The Road Ahead
New Ways to Subscribe to All Three Zones
If you didn’t know, I also run a website called All Three Zones where I collect microstats from NHL games. You’ve seen me apply the data in most of my articles on this newsletter, as well as my work for McKeens Hockey & at other stops. Following the granular level is a way that has helped me understand the game more & the microstats always served as an entry point for what’s going on with certain teams & players. You’ve seen me break down the Stanley Cup Final, look into Mortiz Seider’s game & how his environment affects him, break players down into different archetypes and explore other parts of the game that interest me.
Others have also used the data to help their own work or start their own projects, such as friend of the blog, Micah Blake McCurdy and Louis Boulet is doing some fascinating work exploring parts of the dataset that I haven’t had time to dive into. Initially, I wanted the All Three Zones project to be a one-stop-shop for data on NHL players and while there is a wealth of information on the website, the data usually leads me to exploring a deeper problem or issue with the game or the player. There’s a lot of nuance in hockey & more data helps us breakdown those nuances better.
A good way to do that is through player cards. These get misinterpreted a lot because people will usually look for the blue & red bars to judge if a player is good or bad. There is a lot of data that goes into this so it’s easy to get confused. I like to think of the bars showing what a player does rather than what they’re good at. Overtime you can parse out certain skillsets from this, but there are over 40 data points spanning seven different categories here so it’s easy to get overwhelmed. It’s rare that you’re going to find a player who is great or terrible at everything. Islanders defenseman Alexander Romanov is a good example of this.
There’s a lot of red on this card, so you might think “oh brother this guy stinks,” but it’s a little more nuanced than that. The player cards are broken down by z-score, which measures their distance from the league average in each category by their position. How far away they are from the mean depends on the range of the data & sometimes the spread isn’t that extreme, especially around the 40th-50th percentile range. With a player like Romanov who is in the red, but still pretty close to the middle, he’s pretty much league average in most categories.
The only exceptions are in entry defense and failed exits, where he’s a little more slanted to the left. Exits are a whole other can of worms because there’s a lot that goes into it beyond just getting the puck out (I think of it as starting with the retrieval, making a play or setting your teammate up for a better play from there). Romanov leans a little more towards skating the puck out or vs. dumping it off the glass when he exits the zone & the Islanders are a team that prefers clearing the puck over making passes out of the zone. We can look at the team charts available to show this.
So, it’s understandable that a defenseman who prefers making a play with the puck would be a little turnover prone on a team that wants to clear it out of danger at first blush. Pardon San Jose here for screwing up the average. Entry defense is where Romanov is a little more dicey. Teams enter the zone on his side of the ice often & create chances when they do so. He also wasn’t particularly aggressive while defending entries, ranking around the league average in denials. Adding it all together, you have an average defenseman who eats a lot of minutes & might be more suited as a complement to your more skilled forwards than in a shutdown role. Leaning more in the “Mover” than the “Stopper” category in the defenseman archetype compass.
Most of where he’s getting killed is with playing in his own zone & making bad plays on breakouts. He’s around the middle of the pack in everything else & sometimes you live with a guy who isn’t getting killed in the top of your lineup. People who watch the Islanders a little more closely can probably dive into this, but the microstats give us an entry point.
I’ve also introduced some newer data that I haven’t had the time to dive into yet, such as breaking rush offense down by situation, passing combinations and their effect on shooting percentage & separating players from their environment, which I briefly touched on in my Matty Beniers post. There’s a wealth of data that I’ve really only scratched the surface on.
Subscribing
Onto the meat of the matter, those who enjoy what I do and want me to keep doing this have supported me through Patreon over the years. I have an unmeasurable amount of appreciation for those who have stuck with me because I know accessing the data hasn’t been the easiest thing in the world. There’s been a lot of trial & error on my end to find a way to properly house everything, through sending people Dropbox links or Tableau workbooks with 50 unorganized tabs.
Now, I have a central hub for everything. You can now subscribe to All Three Zones directly on my website www.allthreezones.com (duh) & I’ve added the option for people to subscribe yearly instead of monthly. The Patreon method works for most, but I wanted to add another one for things to be a little less convoluted going forward. Everything, including the links to the raw data, can be found on the site for subscribers now. I’ve also added a members only blog, which will mostly be updates but this is where I’m hoping to add a few more member perks for those who want to go above & beyond.
The Bedard Tier
I introduced this last season, but it was tough to keep up with it with in the early stages of parenthood & ESPN Plus' being a ginormous pain in the ass. That said, I’m giving it another go-around this season. It’s tough for me to keep up with every game & while I aim for a large sample of everyone, there are some teams I end up dragging on by the end of the season. So, if you want your favorite team to be a primary focus of All Three Zones, you can basically hire me to be their personal beat reporter next year.
Subscribing to the Bedard Tier will include:
Your favorite team’s games being tracked within 24 hours of completion (barring some absurd blackout or inconvenience on my end)
A full-82 game sample by the end of the year
Weekly stat-recaps or feature articles every Monday morning on here or the A3Z web site.
I find the project more enjoyable when there’s a team or two that I’m focusing on instead of just randomly tracking a couple games here & there. It was my favorite part of running Shutdown Line back in the day & it’s why I love the playoffs so much. I’m not expecting fans of all 32 games to subscribe to this, but if at least one or two people end up doing this, I think it will make the upcoming season more fun for me personally. The reason it’s called the Bedard Tier is that a Hawks fan suggested it, so congrats you’re part of the project now.
Hockey season is just around the corner!