New Guy And Advanced Hockey Stats

My name is Phil Lemay, I have been a die hard Sens fan since I can remember.  My plan here is to try and cover the Sens as best as I can, along with Jared.  I am an avid sports fan and find myself to be very knowledgeable regarding hockey and baseball.  I don’t consider myself to be someone that is extremely well connected in the hockey world, just someone who understands hockey very well not only on the ice but also on the business side of things.  I won’t be the guy that will give you rumours or anything like that, but I will most definitely report them and analyze them along with trades.  One thing I think we should start to get going is the comment section! Let’s start discussing the sport/team we all love, get that comment section firing! Now enough about me, from this point on I will only discuss hockey!

Advanced hockey statistics are really becoming a big part of how teams are grading players and I feel it is important we all understand them.  I won’t go into great detail on all of them but here are a few I feel are important to know about. On-Ice/Off ice Corsi and Offensive Zone Start%/Offensive Zone Finish.  Here is the equation for corsi: Shot Attempts FOR – Shot Attempts Against=Corsi.  Now it is important to point out that shot attempts includes shots on goal, shots missed and blocked shots.  Corsi is important because it measures just how effective a player is with puck possession and creating chances in the offensive zone while he is on the ice.  For example  Erik Condra(23.03) is our top player when it comes to Corsi ON (Total corsi)x(60 min)/(Players total ice time) along with our top D pairing in Erik Karlsson(18.53) and Marc Methot(21.99).  It doesn’t necessarily mean that those players are the best players in our team, what it means is that they create a lot of chances on the ice when their line in on and I think we all know what happens when the Karlsson/Methot pairing is on!

Offensive Zone Start%/Offensive Zone Finish% doesn’t need much explanation, the stat itself pretty much explains it.  It is the percentage of how often a player starts their shifts in the offensive zone or how often a player finishes his shift in the offensive zone.  I feel this is an important stat because it explains how effective a player is on his shift.  For example let’s use Condra once again as I feel he does this well.  Generally being a defensive minded player his OFF Zone Start % is only at 53.7% but he finishes his shifts in the OFF Zone 59.3% of the time and that is without playing on the power play.

This is just a very small sample of what advanced hockey stats are and there are a lot more out there!

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