Week 3 of The Chirp, my so-far-weekly post about the goings-on in hockey and, wow, have there been some goings-on. For example, in women’s hockey, the Girl Boss of a Particular Media Company took affront that fans of the league might not like players to be associated with a toxic brand. I highly recommend reading Natalie Weiner’s post about it here and Hemal Jhaveri’s article here. Oh, and as always, support Black Girl Hockey Club.
And don’t get me started on the whole COVID mess in the NHL, with games being postponed and now the unfortunate likelihood that a young Wild player now has to contend with long COVID, a syndrome that is still being characterised but may make it exceedingly difficult for an elite athlete to reach previous levels of endurance and fitness.
So, this week, I’m just going to focus on one thing, and it’s something I struggle with on the regular: hockey stats and how to handle them.
Strength in Numbers
Listen, I’m a great fan of numbers but I don’t always understand them. I used to be great at maths but I turned 18 and maths just fell out of my head. I’m not even joking. I went from understanding most concepts with ease to staring at the blackboard (we had blackboards back then, you know) and dragging my hands down my face in silent anguish because those numbers just stopped making sense.
There are a LOT of numbers in hockey and it’s not just jersey numbers. My favourite go-to-guys for hockey stats are both on Twitter: Sean Tierney and Micah Blake McCurdy, both of whom have Patreons you should support, if you’re in a position to (Sean’s | Micah’s). There are other superb resources but I appreciate both of these because of the visualisations. If you talk to me about Corsi, Fenwick, etc for long enough, you will see my brains dribble out of my ears but if you show me graphs, with helpfully labelled axes broadly demarcating what’s good and what’s luck, I will grasp it. Eventually.
The statistics being measured do make sense even if my neurons start overheating when I try to understand them. For example, Corsi is an index of shots taken on goal, at even strength, including blocked shots and missed shots. While my parietal lobes cry for mercy as they hurtle around the hamster wheel in my skull, even I get that it makes sense that a team that takes many shots on goal should have a better outcome. Hockey doesn’t always work that way, does it?
There’s something we often say in medical fields about a disease that don’t behave as one might expect: it didn’t read the text book. I feel like that applies to hockey sometimes too. Now, the old boys of hockey will talk about intangibles and the eye test (as though the eye test is anything other than a crude measure of the very statistics these oul fellas claim to disdain) and I definitely don’t want to dismiss statistics. I just wish statistics would let me love them. I also wish that statistics could explain the Washington Capitals.
Now, the great thing if you’re a Caps fan is that you get to sally over to Russian Machine Never Breaks and enjoy Chris Cerullo’s Numbers for the Morning After series, which is a post-game recap of the important numbers, as well as Peter Hassett’s regular check-ins and vibe-checks throughout the season, and his end-of-season player reviews.
What we know about the Washington Capitals is that they’re old, they’re slow and they have inexperienced goaltenders. And yet they’re winning? They haven’t lost in regulation yet this season and somehow they came back from a three goal deficit to beat the New York Islanders 6-3, like they were Elle Woods undertaking a Harvard Law degree. (Of course, they also coughed up their own three goal lead to Boston last night, even if Ovechkin did tie it up rather nicely in overtime.)
It’s probably not the great mystery I think it is, though. This is a team full of positive reinforcement, chest bumps and ass pats (or slashes, if the mood takes TJ Oshie and Tom Wilson). This is a team that swarmed all over Zdeno Chara, like kittens clambering on a Great Dane, when he scored his first goal for the team. This is a team that thrived without the four Russians, out for Covid protocol, and with seventeen different players contributing goals so far this season. It’s what Letterkenny (the Canadan sitcom, not the town in County Donegal) calls ferda.
Doing it for the boys.
And I guess that’s what our old, slow, wonderful team has been doing:
It.
For the Boys.
(If you’re hearing Playing with the Boys, by Kenny Loggins, with the attendant beach volleyball visuals from Top Gun, then you are both correct and very welcome.)
whelmed.blog 