SPECIAL TEAMS VARIANCE
In the playoffs you never know how a team or a goalie is going to perform on special teams. Call it a streak, a slump, luck, randomness, variance, or whatever you want, guys run hot and cold and just because you’re going one way in one series or even one game doesn’t mean it will carry into the next.
We would expect more variance on the penalty kill just because of the sample size, but we should probably also expect an additional spread in results because of the team factors.
The point is that nobody knows what we will see in the next round. Don’t bet on the hot hand, because he might already have gone cold, and if you have a skill guy who is shooting blanks then keep running him out there because pretty soon the tide is going to turn. The trick is for the team to stay alive in the interim,
SPECIAL TEAMS ANALYTICS
· If we focus on which stat in theory has the strongest association with PP success (GF/60), we see that Fenwick For per 60 and Shots For per 60 are virtually indistinguishable.
· On the PK, however, Sv% becomes the strongest stat.
REPEATABILITY OF SPECIAL TEAMS
To what degree is special teams performance repeatable?
Both generating shots on the powerplay and preventing shots on the penalty kill appear to be largely ability driven measures.
(Note: next article explains this is true for pk only)
The same applies to drawing more powerplays than the opposition.
WHAT MAKES A GOOD SPECIAL TEAMS UNIT
Penalty kill save percentage turns out to be a lot more reproducible than power play shooting percentage – teams have a lot more control over how many shots they stop than over how many of their shots go in.
In other words, teams don't have all that much control over their shooting percentage, so a good power play is one that generates a lot of shots. But teams do have control over save percentage, and just using shot rate to evaluate penalty kills leaves out the skill of the goalie, so you actually do better to use PK%.
However, the team impact on save percentage seems to be even smaller on the penalty kill.
· A good power play is one that generates a lot of shots on net.
· A good penalty kill unit is one that has a high penalty kill save percentage.
SPECIAL TEAMS INDEX AND SPECIAL TEAMS SHOT DIFFERENTIAL
Special Teams Index – it was quite basic, you summed a team’s power play percentage and a penalty kill percentage, and voila – there was your Special Teams Index. 100 is average, anything 5-10+ points above is real good, anything 5-10+ points below is real bad. Easy stuff, right?
These days, we know a bit better – we know that penalty killing and power play success is driven by the number of shots a team is able to both get and prevent and that teams don’t have a huge amount of control over either shooting percentage or goaltending.
knowing that shots tend to be more meaningful than goals when we think about what’s going to happen in the future, I whipped all these new items into something I call Special Teams Shot Differential – It’s the sum of a team’s power play shot differential (Shots For per 60 minutes – Shots Allowed per 60 minutes) and penalty killing shot differential.
We see just how little 5v4 and 4v5 power plays and penalty kills matter in the big picture – few teams have a differential plus or minus 10, those that do are largely driven by luck, and we’re nearly halfway done with a regular season.
HIDDEN VALUE IN PENALTY DIFFERENTIAL
There is very little relationship between a forward’s ice time and penalty-drawing rate:
The correlation with ice time is almost entirely on the penalty taking side:
There is a weak-but-real correlation between ice time and penalty differential, as shown below:
Penalties are a significant component of a player’s value, to a larger extent than is generally appreciated.
PP & PK OPPORTUNITIES AND SCORE EFFECTS
minor penalties are heavily influenced by score effects, and it seems to stem from referee bias.
After adjusting for score effects the biggest thing that jumps out is the correlation to team points. We see a drastic improvement.
If anything, this validates the Canucks’ “Jerk-Puck” system to goad other teams into more minor penalties. Teams benefit from additional opportunities independent of their skill on the power-play
WHAT DRIVES SPECIAL TEAMS SUCCESS
https://www.fearthefin.com/2013/7/14/4520832/special-teams-part-ii-what-drives-special-teams-success
Given that a teams effect on PK Sv% is very close to none, we can say that the goaltender’s influence significantly changes our approach to analyzing the PK as compared to the PP.
Teams on the power-play are much better at controlling shots than teams on the penalty kill.
However, (likely the result of the goaltender), teams on the PK control the percentage of shots that go in net.
Shot rate statistics are the best drivers of PP performance. While Corsi is the most reliable, Fenwick is the most predictive (for GF/60 and as we will see, Pts/game).
We have evidence now that Fenwick/60 is probably the best indicator of future PP success.
PP has a bigger impact on winning than does the PK. This likely traces back to the repeatability issue. Teams have a more difficult time controlling what happens while they are on the PK relative to the PP.
there likely is good value for teams that pursue players who also drive quality possession on the PP as compared to shooting percentage.
· If we focus on which stat in theory has the strongest association with PP success (GF/60), we see that Fenwick For per 60 and Shots For per 60 are virtually indistinguishable. On the PK, however, Sv% becomes the strongest stat.