This week I am joined by my good friend Dan to talk about the Minnesota Wild’s season, including rookie standouts and potential offseason contract scenarios. We look ahead to the NHL Playoffs and discuss whether the Wild have a snowball’s chance in hell to upset the Chicago Blackhawks. We also make our predictions for all first-round matchups.

All killer, no filler today! The first round of the fantasy playoffs are in the books, and this is the time of year when heroes are made and some players become goats (coughCareyPrice). This week I give a rundown of the best and worst of the last week and look ahead to the next round.

Today we take a look at some strategies to win your fantasy hockey playoffs. I am joined by Mike Schmidt as we look at skaters and goalies to target if you need help and some guys to stay away from.

This week, I look at the NHL’s top 20 scorers and their Power Play production and zone starts. Which players get the most offensive-zone work and which are asked to play a 200-foot game?

The Minnesota Wild are not built to win right now. When they have their collective heads out of their rear ends, they are perhaps (perhaps) a playoff bubble team, able to beat teams like Phoenix, Edmonton, and Calgary (as they have recently,) but unable to outplay the Chicago/Anaheim/Vancouver level teams.

Unless your name is Barry Melrose, you probably don’t expect the Wild to contend for the Stanley Cup this season. But certainly the same level of horrendous play as last year from January on isn’t acceptable either. And with two massive contracts doled out and a bunch of highly-touted rookies making their debut, the Wild should be showing some improvement over last year. I wrote about managing expectations going into this season, and while it’s unreasonable to expect a top-four playoff seed, we should hope to see at least some movement in the right direction. Today, I’ll dive into the team-level stats (all collected from behindthenet.ca) to break down whether this year’s team is actually an improvement from last year’s. **Side note: it’s tricky to use overall numbers from the 2011-12 Wild because I think they were better than how they played in Jan-Mar because of all the injuries, but not as good as the best-in-the-NHL team they were for the first few weeks of the season. So grains of salt, and all that.

EVEN-STRENGTH

The go-to team-level stat is Fenwick Close, which shows team’s possession in 5v5 close situations—a one-goal game in the first or second period, and a tie game in the third. This stat has proven itself to be one of the best and most reliable indicators of a team’s play. I also really like it because it’s easily interpretable, a simple percentage that everyone can quickly and easily wrap their head around.

The club is playing at least somewhat better in most every category this year compared to last, which is good to see. However, they’re still not cracking 50% at any time except down two goals, which tells me opposing coaches feel fine taking their foot off the gas when they get a comfortable lead against one of the lowest-scoring teams in the league. The “normal” range in Fenwick between the best and worst teams tends to run just about 55% for the best to 45% for the worst. With the Wild sitting just above 45% for all game situations except up two goals, they are still at the basement of the NHL. While the club was dead last in FenClose last year, they are 24^th this year. So, hooray I guess? This article isn’t meant to be a comparison of the Wild to the rest of the league, but last year’s team to this year’s team…but a bit of context to keep in mind.

Minnesota has had some fine goaltending from Nicklas Backstrom at times this year, so that’s why they have been able to stick around in a lot of games, but at 46% Fenwick when tied or close, the ice is just tilted against the team. The zone entry/dump-and-chase discussion has blown up recently, and I’m not going to spill many pixels talking about it here but suffice it to say I do think the team is not built for the “Canadian style” of digging pucks out of the corners. Here is a great article I read this week that details why the team personnel isn’t suited for a dump-in game.

It’s generally known that home-ice advantage is less of a factor in hockey than in other sports, but the Wild’s home/road splits are disconcerting:

Their record reflects this disparity, with an 8-2-1 record at the Xcel Energy Center and a 3-7-1 record away. I looked deeper into the matchups at home and away, and I don’t think there’s much to be found…the Wild played Anaheim and Phoenix twice on the road, Colorado and Nashville twice at home, and one-and-one for Chicago, Detroit, Vancouver, and Edmonton. With a number of rookies on the roster, the youth factor may play into it as well…but ultimately I think that all we can really say is the team stinks out loud on the road. Less than 19 shots on goal per 60 minutes close? Something something Gretzky, something something miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Damn. I do like to see that the team is allowing less shots than last year though, so there’s that.

SPECIAL TEAMS

I’m going to go out on a limb here, but when a team’s 5v4 shooting percent is less than its 5v5 shooting percent, that’s not a great sign. The club is 21st in the league with a 15.4% PP conversion rate, but their per-minute shot generation is actually lower than last year. I know that on the man advantage it’s not necessarily about sheer quantity of shots, and I’m not going to start down the shot quality rabbit hole, but adding Suter and Parise have not made any discernible difference on the power play as of yet. No es bueno.

On the flip side, the Wild’s PK is a relative strength–that is, at 82.1% and 15th in the league, when you’re at the bottom of the league in most categories, to be in the middle of the pack is seen as an upgrade. The team is allowing noticeably less shots and goals per 60 minutes of time on the PK compared to last year, even without Darroll Powe, so there’s that. But you can’t win games with a strong PK, you can only avoid losing them, so while we see improvement in this area, they’re going to have to start netting more goals if they want to go anywhere.

I’m going to take off my statboy hat for a second. While I am absolutely a believer in the statistical and advanced metrics value of studying hockey, I am also a big believer in individual psychology and team chemistry. Stats folk get unfairly hit with a false dichotomy because we all know that the human element comes into play. But I digress. What I feel like I’m seeing is a team that is learning to play together and gelling (like Magellan) just a bit. With all the new faces on the roster, it’s taken some time to adjust but I think I’m starting to see some progress. Ryan Suter and Jonas Brodin are playing quite well together, Jason Zucker has been a breath of fresh air, and Mikael Granlund seems to be finally finding his way out of the wilderness. He looks like he’s getting a little more comfortable and is showing some of the moves that made him a well-known prospect.

Like I said at the top of this article, I don’t think the Wild are built for a deep playoff run. And of course I don’t want them to be a bottom-dweller in the conference, but for the last few years they have sort of been treading water where they haven’t made the playoffs but haven’t bottomed out to get a lottery pick. The club is set up pretty well to be a mover in the Western Conference, but I’m a bit wary of getting caught up in that cycle again. The shortened schedule may make it more difficult to know who’s going to be a buyer and seller around the trade deadline, but if teams come a-calling looking for maybe a Devin Setoguchi or a Matt Cullen, I hope the organization will listen.

What do you think, will the Wild be buyers or seller at the trade deadline? Leave a comment and let me know! And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, @Hashtag_Hockey

In this week’s show, I talk about the Ryan O’Reilly situation and why I’d wait a little while to pick him up. Then I suggest a skater who is owned in less than 50% of leagues, and finally, I run down the list of top 10 goalies and how many Quality Starts they have put up this year. The numbers may surprise you!

I tried my hand at tracking scoring chances this evening, and while it was my first effort, I checked them against the PBP after the game:

7, Cullen–1

9, Koivu–1

10, Setoguchi–1

11, Parise–1

15, Heatley–4

16, Zucker–1

20, Suter–2

21, Brodziak–2

46, Spurgeon–1

63, Coyle–1

96, Bouchard–1

• Mike Yeo has continued to shake up the lines, going with yet another new combo for tonight’s game: Parise-Koivu-Coyle; Zucker, Cullen, Setoguchi; Bouchard-Granlund-Heatley; Rupp-Brodziak-Mitchell. These lines seemed to work well…Cullen and Setoguchi looked better than they have in some time, and Heatley was being fed good passes in the slot the whole evening. Being able to roll out four lines will help a lot on back-to-back nights like this week, and if the rookies continue to chip in, the Wild’s depth could help them out down the stretch.
• Nicklas Backstrom’s gave up three goals, but one was a weird redirect off Tom Gilbert’s stick on a strange hop, another was a crazy hop off a dump-in from the red line that took two funny hops, and the third came in the last minute of the game after Phoenix had pulled their goalie. I wrote a while back about watching a Quality Start melt away in front of my eyes, and tonight felt very much the same. Backs has been playing quite well as of late, and tonight’s numbers will drag his recent success down a bit but he has been doing his part to help the team along.
• Speaking of rookies, Zucker and Brodin are making the most of their minutes. Zucker has three goals so far and Brodin has stepped up to the challenge of playing on the top pair. Only Justin Schultz is skating more minutes per night, and Jo-Bro is not making a lot of mistakes.
• Not a rookie, but Jared Spurgeon has looked decent since returning from his injury. Pairing Suter with Spurgeon failed miserably, but he is doing alright on the second pairing with Gilbert.
• The Fox Sports North announcers cited a stat in the first period that they called “Attempted Shots” and it was certainly higher than the shots on goal at the time, so I am curious if they don’t have someone counting Fenwick or even Corsi…I’m going to try to look into it.

I’m not a true believer in momentum, except that the team has been playing better over the last couple of weeks, and they will need to play well as a team to take on the Ducks on Friday. Anaheim is in the “due-for-a-regression” spot that the Wild were in last year, so we’ll see if that starts this week. Backstrom will probably get the night off, so we’ll see if Darcy Kuemper can continue his stellar play and keep the Wild rolling along.

Hockey is a game, and fantasy hockey is a game based around a game (though not a game within a game, that would be Inception!)

In game theory, an important distinction is whether the players have perfect information or imperfect information.

In games with perfect information (chess and checkers are good examples,) all the factors are known by all players. Each player can see all of his opponent’s pieces, and there is no ‘hidden’ information except for the plans and strategies inside the other guy’s head.

In games with imperfect information (most card games, blackjack and poker for example,) some of the factors are unknown by the players, which is where the complexity, the skill, and the intricacies of the game come into play. If everyone knew the dealer’s face down card in blackjack, or what everyone else at the poker table had as their pocket cards, those games would be a lot less fun.

So, do we have perfect information or imperfect information in fantasy hockey? Some would foolishly say it’s the former–they look at the stats for last night’s games or a guy’s production last season, and think it’s perfect information. After all, there’s the numbers right there in black and white, there’s everything that happened in the game, right in the box score. But when I think about how advanced stats like Corsi, PDO, zone starts, and qual comp contribute to fantasy, I think about how they make those boxcar stats look imperfect in an awful hurry. Sure, this guy got that many points, but he did it against really soft competition, or he got some really good puck luck, and those points may not really be an accurate reflection of his skill or a predictor of how many points he can put up going forward.

But on the other side of the coin, fantasy doesn’t care about a player’s QoC or his PDO…goals are goals. Let me clarify: if you drafted Patrick Marleau or Thomas Vanek this season, you got yourself a whole heap of goals in the first few games of the season, and you almost certainly won your first couple matchups. Whether those goals came on ridiculously high shooting percentages (they did) or came easier because of favorable zone starts (they did,) they still counted. Last April, I got myself on board the Pascal Dupuis express during my fantasy playoffs, and I enjoyed a nice little hot streak, to the tune of around a point per game over a couple weeks. Did I know that production was unsustainable? Certainly. Did I keep sending him out there night after night? You’re damn right I did! But I digress…

The point I’m trying to make is that the role of more sophisticated stats (or advanced stats, or underlying stats, or fancy stats, or whatever you want to call them, ultimately it doesn’t really matter) is to provide more *context* to a hockey player’s production. And in fantasy, that context can be supremely helpful. It can give us strong signals on whether to buy low or sell high on a team or player, and those signals (if we choose to heed them) can give us a leg up on our competition who is ignorant to even basic stuff like individual Sh%.

These stats don’t give us perfect information, by any means. No self-respecting stat guy (or gal) would tell you that. And we as a community are constantly trying to improve our methods, to develop new numbers and metrics that are meaningful and useful and not downright crazy (if you’re plugged in to the #fancystats community on Twitter, you may have heard about the paper that got accepted to the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference that makes that case that Alexander Steen is one of the most important players in the league. But I digress again…)

Bottom line: in fantasy hockey, we are dealing with imperfect information. But the value of Corsi and Fenwick and the usage charts and all that is that they give us slightly *less imperfect* information. One step closer to knowing when the dealer is about to flip over that suicide king, or that the guy on the button is working with deuce-seven offsuit.

^^The podcast is embedded in this page. Click the play button above to begin streaming, or click here to download an .mp3 file.

Today I interview one of my favorite hockey researchers, Rob Vollman of Hockey Prospectus and Hockey Abstract. Rob has developed a number of great tools and stats that have become a major part of the hockey analytics community.

“A good hockey stat first of all has to be useful.”

“The real achievement is to take something that’s complex and make it simple.”

LINKS:

Hockey Abstract

Rob’s personal page where he puts all his work. This site is a wealth of information–everything from Quality Starts to “Oz Coke charts” (AKA player usage charts) to historical comparisons. Your one-stop-shop for Vollman’s writing.

Hockey Prospectus

Another great site with a ton of great hockey writing from a bunch of today’s smartest minds.

>>E-mail me your fantasy hockey questions at hashtaghockey [at] gmail [dot] com, and follow me on Twitter, @Hashtag_Hockey

Anyway, what I wanted to do tonight is look at the Western Conference standings (current as of Wednesday, 2/20) and compare them to some team-level rate stats: shots for and against at even strength, and particularly Fenwick ratio. Fenwick has been shown to be a great indicator of a team’s level of play, and accurately predicted the Wild’s demise and the Kings’ surge last season alone.

It is generally accepted that the effects of home ice are less in hockey than other sports. But I still like to look at the numbers (why do people climb mountains? because they’re there…why do I analyze home/road splits? because they’re there!) On the other hand, it’s a little dicey to take a small sample and split it into even smaller samples…I heard on #MvsW the other day that the Kings have played just like 4 home games and 9 road games so far, so appropriate grains of salt necessary here. Having said that, on with the chlorophyl!

(Friendly reminder, if you need a refresher on what Fenwick is, head to my stats glossary.)

Table 1. Western Conference Fenwick Close with Home/Road Split

Table 2. Western Conference 5v5 Shots For and Shots Against per 60 minutes

The Best

The Blackhawks and the Canucks are prettay…prettay…prettay good. Expert analysis there, good night everybody! It’s no surprise to me to see that Chicago and Vancouver have almost identical home and road Fenwick rates–great teams play just as well on the road as at home. The Anaheim Ducks are the darlings of the conference so far, and why not? Everyone likes a feel-good story, and the Ducks are loaded with them, from the Boudreau redemption story to the timelessness of Teemu Selanne to the Viktor-Fasth-as-Randy-Quaid-in-that-movie-about-the-old-rookie, there’s narratives flying all over the place. But notice that Anaheim is getting outshot at even strength, and their Fenwick rates are below 50%, and not just barely either. They’re the only team that has a better road Fen close than home…an anomaly most likely but still interesting and worth monitoring. The Nashville Predators are another team that’s rife with storylines, and they are at the league cellar for shots, but dang it all if they aren’t right there in fourth place. Shea Weber seems to be snapping out of his funk, and Pekka Rinne is doing Pekka Rinne things so we’ll see how long he can carry that team. San Jose is in that classic spot where they’re not really as good as they looked for the first two weeks of the season (hi Patty) but not as bad as they have looked for the most recent two weeks, so to be honest I’m just going to set them aside and see what they look like in a couple more weeks. For now, they’re still on top of the Pacific division and their Fenwick rates don’t show anything to panic over. I’m not a Niemi believer, though, so we’ll see where this team winds up.

The Bubble

“The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry when both your goalies get injured.” –Steinbeck. The Blues are putting up eye-popping Fenwick rates, particularly at home, but if the netminder can’t stop pucks, none of that matters. I learned last year not to dismiss the Coyotes, but they aren’t looking like a team that can get to the conference finals again. Kari Lehtonen is a great goalie…when he’s not injured. When healthy, he covers up a lot of their deficiencies, but when he’s out, the cracks in the armor start to show up real quick. Detroit still has as much firepower as any team out there but they’re not getting any younger, and if Jimmy Howard misses time, the Wings will have to work that much harder at winning those 5-4 games. What to say about the Wild…you can only watch so many games where you hear the commentator say, “Parise fires the team’s first shot on net here, twelve minutes into the period” before you start to wonder what it will take to get this thing turned around. I didn’t delude myself into thinking that the additions of two All-Stars would erase all the team’s problems but I had sort of hoped they would figure out a way to get a couple more shots per game.

The Rest

I know we’d all rather just continue to repress all our lockout memories, but I distinctly recall a team down in Oklahoma City that was ripping the AHL a new one. Ah, those were the days. The Oilers have got some great puzzle pieces, but it’s hard to score goals when you’re skating backwards. Devan Dubnyk has been inconsistent, but when he’s on his game, he has looked great. I keep saying the Kings will be fine, buy low on the Kings. But they keep losing, and sooner or later they have to string together some wins if they want to get back in this thing. They are showing great possession numbers, and their shots allowed are lowest in the league, but Quick needs to start stopping some pucks like he did last year. I’m still confident that they will be fine, but if they’re not careful they might run out of time. The Avalanche are just a mess. They had a really good thing going last year with Landeskog and the rest, and this year they’ve managed to piss it all away. Side note: have you seen some of Ryan O’Reily’s dad’s tweets? The dude is on this big crusade about how psychiatric medications are an evil plot by scientists, and schizophrenia isn’t a real thing and on and on and on. We’re talking Tom-Cruise-on-Oprah-level here. Calgary needs to admit they’re in a rebuilding phase–I’d do it like a band-aid and get it over with, but that’s just me. I think I’m actually buying into the Blue Jackets right now…they’ve got something like three first round picks next year, they’ve got a new GM and they didn’t get as much in return for Rick Nash as a lot of people thought they should have, but I think this franchise is starting to find its way out of the woods. It’s unfortunate when a team is playing for next year so early in the season, but rebuilding is a process, not an event.

To sum it all up, I think the Hawks and Nucks are for real, the Ducks are surprising everyone and while I’m not rooting for them to regress, their underlying stats might catch up with them. Nashville is in the same boat with their low number of shots, and the fifth seed through about the eleventh seed are just a few points apart, so I’ll want to see what the bubble teams do in the next month or so before guessing which of them are playoff contenders.

Thanks for reading, make sure to check out my fantasy hockey podcast, and shoot me an e-mail at hashtaghockey [at] gee mail [dot com and follow me on Twitter, @Hashtag_Hockey