Yes, the Caps were particularly bad at secondary scoring last year

by six hole on Oct 27, 2009 6:17 PM EDT Comment 3 comments

I was going to put this in CapsChick's earlier thread but it was just too long and different. I fiddled around with some numbers from '08-'09 just to see if there would be something notable in the numbers for the top tier teams. Basically similar to GINI coefficient (measure of inequality) to see how balanced the scoring is for the top nine teams, with 99 pts or more (calling that the Caps peer group). This is a bit different than secondary scoring (and my headline is misleading) but may point us in the right direction.

If someone can recommend a good way to post an excel spreadsheet anonymously I'm happy to share, not that there's anything too special in the numbers.

First I took all scorers with more than 10 pts for each team, ranked them by points scored, then normalized. So perfection would be everyone on the team scoring exactly the same (something above 10) no matter how many total points the players had. The Caps look by far the most unbalanced compared to the others. The unit numbers don't mean much but it went WAS (.215), PIT (.197), PHI (.189), NJD (.186), BOS (.178), DET (.165), VAN (.155), SAN (.153), and CHI (.147).

10 pts is probably low but it gets you towards a full measure of all "scorers" on the team while getting rid of most everyone who only played a few games.. I considered doing another cutoff at 20 or 30 pts but instead decided upon top 10 scorers for each team. By this approach the Pens are even slightly more unbalanced than the Caps (.150 vs .146), the Hawks, Sharks, Wings, and Bruins look very balanced (.067 to .079), and the Canucks, Devils, and Flyers are in the middle (.120 to .127).

This is partly just putting numbers onto an obvious result you can "see" by looking at the scoring lists.
And one number doesn't tell you everything - the Pens skew at the top thanks to Malkin and Crosby, while the Bruins had a ton of people getting 10+ pts. Problems include not accounting for games played, trades during the season, not accounting for lines/position in each game, getting an exact definition of secondary scoring, and the normalizing which gives the Wings 774 pts the same weight as the Devils 625. This is all psuedo-scientific at this point.

But while I do think there is a "there" worth looking at, I also think looking at the '09-'10 season so far (9-12 games) might be premature. Unless you're willing to rigorously define secondary scoring for each team, break apart line combinations, and do hard work for each game. In which case if that's what you're after do it now, instead of for the whole season.

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Have you considered Google Docs? You can create (or upload) a spreadsheet and share with the masses. Yeah, your google account name may be exposed, but you can always create a “dummy account” if anonymity is important to you.

Without really studying this too much, it’s hard for me to tell if there is any failed logic or not, so I’m not going to comment on that—but I do think the readers of this site enjoy breaking down stats in ways that break the standard mold. It’s hard for me to tell exactly what you’re scores actually indicate (yeah, I get the basic gist of it), so seeing it visually may help.

Since I like to play devil’s advocate so often, here’s something to think about: Couldn’t a larger gap between “primary” and “secondary” scoring only make secondary scoring less important? For example, tonight against the Flyers, Boudreau put all his eggs in one basket, played the “Care Bear Line”, and that line pretty much did ALL the scoring…and the Caps won the game. You can definitely make the argument that if your “primary” scoring lines are so prolific that they’re putting up a ton of points every night, that secondary scoring isn’t nearly as important than if your primary scorers aren’t producing…I think?

The point I’m making is that I think the numbers you’re trying to generate probably also depend on what the primary scorers are producing—a larger gap on a team that where the top line(s) are less productive is definitely could definitely spell doom, but if you’re top line(s) are producing numbers that win games, you might be looking for other qualities from your secondary lines.

Maybe that’s the point you’re trying make? I’m sorry, I wasn’t quite sure about that.

by PaintDrinkingPete on Oct 28, 2009 12:17 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

we’ll see if this works. unfortunately it looks like it took out the charts i had made (ranking the series in G and K on each page). next attempt tomorrow.

I won’t disagree with your statement about importance, mostly because that wasn’t what the exercise here was about. I was trying to say there is a virtue to perfect scoring balance, in that if one player went down he’s not missed because the fill-ins are exactly as productive. But that’s not the real world. The Caps unequal balance makes them vulnerable – a broken leg for Ovie would be devastating, obviously, in a way that maybe Phil Kessel doing it last year for the Bruins wouldn’t have been.

I’m leaving out (for now) the fact that Detroit’s top ten scorers were more productive than e.g. Vancouver’s (606 pts vs 494) because by normalizing the GINI figure will show the relation within that group. And that group of ten might be defined the wrong way (maybe it should be 1-7, maybe it should 1-4, 7,9, and 14, etc). And I’m leaving out the crappier teams in the league, where secondary scoring may or may not be relatively more important to their team’s fortunes, because it didn’t seem to have any bearing on how the Caps were doing relative to their peers.

You’re right that if primary scoring was ungodly – let’s say Malkin and Crosby each had 200 pts with their teammates unchanged – then the inequality would be high, GINI would be high, and … it would all be irrelevant because Pittsburgh would be destroying the league. But I think the real situation is more competitive than that, these teams are all at the top of the league, the total scoring from one team to another is not massively different, and the GINI might mean something.

Is there a point here? I’m really just trying to anticipate some of the analysis that would be needed to compare this issue to other teams, in a way that could have some objective meaning.

by six hole on Oct 28, 2009 2:21 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

I think someone should make a t-shirt that looks like this;

front: black and white mug shot of Ovie, Backstrom, and Semin
back: “Who needs secondary scoring?”

by bigity b on Oct 29, 2009 10:46 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

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