:41:43 +0000

I’ve spent the last month or so working on a new way to measure hockey players. I call it the Heavy Lifter Index (HLI). I didn’t invent the term heavy lifter for hockey players, I just added the index part. I’m pretty sure my contribution to the name is much more important than the rest.

For those that don’t read a lot of hockey stat blogs, I’ll elaborate. A Heavy Lifter is a player who not only faces the opposition’s best players, but frequently has to start shifts in the defensive zone. Yet he stilll outplays everyone he faces.

HLI measures the difficulty of the player’s icetime by defining the level of competition and starting shift position the using existing stats QualComp, Corsi Rel QoC, and Zone Start percentage. The only difference is we compare the players rating, to the league rating to see what the magnitude of difficulty of their icetime is.

As for outplaying the competition, HLI uses three stats again. I measure how much they outscore their competition, how much they outshoot their competition and whether they draw more penalties than they take. Again these stats are all readily available on BehindTheNet.ca but I use a method to measure magnitude compared to the league.

My work is posted on Hockey Prospectus. My first post explaining the inner workings of HLI can be found here, while the evaluation of every forward in the NHL over the last 3 seasons can be found here.

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