Jump to content
The Official Site of the Vancouver Canucks
Enter Search Term. Use arrows to navigate between autocomplete results. If no results appear, use Enter to do a full site search.
Forum Closure ×
Canucks Community
Forum Closure

Mike Gillis Analytics - Province Sports

Line Juggler

By Line Juggler
in Canucks Talk

Recommended Posts

Line Juggler Abbotsford Regular

Line Juggler

Posted
Posted

Very interesting read. I admire the depth of thinking MG brings to managing his team and players.

http://blogs.theprov...-radio-station/

Filling in with Matt Sekeres this week during Team 1040′s mid-day slot is a revolving door of team presidents from Vancouver sports organizations. Monday, Mike Gillis of the Vancouver Canucks joined Matt, discussing a number of things. Gord MacIntyre has much of the breakdown, chronicling in three parts Gillis’ talking points.

But eventually, Matt asked Mike about analytics and Moneyball, the Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Gillis is the leader of one of hockey’s most successful organizations over his tenure, and fans of all teams may be interested in what he said. A transcript follows below, plus a few comments.

It’s different for different positions. For forwards it’s a combination of shots on net, quality of shots on net, location of shots on net versus time on ice. You know, there’s a number of stats that go into it, but one of the reasons that Moneyball was intriguing to me, was that—I taught about it at law school and talked about it a lot—was what happens when a team is forced to look at something differently.

And forced to go against the grain and forced to change the rules to their benefit so they can be competitive. And the biggest thing that I got from Moneyball was not statistical analysis but it was that ability to think differently when you’re not forced to, when you want to. And when you want to create a different culture and a different environment. And the fact that they were successful that leads me to believe that you can be successful doing it without being forced to do it.

Who takes an issue with this? The Oakland A’s were forced to re-think certain things because they didn’t have the money to traditionally compete. But it’s not like Billy Beane invented on-base percentage to get a leg up. This was a long-time direction of the A’s, as they focused on player value and finding market inefficiencies ever since the days of Beane’s predecessor Sandy Alderson.

A lot of people misinterpret Moneyball as being solely about the stats, but finding market inefficiencies can mean a number of things. Drafting, for instance. Gillis has always thought things differently even as an agent. On Gillis’ first day of free agency as a general manager, he signed David Backes to an offer sheet contrary to the gentleman’s rules of the game.

But do the Canucks use statistics? Indeed I bet they do:

We do use advanced analytics to some measure. It’s more difficult in hockey than in baseball because baseball is a defined event. You’ve got 100 different things that go into player success. Who they play for, match ups they constantly play against. Their age. Injury history. So you’ve got lots of things that are determinant factors in hockey that can’t be properly analyzed just through analytics.In baseball you can.

What we’ve done is look at things and try to design success, particularly for younger players, based on where they’re starting. And who they’re playing with and what situations they’re playing with and the number of minutes they play. And I’ve become convinced that you can really begin to enhance a young player’s ability by putting them in situations where they’re going to be able to succeed almost all the time and
the only way you can do that is if you have the luxury of having a good team
. If you don’t have, if you’re in a rebuilding stage or something that might not have the luxury to design those ice times the way you’d want, but here we’re fortunate, we have a good team, we can do what we want.

We do know that Mike Gillis has experimented with boosting a young player’s offensive numbers through offensive zone deployment. We also know that the Vancouver Canucks have a zone-start discrepancy that’s unprecedented in the NHL.

Pay attention though to the bolded section. Gillis believes that having depth and talent means more lineup flexibility. Falls into the “well, duh” category, but I think this shows that a player like, say, Jay McClement may be less valuable on the Toronto Maple Leafs than a team like the Chicago Blackhawks. Accumulate talent, let the roles fall where they may.

The research also shows that players do better offensively when they start more shifts in the offensive zone.

Here’s Gillis on soccer analytics:

Well oddly enough we have looked at [passing efficiency] in soccer. And we put that in a very different context, we’ve looked at it relative to fatigue and conditioning and how you’re percentage of passing success is relative to your conditioning and the time in the game when you do it and how many minutes you’ve played. There are studies that we’ve looked at that indicate that passing percentage in soccer goes dramatically down depending on the time in the game or depending on the conditioning of the player.

That’s through practice, that’s through defined, you know, not in the spontaneity of the game and so there are things from other sports that we’ve been trying to utilize as much as we can. The problem in our sport is that when you combine hitting and you combine puck battles, that takes it away from every other sport.

Fatigue seems to be a common theme. Are the Canucks counting passes, or looking at splits from the first and third period?

We’re trying to define fatigue levels in those circumstances and as you know, a player usually gets hit twice when he gets hit once. He gets hit by the player and then hits the boards. How you can attribute that to success and how you attribute that to fatigue levels is instrumental in finding out when a player in the third period makes a mistake. And something happens and I think that as we’ve found, in a dynamic, competitive contact sport that fatigue levels are really a lot of the determining factor in success or failure.

Worth noting something from here because I was curious. Since Gillis was hired, the Canucks are the best team in the NHL in third period Pythagorean Expectation, a win-loss estimator based on goals for and against. They’re a very close second to Boston in overall score.

But the big improvement for the Canucks in the last four years is in the third period. Pythagorean Expectation predicted 50 wins from the Canucks in the Gillis era per year (actual, 49.8) and 43.2 in the four previous seasons (actual, 43.3). That’s an increase of 16%.

But where did the increase come from? They actually lost ground in the second period, their win expectancy dipping by 8% in the middle frame in the Gillis era, but that’s propped up by a 23% gain in the first period and a 35% increase in the third period.

The median NHL team won an equivalent of 42.2 games pro-rated to 82 games in the first period over the last four years according to Pythagorean Expectation. In the second period, that dipped to 41.6 and in the third and overtime it dipped to 41.1, so perhaps the average team does get impacted by fatigue. Honestly, I’d never really looked into this but you run into all kinds of fascinating things when you do period splits.

Also, then you have to define mistakes, which is a whole other ballpark. Hockey statisticians are measuring how the team does when a player is on or off the ice, but individual contribution indicators are still in their infancy.

Lastly…

You need defencemen who can handle big minutes because they’re constantly in today’s NHL being challenged, hit, challenged speed-wise in their own zone and then they have to make really good passes, outlet passes, and that’s what differentiates those great defencemen from the ones that are really good.

I can’t disagree with this. There are four positions on an NHL roster that I’d consider overpaying for: your No. 1 centreman, your No. 2 centreman, your No. 1 defenceman and your No. 2 defenceman. All four of those players should be equally adept at offence and defence. Vancouver are lucky to have a deep enough bottom six forward group that their number one centreman doesn’t exactly have to play defence.

Los Angeles had Anze Kopitar, Jeff Carter, Drew Doughty and Willie Mitchell. St. Louis have David Backes, Alexander Steen, Alex Pietrangelo and Barrett Jackman. Boston had Patrice Bergeron, David Krejci, Zdeno Chara and, well, the other half of Zdeno Chara in their Stanley Cup year.

Whatever helps the team find the “great” one as opposed to the “really good” ones. You can make do with really good players up and down the lineup, but there’s no substitute for great players.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
CHodgson9 Abbotsford Regular

CHodgson9

Posted
Posted

I'm sure the hard numbers are available in a very easy to view format, with lots of visuals/charts/graphics against KPIs. They're probably using decent Business Intelligence software and feeding several datacubes with lots of relevant multidimensional data. They'd be able to break down and analyze any metric they wanted, within seconds, which is perfect for that type of ad-hoc analysis.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
5minutesinthebox Abbotsford Star

5minutesinthebox

Posted
Posted

Hamhuis and Edler say hi! don't be fooled by their bargain cap hits 2 of the best in the league.Also doesn't hurt to have great character in Bieksa And welcome to Garrison who went from being one of the top shut-down d men to one of the highest scoring d men in the league in 2 seasons . I'd say we don't need Weber and the offer sheet he signed is ridiculous I hope nashville laughs all the way to the draft for the next 4 seasons.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Bodee Canucks Third-Line

Bodee

Posted
Posted

I don't know why but that worried me..............He thinks too much.

I would like a bit more gallus judgment and designed objectivity. It is almost like he thinks that players need to conform to some preconceived system rather than selecting players to play roles designed to win.

Could this be why he doesn't address our weaknesses? I used to think it was because he couldn't commit to players but now I wonder if it is because he doesn't accept there are weaknesses only system malfunctions.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Go to topic listing

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...