Ever since I started in this league people have encouraged me to build a player the way I want; however, the subtle hints have been to avoid building a player with high checking. The justification has been that checking equals penalties. I believe this mentality is a carryover from the league we based the SHL on, the NHL. On a routine basis I hear the argument that bad teams hit more because they don't have the puck. This does make some sense. You cannot hit if you have the puck, the logic is there. I don’t completely agree though. You cannot intercept a pass if you have the puck either, or make a save, or a blocked shot, and nobody encourages a player to have low defense in favor of high offensive stats, in fact the current meta almost mandates all players be >90 DEF in order to be successful.
I don’t know if I would say I agree or disagree with the assertion that Hits=PIMS, so I am going to explore this belief and see what we come up with. In order to do this I took a look at each game from S37 and S32 and compared the hit totals of the winning and losing team of all 350 games in each season. I originally wanted to look at S37 and S27 to get a bigger gap between the players involved and to see if there was a shift in thinking when it came to building a player, but we all know why I couldn’t. With that said I will acknowledge that the data isn't a good as it could be as there are a lot of overlaps between S37 and S32 in terms of players, GMs, and overall groupthink when it comes to how to build a player. I also couldn't go too far back as I wanted the same sample size for the two seasons. I stuck with the regular season as I felt that the sample size was large enough and that team strategies did not vary as much as they would in the playoffs where GMs and coaches are adjusting things on the fly.
I will attempt to address both claims, bad teams hit more, I will call this the BTHM Theory, and hits=PIMS. To start off with if you look at the spreadsheet on the left side of the S37 and S32 tabs is the hit totals for the winning and losing team along with the hit differential. The hit differential was used to create a record of sorts to determine if the winning team hit more or less for that season. For S37 the winning team outhit the losing team 160 times, and was outhit 176 times with 14 ties. So the winning team won the hit game about 46% of the time. I don't believe that a 46/50 split is enough to definitively say that the BTHM Theory is true. I will say that the data does have some truth in that belief but it isn't enough to prove it completely. After I had gone this far I began to notice a trend, that in hindsight, I would have kept track of. If the winning team won by >3 goals the hit differential favored the winning team more frequently and with a larger differential, or it seemed to. I believe that this is just a dominant team winning in all catagories and without analytic proof I can’t prove that belief, and I am not going back to get the proof.
S32 showed that the winning team won the hit game 163 times, lost 162 times, and tied 25 times. This is a little bit more definitive in terms of proving that the losing team would hit more. A 46/46 split does nothing more than disprove the BTHM Theory. The hit totals, hit differential, and average hits/game shows that there is a lot of parity between teams and the seasons. This may go back to the idea that there is a lot of overlap between the rosters in the two seasons and without adding a 3rd season a bit farther back I can’t definitively prove anything. I will say that I am confident saying that bad teams do not hit more, they hit the same as the good teams.
The next theory I will attempt to address is that hitting nets more penalties. This theory is one that I do believe to some extent and is also a bit more complicated to prove or disprove. The thing I don’t like about it is that I view a hit as just another mechanism to cause a turnover. Sometimes a hit results in the skater losing the puck and sometimes it does not. This is similar to a blocked shot being recovered by the offense, or the defense. Neither hit or block are a guarantee that the defending team recovers the puck. Not even a save does this as rebounds are unpredictable in both the SHL and NHL. Without a program to automatically go through each game and count the amount of times a turnover occurs and the mechanism that caused the turnover it is very difficult to get this data, and I am sure as fuck not going to do it manually.
There is going to be some errors on my part in terms of my thinking and the way I go about proving that hits=PIMS, but I will attempt to do so. There are many people who are smarter than I am so I hope that one of those people can show me my error and help me address it when it does come up. In the meantime, what I did for each season is provide the season hit leader. For S37 it was Sebastian Strange with 249 hits and 50 PIMS. Strange did not have any PIM5s, so he ended the season with 25 minor penalties. In S32 it was Slappy McDoodle with 227 hits and 89 PIMS. Slappy also had 3 PIM5s that season which I removed from his PIM total for a total of 66 PIMS, or 33 minor penalties. There could be some 10 min majors or a misconduct in these numbers but again, for my sanity I am not going to go look for them.
We experienced some ice time drama this season which we can see in Strange’s ice time as he played on both the 2nd and 3rd lines for a total of 50%. To address this and bring him in line with what we see for Slappy I reduced his stats by 30%. His 2nd line time was 35% and 3rd line was 15%, so in the end his 3rd line time accounted for 30% of his total. I acknowledge that the sim is unpredictable and this isn't completely accurate, but it's the best I can do. So with adjustments done these are Sebastian’s and Slappy’s stats:
<div align="center">Sebastian Strange
Ice Time: 35%
Hits: 174
MP: 965
PIMS: 35
Hits per MP: 0.18
PIM per Hit: 0.20
PIM per MP: 0.04
Slappy McDoodle
Ice Time: 38%
Hits: 227
MP: 1132
PIMS:66
Hits per MP: 0.20
PIM per Hit: 0.29
PIM per MP: 0.06</div>
I believe that it is worth noting that neither one of these players were in the top 10 for PIMS in their respective seasons. It is also worth noting that the PIM leader for both seasons, none other than the venerable Danny Foster, was in the top 3 for hits in both seasons. It’s also worth noting that both players are forwards.
I wanted to do the same for another player that was in #2 in hits during S37, Zach Evans. I believe that Evans is the case study on how to build a responsible and physical player. He is also right in the middle of the recent ice time debate, but his numbers should still be relevant. I also adjusted his stats to reflect only the approximate stats gained on his top line, which is line 2 as he played on lines 2 and 4, and he is a forward as well:
<div align="center">Zach Evans
Ice Time: 30%
Hits: 132
MP: 829
PIMS: 22
PIM per Hit: 0.17
PIM per MP: 0.03</div>
One thing to notice between these three players is that the PIM per Hit for Slappy is almost 50% higher than the other two. Slappy’s Checking is also drastically higher than the other two. Both Evans and Strange have a Checking of 70 and 78 respectively, where Slappy is at 90. I believe that this is of some value. I believe that there is a line in the sand between hitting when appropriate and hitting to much. All three players have a Hit/MP that is within 10% of each other, so to me that means that they are all hitting equally as much, Slappy was just not hitting correctly. To me this means that a Checking stat between 70-80 would net the best results with the least amount of PIMS associated. Discipline doesn't seem to play much of a role in these three players and also removed Danny Foster from the comparison as he is the rare Enforcer, so it is expected that his PIMS be much higher than the league average.
Now I want to look at the AVERAGE SHL player. On the third tab of the spreadsheet you will find a truncated version of the SHL stats for all skaters. I removed everything not relevant to this post. So with that let's look at the average player.
<div align="center">Hits: 52
MP: 803
PIMS: 16
PIM per Hit: 0.31
PIM per MP: 0.02</div>
With that information it may be possible to make an argument that an investment into the checking stat would actually reduce the amount of PIMS the average player takes. Both Slappy and Strange have more MP than the average which would account for the increased PIMS. The PIM/Hit stat for the average player is actually higher than the three players above, although only slightly higher than Slappy’s. The PIM/MP is also right on par with Evans and Strange. In the end I don’t think it's actually possible to say conclusively that hitting means you will take more penalties. Of course there are outliers like Foster and Winston Windsor who had 0 hits and 0 PIMS in S36, but these players will be pulled inline with the average by the rest of the league.
Im at work and dont have time to parse the numbers fully right now, but thank you for doing this. Checking, i believe, is a vastly misunderstood aspect of this game.
For me, i always just wanted to build my guy my way and stay true to my original vision regardless of the group thinking.
Also, for the record, i have almost never appeared in the top ten for PIM's over fifteen seasons.
Quote:Originally posted by Slappydoodle@Nov 28 2017, 08:07 PM Im at work and dont have time to parse the numbers fully right now, but thank you for doing this. Checking, i believe, is a vastly misunderstood aspect of this game.
For me, i always just wanted to build my guy my way and stay true to my original vision regardless of the group thinking.
Also, for the record, i have almost never appeared in the top ten for PIM's over fifteen seasons.
I agree with you completely. THIS is what really made me start thinking about the issue.
I know my player is almost proof of the hits=PIMS but I dont think that its completely true, and players like you show that hitting is effective and can be done, and be competitive.
Maybe if you want to look into the Hits=PIMS hypthoesis some more, you could do so by looking at it on game-by-game basis? Obviously doing it for the same sample that you used for BTHM would be way too much work, but maybe do it for a sample of 50 games or so. You already have the hit totals for the winning and the losing team, maybe now look into the PIM/minor penalties as well to see if the team that had more hits also ended up with more penalties - and if there was a difference between games where the hit numbers were close, and ones were one team clearly outhit the other?
Quote:Originally posted by RomanesEuntDomus@Nov 29 2017, 08:16 AM Nice work, interesting read for sure
Maybe if you want to look into the Hits=PIMS hypthoesis some more, you could do so by looking at it on game-by-game basis? Obviously doing it for the same sample that you used for BTHM would be way too much work, but maybe do it for a sample of 50 games or so. You already have the hit totals for the winning and the losing team, maybe now look into the PIM/minor penalties as well to see if the team that had more hits also ended up with more penalties - and if there was a difference between games where the hit numbers were close, and ones were one team clearly outhit the other?
I had thought about that as well. I almost went down that road here, but I didn't for some reason. I also wanted to take a look at what kind of penalties players who dont hit take versus those that hits create.
To your point I was keeping an eye on the PP stats of each game and even when a team went 2 for 4 or something the game was still close.
I think it would be interesting to run a sim of a full season for team that was made up of players with relatively high checking with lines like 1-1-3 or 1-2-2 and see what the end result looks like. My gut tells me that they would give up a ton of PP points, but not a lot of even strength goals and they would still be competitive
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