Dellow: Closer look at Vancouver's possession increase suggests coaching influence
theathletic.com/148413/2017/11/07/dellow-clos...
theathletic.comPosted Nov 9, 2017, 6:32 AM UTC
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theathletic.comCoaching articles are awesome, Dellow didn't disappoint.
Great article. For example, his analysis of the maligned Gudbranson-chip-to-the-neutral-zone play is refreshing compared to Botchford's "I don't like this."
I was just complaining about the Athletic's coverage and you post this.
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I wish they had better Vancouver coverage, but I'm thrilled to see this kind of in-depth look at the Canucks.
I firmly believe that user-pays journalism is the future. Get rid of the advertising model, and you get rid of clickbaity bullshit. Readers paying for articles means the interests of the publisher are aligned with those of the reader: both are best served by high quality content.
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user-pays journalism is the future.
And also the past. Funny how went from magazines and newspapers, following trusted editors, to a bunch of random blogs once information was nearly infinite. Bloggers got greedy, got into clickbait and now we're back to paying for it, because at the end of the day, articles are a commodity. And the paid for stuff is (almost) always better than the cheap stuff.
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Journalism was always a mix of user pay and advertising supported. Big city newspapers may have charged for subscriptions but they were highly dependent on selling ads and classifieds. Same with magazines.
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don’t read theathletic unfortunately cause the subscription is so expensive.
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Also suggests a talent influx. It's easy to notice that some guys are better at passing. ie. Vanek/Gagner/Burmi as opposed to Megna/Chaput/Skille.
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Reading through that it doesnt suggest much in that way imo. He basically shows that we havent improved in the on the fly categories which would have much less of an effect from coaching. We have improved on plays where coaching matters a lot. To me this means we are still not a great team but we have a coach who is doing great things so far so now we are pretty decent
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+1 to this. If our improved play this year were simply due to talent, you'd expect it to show up in situations that aren't coaching-dependent. It doesn't. We're no better than we were last year, and maybe a little worse, at controlling the flow of play in situations where the players determine everything. We're much better at controlling the flow of play in situations where structure and coaching matter.
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Alright, but it definitely matters to have more players who can execute the plays drawn up. It was painfully lacking in that regard last season, certainly. Almost to the point where the players didn't look to be trying to pass accurately. lol.
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Nice article. I'll need to read more thoroughly tomorrow to understand, but pretty much confirms Greens influence on the success of the team so far. Also confirms Corsi is an effect on style of play.
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The thing about corsi is it tells you if you're doing something right or something wrong. It doesn't tell you what you're doing right or wrong.
Optimizing for corsi is kind of like the Chinese approach to education, whereby the only thing that matters is the grade. The grade tells you if you're doing well or poorly; it's not the goal in itself. Making a coaching decision in order to boost your corsi is like cheating on a test: sure, you might get the number you're aiming for, but you're missing the point of why you should care about the number in the first place.
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Corsi is an effect on style of play.
Careful, a comment like this can get you banned around here.
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Stop being a cry baby.
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Fuck. This idiot again.
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A mean crybaby at that.
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He's been a very good coach so far. I'm a fan. Hopefully he keeps it up. Willie had some strong starts too.
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I think it's time to quit piling on Willy. (by media and fans) He's gone. Didn't work out. Over. We like the new coach. Talent and/ or great goaltending can make any coach look great. Between injuries, illness and lack of talent, last years team after Feb. looked a bit different than this years. We love the new exciting brand of hockey this great new coach brings compared to Willy. Realistically, You have to coach with the talent you have. Last year Travis rode Wacey Hamilton and Carter Banks like rented mules. He had a ECHL talent team with a great goaltender and tried to win games 1-0. That's what good coaches do. They look at what they've got talent wise and set up systems accordingly. Willy's style of coaching was always firewagon hockey. Look at his AHL numbers. Way more impressive than Travis. Let's be realistic, possession numbers might be a bit better with NHL veterans like Vanek, MDZ, Gagne and Tanev than Chaput, Megna Skille Bartkowski and Larsen. Willy is gone. He didn't work out. Let's focus on the great job our new coach is doing and stop the comparisons. There is no comparison in talent levels and that is what the last few years boils down to.
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I think it's time to quit piling on Willy. (by media and fans) He's gone. Didn't work out. Over.
Easy Karma for some when they don't have anything new to say.
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Good guy op. Thanks!
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What is your affiliation with them?
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None. I just follow a bunch of canucks/hockey writers on twitter and got annoyed enough at seeing constant praise of articles I couldn't read that I bit the bullet and signed up for the 7 day trial.
It's a system that works for SaaS, but I don't like it for trying to get a new journalistic enterprise off the ground. It makes it much harder for people to find and become fans of your outlet if you have to give them your credit card info just to read a single article. That said, I was very impressed when I did and I want to see them and this business model (pay for journalism, not the trial bullshit) succeed.
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I just signed up for the week trial 6 days ago and it's convinced me to bite on the year subscription. Some great writing on the site.
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Fair enough.
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Great read. It’s paywalled though so I’ll mention the two most pertinent points Dellow mentioned were about the Canucks significantly better at controlling shots on shifts from defensive zone faceoff wins compared to last year by flipping pucks out and pushing the puck battles to the neutral zone, also how they’ve been better at controlling shots from shifts where they lose faceoffs in the offensive zone compared to last season by being aggressive to create turnovers. Both of these aspects are believed to be coaching/system driven things.
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Study: Higher "possession stats" does not correlate to more winning in ... https://fulltiltnyr.com/higher-possession-stats-does-not-correlate-winning/ Nov 5, 2015 - Study: Higher "possession stats" does not correlate to more winning in ... Let's focus on Corsi and Fenwick here and the notion that teams that ...
this guy thinks there's no significant correlation
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The Athletic is paywalled and doesn't give you any free articles, so I'll post (just this one) article here. That said, they offer a quality of analysis you're just not going to get for free. I highly recommend you sign up for a free trial. Seriously, guys, this is a quality of sports reporting that's worth the money. I'm only posting it here because their free trial program sucks and is bad for virality.
There's a misconception about how you earn or don't earn good possession numbers that's perpetuated every time some under-read guy with airtime or column inches to fill starts blathering. A surprisingly large number of people think that NHL coaches are so dumb that they think they can just shoot from anywhere and win because of the Corsis. Smart coaches – which is pretty much all of them, despite their foibles – aren't thinking in those terms. They're thinking about how to do things that they believe will maximize their chances of winning games. Generally speaking, those things line up with producing good possession numbers, which is why possession numbers work as an indicator of teams that are likely to be more or less successful in the future.
This isn't to say that some teams don't play in a way that makes their Corsi% a bit misleading, although I don't think is becuase of stupid coaches. It's an issue for teams on the extremes, I think. The Los Angeles Kings under Darryl Sutter were probably a less effective group. Philadelphia last year might be another example. I suspect that Alain Vigneault's Rangers of the past few seasons have done some things that made their attempts a little more dangerous than the typical team's.
Really, there are two separate truths involved here. Generating good Corsi numbers because you're shooting from anywhere isn't helpful. Generating good Corsi numbers because you have the puck more than the other team or you move it more efficiently when you do have it? That's a good thing.
When a coach is looking at possession numbers (or whatever measurement of shot volume he prefers; a whole other issue in and of itself), that's really what he should be thinking about: what tactics can I employ in order to have the puck more often and generate more quality scoring chances? How can I use my players differently to achieve this? You coach to Corsi in the sense that you use it to identify areas in which you're failing; areas where you could do something differently in order to generate more shots and chances for and limit shots and chances against.
Which brings me to Vancouver. (It was going to bring me to Winnipeg too but this got longer than I wanted about Vancouver and I'm trying to keep things at a readable length. Winnipeg, we'll talk in a day or two.) The Canucks have had a surprisingly good start to the season. Vancouver was expected to be terrible but sits at 7-5-2. Vancouver's actually doing alright on the possession front too, sitting 13th in the NHL at 50.7 per cent, up from 47.9 per cent last year. This is all the more impressive because the Canucks were trailing a lot last year, which will give a team a possession bounce.
Unfortunately, possession numbers are a great big ocean's worth of information. You need to find ways to drill down into it. One way in which I do that is by classifying slices of the game based on the location and outcome of the most recent faceoff or, if enough time has passed, as on-the-fly hockey (or, less frequently, based on a penalty having expired). These different slices have different expected outcomes and frequently involve distinct tactical issues, which lets you look closely at specific aspects of play.
https://i.imgur.com/M7IfeXw.png
Vancouver has had a couple of nice bumps under Travis Green this year. Specifically, the Canucks have been doing better after defensive zone wins, neutral zone losses, offensive zone losses and offensive zone wins. They're flat after defensive zone losses and on-the-fly and down a little after neutral zone wins.
I tend to look at stuff that occurs after faceoffs as being more influenced by the coach than the OTF stuff. This isn't to say that a coach doesn't influence what happens OTF, just that you can really impose more structure when you're starting with a faceoff, you know where everyone will be positioned and, if you're smart and work hard, what the opposing team is likely to do. It becomes a little bit more like chess.
It's notable, I think, that the Canucks aren't any better OTF this year from a Corsi% perspective. I calculate this based on when a defenceman leaves the ice after a faceoff and they tend to leave with the puck in a good spot, which means that league average is about 54 per cent. Vancouver was well below that last year and are well below it again this year, although, in fairness to the Canucks, they've spent more time leading this year, which will hurt. Still, I don't think this points towards Vancouver being a particularly good team as the coach's impact on what's happening diminishes.
If you look a little more closely at why the Canucks have had success in the areas in which they've had success, some trends emerge. It's been a mix of increased shot generation and shot suppression in all four cases.
https://i.imgur.com/eQb4GSO.png
https://i.imgur.com/jGu2wua.png
The other thing that you can ask yourself here is how the process is working. Is Vancouver generating more and allowing less in these situations because they're generating/allowing the initial shot less frequently than last year? Or are they doing it because they're increasing/decreasing the frequency with which they have shifts on which they generate/allow multiple shots?
I measure this in two ways. First, I look at the percentage of shifts in which a team generates or allows at least a single shot attempt. Then I look at how many shot attempts they generate or allow on those shifts on which they've given up at least one shot attempt.
https://i.imgur.com/1lQXE5d.png
The Canucks are generating at least a single attempt on shifts starting with defensive zone wins a little more frequently than last year; they're up substantially on shifts starting with neutral zone losses, offensive zone losses and offensive zone wins.
https://i.imgur.com/X3JZI53.png
You can see that the increase in shot attempts on shifts starting with a defensive zone win is much more tied to getting multiple attempts on shifts with at least one attempt than it is for neutral zone losses, offensive zone losses and offensive zone wins.
Having watched some video on this, I'm not particularly surprised by this. I went through Vancouver's game against Pittsburgh over the weekend and tried to figure out what they're doing when they win a defensive zone faceoff. My sense was that they aren't necessarily trying to exit their zone with possession but are more trying to simply get the puck into the neutral zone and chase it down. It seemed that if the puck went to the boards, the Canucks were just trying to go off the glass and out; if it went towards the middle of the ice, they'd try to go up the middle quickly. Some examples of both:
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-media-theathletic-production/app/uploads/2017/11/07151147/VANDZ.mp4?_=1
I tend to think that this method of exiting the defensive zone after a faceoff win isn't really conducive to piling up shots because you get into a scrap in the neutral zone to retrieve the puck. It's not surprising to me that of the four shift types on which the Canucks have seen increases in their shot rates, this one is a little more dependent on getting multiple shots after the first shot.
That said, the increases in shot attempts on shifts starting with a neutral zone loss, an offensive zone loss and an offensive zone win all look very real to me. Vancouver's getting into position to shoot the puck much more frequently than they did last year. Pressure from offensive zone losses has a special place in my heart. It's similar to soccer theories about pressing, which are kind of based on the idea that a team is vulnerable when it has just recovered the ball because it's not yet organized to take advantage of the possession. Vancouver's first goal Monday night was a pretty good illustration of that:
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-media-theathletic-production/app/uploads/2017/11/07152641/vangoal.mp4?_=2
About 35 seconds elapse between Detroit losing the faceoff and Vancouver scoring, but the entire sequence comes about because the Red Wings aren't able to deal with the Canucks forecheck and get a clean breakout. As a result, Vancouver recovers the puck in the defensive zone, gets a clean entry and scores. The data suggests that this is happening much more frequently for the Canucks this year.
https://i.imgur.com/Xvqcpt2.png
Defensively, all four of the shift types I've highlighted have seen it become much more difficult for the opposition to get even a single shot attempt. This includes shifts that start with defensive zone wins, which are the oddball from a shot generation perspective. Vancouver's “Get it into the neutral zone and chase it” strategy might not be conducive to generating more shots of their own in the long run but it seems like it's not helping the opposition either.
The Canucks have also improved in that if the opposition does generate a shot attempt on these shifts, it hasn't tended to spiral into a shift in which they get a pile of shot attempts.
https://i.imgur.com/hMw8xhJ.png
The change looks pretty significant on this graph but I don't think it's the big driver in the decreased rate at which the Canucks are allowing shots. Using offensive zone wins as an example, the Canucks allowed at least one attempt on 22.2 per cent of shifts starting with an offensive zone win last year. This year, they're at 18.7 per cent. When they allowed at least one attempt last year, they averaged 1.4 attempts allowed for the shift. This year, that number is 1.25.
(cont)
(cont)
If you do the arithmetic, you come up with about 65 per cent of the decrease in shot attempts allowed on these shifts being due to the change in frequency of allowing at least one attempt. This is the instance where the decrease in terms of the rate at which attempts are allowed after the first one has the biggest impact – really, it's cutting out the first attempt that is driving things.
It's worth noting as well that guys who were on the team last year are seeing bumps in their Corsi% on the four shift types I've outlined, which leads me to look at the coaching more than the additions. (Although, in fairness to the additions, they may well be helping too.)
https://i.imgur.com/9F3rTJc.png
As I indicated above, I'm a little bit suspicious that the improvement on DZW shifts is illusory. The fact that so much of the improvement is tied up in a few guys who rarely take defensive zone faceoffs in the Sedins doesn't help with that. This will be worth keeping an eye on as the season progresses.
It's certainly not the case after neutral zone losses though – everyone who's back from last year seems to be doing better.
https://i.imgur.com/VPIJSSw.png
Similarly, the improved numbers after offensive zone losses aren't centred on any specific player or players and apply to pretty much everyone who was on the team last year.
https://i.imgur.com/lXH8qs2.png
The same holds true for the numbers after offensive zone wins.
https://i.imgur.com/PC4C9H4.png
Entering this season, I didn't think the Canucks were a particularly good team. I still don't think that they're a particularly good team, although they've had some pleasant surprises, like Brock Boeser. I increasingly think that they aren't going to be one of the league's awful teams, though. While that might not sound like much, it's more than they could say last year.
I hope you guys enjoyed that. Now go sign up for a trial.
do you have to pay for all sports to get hockey? over 50 a year is quite a bit.
Less than $5/month. Skip eating out once a month and you've paid for your subscription.
I don't think my girl would be very happy if I did that.
i can def afford it, but I'm looking for efficiencies here.