AMA Answers Round 1

Tracking projects, the Devils, Bowen Byram & Leafs Playoff Struggles

Let’s not waste any time.

From Substack

I would say there’s value in analyzing one team, especially if you’re a fan and already have a vested interest. It’s a small market, but there’s still an audience and eventually trades/free agent signings happen where more people will catch on. My old Hurricanes blog got popular from fans of other teams enjoying my microstat recaps, so picking up new readers isn’t as tough as you might think. That and I think some of the best work comes from team-focused blogs like Expected Buffalo where they really dig into the details. It’s easier to do that when you’re focused on one team instead of trying to cast a league-wide net.

The downside of this is that it gets muddy when you’re tracking new stats & don’t have any averages or reference point to know what “good” and “bad” is. It’s a little easier now with the A3Z data but there are areas we haven’t explored (especially with off-puck play). It depends how much work you can do & if you’d rather have a complete set of one team or an incomplete set of every team. Personally, I think it’s easier to start with just one team, especially if you’re already watching the games and have questions you want to dive into. The turnaround in hockey can be a little stressful, so I breaking it up into 5-10 game segments or a weekly post can be easier to manage than doing a recap every other night.

Making the process easier is all about having clear definitions, an easy way to notate them in Excel (or whatever you’re using to house the data) and staying consistent with your definitions. Don’t feel like you have to capture everything that happens during a game & just focus on the details you’re interested in. Also don’t fall into the trap of having everything be about stats. Sometimes you catch things you didn’t see before when rewatching or tracking games and it doesn’t always have to be expressed with stats (especially on a singular game level). It’s about putting your own spin on things & the data is just part of it.

Good luck on your project!

Linking a couple of the Jersey-related questions. These kind of tie together because both Bratt & Meier had good underlyings & weak production in the playoffs. With Bratt, I don’t think it will impact his incoming contract because regular season production is still what gets you paid & he just had another 77-point season after getting bridged. It will probably come down to whether the Devils want to keep him after next year & establish him as a core piece.

As for his playoff run, the only thing I would worry about is his performance was very hot-and-cold depending on the game. Sometimes your stars or even your top-sixers will have games where they don’t get on the scoresheet but are still doing things like creating chances, flipping possession with entries/exits or helping on the forecheck. Microstat Game Score takes all those into account & Bratt was either great or a non-factor depending on the game.

You want your top-sixers or top-liners to have a Game Score of at least 1 & Bratt was either way above or below that benchmark. Not much of a happy medium, except for Game 5 against the Hurricanes. He is someone who usually performs well in this metric too because he’s been a zone entry wizard for most of his career & the production followed the past two seasons. In the playoffs, you only got that sometimes.

If he wasn’t in a contract year with Jersey also having Meier to deal with, this wouldn’t be as much of a concern, but teams are always going to pay for scoring and that’s just how it is.

As for Meier, he had a weird playoff because I thought he was fantastic against the Rangers and not great against the Hurricanes, and he got all four of his points in that series. He was definitely a bit unlucky against the Rangers because nobody on the Devils was producing more chances than him in that series & his lines were still winning the territorial battle despite not seeing much reward for it on the scoresheet.

I will say this has always been the player Meier is, having watched him a lot in San Jose’s good years. He has always been a high shot-volume player prone to cold streaks because a lot of the chances he does get are from him attacking the net by brute force or shooting from everywhere. You’re going to be happy with what you get from him at the end of the season, but there will be 10-15 game stretches where you wonder if he will ever score again just because the chances he gets are so ugly.

I thought this year was a bit of a turning point for him because he became more of a playmaker when he was with the Sharks & it was something that carried over to the Devils.

It’s interesting because being a scoring chance creator is Meier’s calling card & he was more of a playmaker this year. He’s still taking a lot of shots, but had fewer chances, more goals & was less of a one-man show compared to previous years. This flipped in the playoffs, as Meier had 21 chances & setup only 10 (which was still second on the Devils). His linemates were also ice cold in that Rangers series so I guess it’s not a surprise to see him take charge of the offense more. Still, I wonder if more balance is the key with him.

Like Bratt, it’s not something I would worry about long-term because Timo has a track record of producing & lots of good players had trouble scoring in the playoffs. The Devils are in a unique situation of having to pay both so I can see where things get might get dicey. They’re still in a good position to reload & come back stronger next year.

The big outlier of the series was Game 2. The Devils had a bad first period in Game 1, but got to their game after that & Jersey’s “adjustment” was taking Jonas Siegenthaler out of the lineup while trying to play a physical game against the Rangers. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

The worst thing a team can do in the playoffs is try to play a game their roster isn’t suited for because “that’s how you win in the post-season.” Devils didn’t have a great Game 3, but they started to get back to attacking off the rush & the Rangers own problems with exiting the zone started to come to roost as the series went on. Schmid giving them saves also helped. The Rangers will get counter-attack chances regardless, Devils just needed to match them with volume and try to mitigate the damage off cycles. As the series went on, the more ugly it got for the Rangers. Counter-attacks became their only offense, but the Devils found a nice balance of playing a possession game while preventing NYR from getting any quick strike offense.

If the Rangers wanted any transition offense, they had to go through the forecheck & aside from Adam Fox, their defensemen could not do that. Panarin took a lot of heat for his play this series & while his point-production wasn’t acceptable, he was also taking on a big workload in the defensive zone along with running the offense.

Puck retrievals show exits against a forecheck & you can see how much of a problem this was for the Rangers. Panarin’s 9.7 would rank 5th on the Devils in this series. What makes this worse is that some of the Rangers stronger puck movers were also turnover-prone (Trouba, Schneider, Miller) & they were clearing the puck more than exiting with possession. Sometimes this is the right play, the problem was it was the only play the Rangers could make more times than not & it led to the Devils re-entering the zone with speed. This is the type of stuff that catches up with you over time.

Right now, he looks like one of those players who is a top-pair guy in name & point production only (think Shea Theodore). Everything is good at is very hard to find & complementary to the forwards, but it’s all when the puck is already heading north (zone entries, passing, chance production). The things he struggles with are common for most young defensemen (puck retrievals, dealing with forecheck pressure, entry defense) but those are also things you can work around when you’re on a good team. Whether he gets better at them is another story. Makar was notably bad at entry defense early in his career & he got better. Theodore has improved dramatically from his early days in Vegas. Others like John Carlson & Mikhail Sergachev kind of stayed the same for most of their careers & while they still have value, someone else on their team always handles the tougher minutes so they can play more in the offensive zone.

The Avs have done a good job of protecting him & you saw some of what made him special in the Stanley Cup Final last year. He got more shifts with the MacKinnon line while Makar/Toews played more shutdown duty. He hasn’t gotten that luxury this year & the Avs forward depth took a huge hit, but he still had a nice season in terms of boxcar stats (10 goals, 24 points in 42 games). Overall impact hasn’t been as good, but I always think defensemen are limited there, especially when puck retrievals aren’t your strong suit. I think next year will be more telling if he can stay healthy.

Every playoff series is different. Teams that like to skate & carry the puck ran the show last year & this year things have been especially clogged. The Leafs are a tough one to figure out because their issue is they can’t score enough in the playoffs & the root of it has been different the last two years (can’t speak of the Montreal or Boston losses). They aren’t a team that needs to attack in transition to win, but I thought they played too much of a half-rink game against Tampa. 8 of their goals were off the rush but Tampa’s players were better & Nylander led the charge on most of them.

Things were open last year & Toronto did better when the game slowed down. This year was almost the opposite. Forechecking, regrouping & cycling have dominated the playoffs while rush/transition play has been a smaller puzzle piece. Toronto was content to do this against Florida but they weren’t getting much out of it.

They were unlucky to a point, but they only outchanced Florida by two and were heavily favored in the series. Florida was also more effecient off the rush and while the Leafs were content to play the dump-and-chase game, they scored only 3 out of their 8 goals off the forecheck. It’s tricky to evaluate this in the playoffs because transition play has been more about picking your spots instead of always being on the attack (see Vegas), but there was a lack of balance with Toronto.

Cam Charron did a better job of analyzing this than I ever could, but the Leafs are a very methodical team with how they play. They like to regroup in all three zones & try to wait out the defense so they can make a controlled play up the ice. Florida, on the other hand, was playing quicker and while it didn’t always result in the best play, they had more pace to their game & could create some tough situations for Toronto’s defense. Playing this way is a risk because aimlessly clearing the puck can result in turnovers, but Florida was content to recover & defend if Toronto picked them off.

I tried using my zone exit data as a proxy for this, creating a stat called “rushed exits,” which are exits where there isn’t a pass involved. It’s not perfect, but it does capture teams playing styles well.

I do wonder if there’s a point of diminishing returns with this if you’re just dumping the puck in on 60% of your entries anyway. Toronto always seems like they’re caught in between how they think they should be playing & stick with what is working for them, but I said this a lot about Washington when they kept losing to Pittsburgh & the Rangers in the playoffs before they finally broke through.

Sorry if I didn’t get to all your questions, but there’s a word count.