Posts tagged hockey
Predicting the NHL Playoffs 07/08
Apr 9th
I’ve become increasingly interested in computer solutions and simulations for domains where you might not expect something can be done. One domain that I’ve been more and more interested in is NHL hockey — a sport that I’m a fan of.
So before the 2007/2008 playoffs started, I decided to write a simulator that figured out how likely it was that each team won the stanley cup based on their regular season statistics. The results are below, with each team’s probability of making it past each round the numbers in the columns. So the Montreal Canadiens have a 72% chance of beating the bruins, and a 12.2% chance of winning the cup.
Montreal_Canadiens 0.720 0.446 0.264 0.122
Pittsburgh_Penguins 0.590 0.362 0.193 0.083
Washington_Capitals 0.481 0.224 0.097 0.033
New_Jersey_Devils 0.477 0.217 0.096 0.034
New_York_Rangers 0.523 0.250 0.116 0.043
Philadelphia_Flyers 0.519 0.236 0.110 0.039
Ottawa_Senators 0.410 0.167 0.086 0.030
Boston_Bruins 0.280 0.098 0.039 0.010
Detroit_Red_Wings 0.811 0.622 0.449 0.330
San_Jose_Sharks 0.634 0.368 0.150 0.082
Minnesota_Wild 0.468 0.187 0.056 0.024
Anaheim_Ducks 0.414 0.182 0.069 0.033
Dallas_Stars 0.586 0.306 0.141 0.079
Colorado_Avalanche 0.532 0.178 0.068 0.031
Calgary_Flames 0.366 0.086 0.037 0.015
Nashville_Predators 0.189 0.072 0.030 0.012
What’s startling is Detroit’s enormous 33% chance of winning the whole thing. A couple of other surprises include Dallas’ relatively high probability of winning the cup (7.9%). It’s much higher than the Ducks or Avs which are next to them in the standings.
How does this work? I basically calculate the average goals a team is expected to score against their opposing team by using the season goals-for and goals-against numbers. I use this to simulate games between teams and run entire playoff simulations. The probabilities above are simply the number of times that team reaches the next round divided by the number of simulations.
I don’t have very many features added in that I would like to add. One particular one is a recency statistic that increases the relevance of the last 20 games of the season. I expect that such a statistic will greatly increase San Jose and Washington’s chances of winning the cup and probably dampen Dallas’ chances.
Credit to Darse for giving me some hints and tips on how to create my simulator. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to work on it a bit more so that I can build in some more statistics to help it make a more informed decision.
Heraldk
Oiler Pregame
Feb 25th
My friend and roommate was kind enough to give me a spare ticket he had for a recent hockey game between the Oilers and the Minnesota Wild. It was a fun night, and our Oilers managed to win the game! I wish the Oilers had managed to put together a better season this year. It’s looking like they won’t make the playoffs this year 
3-0 Baby!
Jan 31st
I’ve been playing floor hockey with the CS team again this year. This year we’ve got a pretty competitive looking team. Several new additions to the team mean we’ve got some serious firepower on the floor almost every shift, and the players that don’t have that firepower are good solid players. So with last night’s 10-1 win capping off the 3 game round robin, we’re on top of the division for the first time since I joined the team several years ago. Woohoo!
It’s a lot of fun to play and have a shot to win. I haven’t often been on a team that has had a competitive shot to win.
In related news, it looks like I might be able to join a floor hockey team in the Edmonton ball hockey league. I’ve been looking for a league to play in for a long time, so I’m pretty excited about getting a chance to play finally. The short intramural season was just not enough time to play floor hockey each semester.
Heraldk
Christmas Ornament
Dec 5th
Now that it is December, it was now permissible for me to put up the Christmas tree. So Diane and I did so on Sunday. It was kind of fun – I have a little 4 foot Christmas tree that is the perfect size I think for my condo. I sat down to watch the hockey game on Monday and during the intermission I took a few pictures of the tree with the lights on. It’s pretty tricky to take good photos of the tree though, so the best I could come up with was this close-up shot of one of my ornaments.
Maddening Oilers
Nov 16th
Man, I just can’t shake the feeling that the Oilers have some chance to go on a stretch of wins. They’ve got so much talent – they just can’t seem to put it together. Of course, the crazy number of injuries isn’t helping. If the Oilers started getting healthy all of a sudden, I think we’d be looking at a particularly good team.
The game last night against Vancouver was a lot of fun to watch. It was also a nail-biter, and every time Vancouver got some pressure on us I got nervous. But Mathieu Garon managed to put on A SHOW and stopped everything that Vancouver sent his way – including three shootout attempts! The Oil looked dangerous for parts of the game, but they seem to have this bad habit of giving the puck away in the neutral zone (or worse, in their own end). I don’t know how to get them to do this, but they need to be able to maintain control of the puck for longer parts of the game or we’re going to continue having trouble maintaining any pressure.
Tonight’s game was worse for that score. We just couldn’t keep constant pressure on the puck and it seemed like every second shift we’d give the puck away several times. Ewww. Hockey like that is maddening to watch for the fan. Glad to see Jarret Stoll get a couple goals though. They were a bit ugly, but I’m glad to see him snap his goal drought. Let’s hope he continues to recover last year’s form!
Maybe their play tonight was due to the back-to-back schedule. I sure hope they can start building some consistency into their game … if they do, and start to get healthy … I seriously think we’ve got a playoff bound team. Until then though, we’re in some trouble.
Heraldk
Reorganization
Nov 16th
Every so often I feel the sudden urge to reorganize the furniture in my room. Today was one of those days. I don’t know what it is – maybe it’s a fresh perspective on something I see everyday, maybe it’s a chance to try something else … but it seems that whenever I do it, I am almost always completely satisfied with the result. This time is no different. Several of the elements in my room were moved around and the room feels like a totally different place – and the organization is altogether better (in my mind at least).
I completed the furniture move before the hockey game (that’s another post), and then sorted out a bunch of crap that had accumulated. I’m going to be spending some time in the near future sorting through paper that I’ve accumulated and trying to discard as much as possible. It seems pretty unlikely I’ll need my high school financial management course work, don’t you think? (Oh yeah, I kept a lot of crap). Something tells me I’m going to need a couple of boxes to take all the paper I’m going to discard to the recycling bin.
I love it. I find a reorganized room refreshing and different – and yet familiar in the same way. So it is nice to be able to get that feeling here.
Heraldk
Mmmmmm Beer
Nov 8th
Right time, right place, I guess. I went out for some beer with one of the new grad students, and when the beer arrived there was just a bit of sun left before it dived below a cloud. That night we watched an exciting hockey game between the Minnesota Wild and my Edmonton Oilers. The oilers pulled out a shootout victory. It was interesting because the guy I was with was from Minnesota – so we had a bit of a rivalry going at our table. It sure was fun!
Predictions
Oct 3rd
I’m not going to give my predictions for the upcoming NHL season, although I suppose it has already started officially since there’s been a couple of games have been played over in London. I am, however, going to rant a little about the predictions of other “experts”. It seems that hockey experts agree that the Oilers have no shot at making the playoffs this year. I have one thing to say: why do these so called “experts” always sell the Oil short?
It doesn’t seem all that long ago when the Oilers were pushing for the 8th and final playoff spot a couple years ago. They were a team that was fighting it’s own potential. I knew the team had a lot of talent, but it seemed that every couple of games, they’d lose a you-should-win-this-game type scenario and they’d slip back a notch. They did it, but barely. In the first round that year, they were up against the high powered Detroit Red Wings. Everyone wrote Edmonton off and had them down in out quickly. Surprise, surprise when the Oil suddenly became the team they were capable of becoming and took down not only Detroit, but San Jose, Anaheim, and almost Carolina en route to the stanley cup final.
Last year was a painful year for the average Oiler fan. The team struggled in mediocrity for most of the season and then got hit by a terrible injury streak that took most of the regulars out of the lineup. As a result, the team skidded to a halt and failed to win most of their remaining games.
The offseason was a high-drama period where the Oilers made a large number of moves and almost completely re-tooled. Powered by the new blue-liners of Pitkanen and Souray, they have far more power on defence than they had last year. Penner adds some size and some scoring punch and Sanderson is a wily veteran who should contribute as well. The real exciting thing for this upcoming season though is the chance for some of the youth to shine. The Oilers have several young players, in addition to Ales Hemsky, who all have a shot of hitting it big this year. These guys include Gagner, Nilsson, Brodziak, Pouliot, and Cogliano. To me, this is super exciting … and I have a hard time believing that the Oilers are going to have trouble making the playoffs.
But lets take a look at what the experts think. One of the oft-quoted stats from last year is +/-. I’m not sure how they can compare player’s +/- stats correctly when these numbers are so very biased on the team they were playing for. For example, Souray and Pitkanen both played on teams that didn’t make the playoffs last year. This typically means that those teams got scored on more often than they scored (duh). So take two important defencemen who play big minutes for their teams and put them on clubs that are losing. What happens to their plus minus? It plummets. Whoop-dee-doo. I’m not saying the statistic is meaningless. I’m just saying that you need to make sure you keep in mind what you’re trying to compare.
A lot of analysis seems to compare how a team has changed from the previous year. Unfortunately, this also is a problem. How do the experts know that the “winners” of the free agency craziness (the rangers and the flyers) are going to gel and mesh the star players they signed? Who’s to say that teams with a bunch of young talent are going to not mesh and start winning games? The past doesn’t necessarily tell the future, folks – especially when so much has changed from last season.
One of the things I think many people forget is that the new collective bargaining agreement is giving teams some level ground to play on. It’s not completely level, that’s for sure, but teams are much more evenly matched than they used to be. Remember the Oiler’s heyday way back when they were winning cups every year? That team was so stacked that you had to expect great things from them. Fast forward to today – there are far fewer teams that looked that stacked in comparison. Maybe the penguins look a bit awesome at the moment … but the division from them to the next closest team is far smaller than for the Oilers back in the day. The salary cap helps balance out the skill players among the teams, and as a result, nearly any team has a chance to do well enough to hit the playoffs. So I don’t think last year means nearly as much as the experts seem to think. I also don’t think they have ever given the Oilers enough credit.
So I think the Oilers have a good chance of doing well this season, and we’ll just have to see how it turns out.
Go Oilers!
Heraldk
LRT Bridge (Night)
Sep 21st
I shot this photo walking back from the University of Alberta golden bears versus Oiler rookies hockey game. Even with my 50mm f/1.4 lens and a high ISO, I had some troubles taking some hand held shots … but this one turned out a little better than alright, I think. There’s a couple more that turned out pretty well. The LRT bridge is rather pretty at night, I think!
Oilers and Nylander
Jul 3rd
Ugh. Why is so much bad stuff happening to Kevin Lowe? Seriously, if the news reports on the Nylander debacle are true, he has every right to be seriously livid over this. What the hell? Here’s where this thing hurts the most. Kevin Lowe thinks he’s signed the talented player to play on the top line with Ales Hemsky. Now he can move on to fill in other chinks in the Oilers roster. This is just two days after the free agency has kicked in, and teams have grabbed a large portion of the top talent available. Now, a full day later from when Lowe *thought* he had a signing, he now needs to backpedal and see what he can get from the dwindling pool of talent available. At this point, he might have to consider Alexei Yashin … a player I’m not entirely thrilled to think about in an Oiler uniform. If he doesn’t find a player he wants, he’s going to have to resort to trading again – which may or may not be possible.
*sigh*. I feel real sorry for Kevin Lowe. Seriously. The guy is smart. He’s made a lot of smart deals for the Oilers. However, he’s gotten seriously screwed over by a couple of things … the Chris Pronger thing was one, and now this. Not to mention the players who left after the Stanley Cup Finals last year … despite finishing runners-up to the Carolina Hurricanes, they decided that other hockey teams were better locations. Bleh.
I really respect what Kevin Lowe is doing. His job is not easy. I feel that his Smyth trade was a smart move considering that Smyth seemed to be more interested in the money than signing with his home team. The recent Jason Smith and Joffrey Lupul trade looks like a really good deal on paper to me. Sure, we lose another heart player. We’ve still got a lot of those! Staios, Stoll and Moreau are awesome heart and soul players for the Oil! In return, we get Pitkanen and Sanderson – both players who I think can contribute.
We’ll have to see how things go. The Oilers are still in a position to do well this season. Sure, they need to add a bit more talent … and Nylander could have been a key piece. However, they still have a lot of young talent that could either prove themselves this year or be tradebait for some top-notch talent. I’m excited to see names like O’Marra, Nilsson, Shremp, Pouliot, Cogliano, and Gagner just about ready to enter the NHL – it’s an exciting time for them and I’m looking forward to seeing them develop into good players!
So I say to Oilers fans … stay patient with K. Lowe. We’re in pretty good shape still I think.
Heraldk
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