Mathematician and freelance data visualization with focus on NHL. micah@hockeyviz.com. Subscribe for early access to charts at hockeyviz.com/subscribe. He/him.
Halifax, Nova Scotia
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Turns out eventually is a few days ago. I'll be around from time to time to tell people I'm not around but otherwise you won't find me here. Follow me over there for brightly-coloured nonsense: @hockeyviz.com
In light of recent twitter functionality downgrades (not to mention all of the previous downgrades) you should know that I'm posting everything on bluesky also; eventually I'll be out of here forever. You should all come to bluesky instead, it is nicer.
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I do admire the Flyers having nothing to play for but taking the Penguins and Red Wings down with them anyhow. That's the kind of hater energy the league needs more of.
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Any nhl team could hire me for a million bucks a year; I would do nothing but say 'don't do that' five times a year, and I'd be worth it.
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Ah yes, the famously professional Arizona Coyotes, who called me up to ask me about working for them and then ghosted me when I refused to work for free.
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Breathtaking singularity of purpose. Flawless technique. The kind of élan vital that powers legends.
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The Detroit Red Wings have been eliminated from playoff contention. It is February 21st.
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If Babcock getting fired is going to unleash the torrent of previously-ignored coach abuse stories from all over the league it will be even better for the sport than I imagined.
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I especially relish the thought of Montreal winning this series because that's the outcome that would teach the wrongest lessons to both teams.
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Shouldn't use 'Achilles heel' to mean 'salient weakness'. If one thing is your Achilles heel, that means that you are basically perfect at every other thing. If you have several weaknesses of which one is worst you don't have an Achilles heel. You are not Achilles. You are Bob.
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The Buffalo Sabres have been eliminated from playoff contention for the 2020-2021 season. They are the first team to be eliminated this season.
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The day that NHL teams prefer to play young players who might be bad instead of old players who are definitely bad will be a beautiful day.
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Going from Pierre to Emily is a /staggering/ upgrade in between-the-bench fare.
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Happy retirement to Henrik Lundqvist. Over the last thirteen seasons he saved +178.2 goals more than an average goalie would have. [rink adjusted]
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Flyers paid a king's ransom to slightly downgrade their weakest regular defender. Incredible.
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Ryan Reaves has played 18 minutes of 5v5 time for Toronto this season, during which the Leafs have been outchanced 1.5 xG to 0.3 and outscored 2-0; and still I have to see posts about how he is helping the team win. The market for tiger-repelling rocks remains strong, evidently.
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The Montreal Canadiens are the first team to be eliminated from 2021-2022 playoff contention.
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Rasmus Ristolainen (5x5.1m extension with Philadelphia) is a grievous harm to his team in virtually every facet of the game. This deal covers his age 28 through age 32 seasons. May God have mercy on all our souls, especially those of the players who deserve his minutes.
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If the Maple Leafs lose tonight, they'll be more likely to miss the playoffs than not, even if their players play at their true talent level for the rest of the season.
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Maybe Patrick kane will be more motivated on a better team / in the playoffs / next season / in the khl / on the moon / in the hereafter / in a world beyond mortal conception /
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The important milestone for that was about four years ago, when operating revenue finally grew above operating expenses. Today, though, is the day which feels somehow even better: when all those debts are paid off, and we are officially in the black, all up.
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New shooter / goalie model is ready, gonna publish it next week. As a teaser: best goalie (overall talent, not single year performance) in the league:
07-08: Lundqvist
08-09: Lundqvist
09-10: Lundqvist
10-11: Lundqvist
11-12: Lundqvist
12-13: Lundqvist
13-14: Lundqvist
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Joshua Brown (3x1m with EDM) is, in fact, the worst player in the national hockey league.
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Kadri hat-trick last night came on three total shots. No misses, no blocks. Three shots, three goals.
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If Toronto and Ottawa both win in regulation, the Maple Leafs will qualify for the playoffs.
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Interesting that the league defended Parros' professionalism and dedication (which weren't questioned) but said nothing about his fitness for the role (which was).
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The Ottawa Senators, who are third-last in the league, have seven regulation wins, just like the St Louis Blues, who are fourth overall.
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Strangely pleasing to see Tampa use almost entirely the same players to obtain zero playoff wins one year and then sixteen the next.
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As terrible as talking hockey on twitter can be, every time I try to talk to anybody about hockey anywhere else, I realize why I spend so much of my time on twitter.
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Increasingly surprised that they reviewed this and didn't pull it back - Bennett jams his stick under Andersen's pad so he can't get across.
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The hockey stats coverage I aspire to
The Lemieuxs are the first father-son duo in NHL history to both get ejected for biting: defector.com/biting-runs-in-…
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Cross-referencing the Leafs accounts in my mentions opinions of a slap-shot empty-netter with opinions about the Bautista bat-flip.
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<peaceable silence descends on the family driving; the sun sets gently>
4yo: Blood is everywhere.
Me, alarmed: blood is everywhere??
4yo: I said GOD is everywhere.
Me, affecting calm: Yes! Yes, God /is/ everywhere.
<uneasy silence>
6yo, very quietly: blood is also everywhere.
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Every morning, because I'm neurotic, I work out what hockeyviz subscriptions are worth, annually; and this morning we broke 100k before costs. Y'all are well and truly stuck with me now.
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For the first time ever HockeyViz crossed 100k gross revenue in a one-year period. \o/
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Lots of calls to change the playoff format, and I agree. Specifically, the top seeds should get rewarded by getting to choose their opponent. This year, the Bruins would probably have chosen the Panthers. So it could have been even funnier.
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This tweet is five years old today; five years since I left a job paying me much more than I deserved to go do something I loved instead. It has been an extraordinarily weird half-decade and while not without its crises of money and confidence I have enjoyed it very, very much.
Quit my startup day-job and now freelancing full-time on hockey work. Expect more tweets and more graphs. And a website.
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The "analytics wars" are literally never going to end. Stuff that works will just become "normal", stuff that doesn't work will be discarded, and nerds will come up with new things, which will for an intervening period of time be called "analytics" and yelled about. Forever.
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If you've ever watched a sporting event and thought "they really should have scored there" but you don't like xG models, I have some bad news for you.
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Cody Ceci for Nikita Zaitsev, eh? Like six slices of toast for half a dozen slices of bread that are toasted.
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It pleases me to bring joy to some fans, suffering to others, and both to Flyers fans, who can't tell the difference.
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In honour of that "Ovechkin shoots from that place he shoots from" article that went around without a single chart, somehow, here's a whole thread of "Ovechkin shoots through the years". All situations, regular season and playoffs. First up, 2007-2008; mostly symmetric.
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If Drouin has the huge year that I would love him to have, I will have to make model terms for the power of friendship
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Erik Gudbranson (to Penguins, ahahaha) is a terrible, truly, truly terrible defender. Just, like, so bad.
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⬢⬡⬢ New xG Model ⬡⬢⬡
Version 6 of my xG model is here:
hockeyviz.com/txt/xg6
This is the model I use to measure how likely particular shot patterns are to become goals.
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The material cause of your hockey team being bad is how the players aren't very good.
The formal cause is them losing so many games.
The efficient cause is the people who run the team being unwise.
The final cause is for you to suffer.
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Just once I'd like a coach to say "we're dying to get into a track meet with them. Our guys are better than theirs at that kind of hockey, so if we can trade chances with them that'll give us the best chance to win"
Stars don’t ‘want to get into a track meet’ with Avalanche in 2nd round nhl.com/news/stars-try-to-co…
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Extremely excited for 31st-place Ottawa at 29th-place Vancouver tonight, the only game on the nhl schedule. The slap-fight of the league, starting at eleven pm my time.
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Rasmus Ristolainen (traded to Philadelphia) is somewhat or very (mostly very) bad at every aspect of the game of ice hockey.
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To the person named Micah who just subscribed to the site: I put a free one-month coupon on your account, because your name is Micah and my name is also Micah. This is flagrant Micah-favouritism and it may very well be extended to other Micahs at other times.
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A fun and winsome thing you can do with your precious moments before death is meditate on the difference between the Panthers offence when Matthew Tkachuk is on the ice and the Panthers offence when Matthew Tkachuk is not on the ice.
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As always: playing hurt is the selfish choice.
@NHLBruins . Like all teams ; players grit it out to play through major injuries in the Playoffs. My sources tell me soon to be Vezina G Ullmark was playing through a debilitating & painful injury that limited his mobility and technique. @espn @NHL @NHLNetwork #HockeyTwitter
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One time when I was n sheets to the wind I had to google if it's a hundred centimetres in a metre or a thousand, that was embarrassing.
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All this fuss about Jessica Campbell and still I haven't seen the central question answered: are they gonna call her soupy or is there already somebody called soupy.
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Would there be any readers for a hockey analytics book? Like all of my models described with some philosophy/approach glue holding it all together?
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11yo has decided to play the trombone in her school band; evidence is mounting that her primary motivation for the choice is so that she can follow her little brother around the house making sad trombone noises whenever anything bad happens to him.
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Sometimes I get a lot of friction for pointing out that nhl players are not particularly reliable at evaluating nhl players.
Joel Edmundson says Joseph Woll is reminding him a bit of Jordan Binnington:
"Just how calm he is. Yeah, I feel like nothing really bothers him as all &, you talk about St. Louis, that was kind of the same way with Binner. It’s cool to see."
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Ryan O'Reilly has the second-toughest net 5v5 zone deployment on the league's worst team, his line faces the toughest competition, he's used preferentially to defend whatever leads the sabres get, and he leads the team in primary production. Maybe let him publicly complain some.
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This kind of nonsense (where one guys mauls another and they both go for "roughing") is my second-least-favourite type of offsetting minors.
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Caleb Jones (traded to Chicago with some picks) is an average nhl defender. Duncan Keith (in return to Edmonton) is a liability to his team on offence at 5v5, a liability on the powerplay, a liability on the penalty-kill, a severe defensive liability at 5v5, and a poor shot.
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Today is a great day to remember how Sean Couturier is one of the best players in the league.
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Unrelated but the fact that we don't get to see these teams play each other /in those uniforms/ is a minor but definite crime.
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"On your application you wrote 'take these motherfuckers down from the inside' in several places, including some fields for which we were expecting numerical answers. Can you elaborate?"
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oh HELL yes
Gold drafting AND a little bit of pick-your-opponent playoff seeding? The Gods do love me after all.
The PWHL has announced the 2024 playoff format and process to determine Draft order of selection among non-playoff teams.
📰 bit.ly/3Po8FMr
ALT A purple graphic with white text that reads “PWHL announces 2024 playoff format and draft order of selection process.”
ALT Information about the 2024 playoffs format The top four teams in regular-season standings qualify for playoffs. The first-place team will have a 24-hour window to select its semifinal opponent. Semifinals and championship will be played as best-of-five series. Higher seeds will have home-ice advantage for games one, two, and five. Games requiring overtime will be decided by playing five-on-five periods until a winning goal is scored.
ALT Information about the 2024 Draft order of selection process. The “Gold Plan” will assign the first pick to the non-playoff team that accrues the most points following its elimination from playoff contention. Once a team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, it begins earning ‘Draft Order Points.’ The team with the most Draft Order Points at the conclusion of the regular season will earn the first selection in each round of the draft.
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This wasn't even the worst ghosting. One time a team went so unexpectedly silent i asked a reporter to find out if my contact at the team had literally died. (The reporter also did not get back to me)
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It's very amusing to me that the Flyers could prevail over the Caps for a playoff spot due to tying on points, and regulation wins, and reg-and-ot-wins, and total wins, and tying the season series, but better goal difference (-25 vs -38).
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Just remembering for no reason at all the time Pierre McGuire said that analytics couldn't tell you that Patrice Bergeron was good. I think about that a lot.
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I didn't prep a thing for Ovechkin hitting 800 but please enjoy the extremely on-brand finishing map for this season.
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