SIMPLIFYING SCORING
GOALS CREATED
It feels right to consider that the pass and the shot have roughly equal value, although on any given goal you might reach a different conclusion.
These facts suggest that closing a goal is, on balance, a more valuable piece of goal creation than is a set up. And this would nudge you to conclude that scoring is more than 50% of goal creation.
So here is my Goals Created formula: give 20% credit to second assists, 30% credit to first assists and give the rest (on average about 56%) of the credit to goals.
DROPPING THE SECONDARY ASSIST
The numbers suggest that secondary assists have very little connection to a forward’s talent level, and that we would do better when evaluating forwards to ignore them altogether.
So in the end, we’re left to conclude that – at least for forwards, at even strength – secondary assists aren’t really a talent at all. By including them in people’s point total, we’re just adding noise, and making it harder to tell who’s having a good season.
IPP TELLS US THE SECONDARY ASSIST IS USELESS
One of my comments in Scott’s articles was that it might be interesting to reduce the importance, or even eliminate, the second assist as it may not be as important as the first assist. To see the impact of the second assists, let’s take a look at Individual Second Assist Percentage (ISAP).
It seems to me that the second assist is probably largely a useless point somewhat randomly distributed among players.
PASSES AND SHOT ASSISTS
(December 31, 2012)
passes that directly resulted in shots (you can call them “shot assists” if you want). Unlike shots, this statistic isn’t tracked by the NHL, but we can create an estimate by dividing a player’s assists by the average number of assists per goal (1.7) and then dividing that by the average on-ice shooting percentage of his linemates.
should provide a decent estimate of how many of the player’s passes resulted in shots on goal.
Much like shots, the advantage of looking at passes is the removal of the influence of shooting percentages so you can truly see who is most adept at creating shots, and who is passing when they should be shooting.
ON-ICE PASSING METRICS
Teams consistently shoot at a higher percentage on shots from passes as opposed to shots preceded by no passes. The average team shooting percentage in the NHL is 7.9%. The average shooting percentage across our sample size on shots preceded by two or more passes is 10.8%.
ESTIMATING SHOT ASSISTS
We can estimate shot assists using publicly available data with reasonable accuracy.
Estimated shot contributions and estimated primary shot contributions both outperform their point-based counterparts for forwards and defenders.
ARE GOALS OR PRIMARY ASSISTS MORE IMPORTANT
(Jan 2019)
What’s more important, goals or primary assists?
There are many ways to go about answering this question, but many in hockey analytics will look for how predictive each metric is, or how highly correlated each one is with future on-ice goals for.
Primary assists are the most predictive, then goals, and finally a massive drop-off to secondary assists.
still probably better off weighing primary assists more heavily than goals,
Public micro stats are more predictive of future goals than traditional metrics like Corsi and xG (For defenders).
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