Odds and Ends: Crowdsourcing Passing and Zone Diagrams

LOS ANGELES, CA - MARCH 24: Wayne Simmonds #17 of the Los Angeles Kings plays the puck along the boards in the second period during the NHL game against the San Jose Sharks at Staples Center on March 24, 2011 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Victor Decolongon/Getty Images)

Don't worry, it's a short post for today. I've been working like hell on the continued analysis of the Kings-Blues game, with pass by pass tracking, power play formations, puck tracking(this one I'm real excited about), and more. With that in mind, I have two questions.

What would your ideal zone breakdown be? Thanks to my much-more-brilliant-than-I-am co-writers, I have improved the map of the zones to get it to what I feel should represent a game of hockey pretty welI've included a blank chart for you all to make edits to if you have any suggestions. I'm clocking in at 22 zones- 8 on each side and 6 in the middle. I made some changes like lowering d/o5 to the top of the circle and widening d/o2. What do you think?

Who would be open to doing some pass charting? Before you instinctively flee: this isn't going to be like the stuff I've been doing, which is quite time-consuming despite my best efforts to make it simpler. Rather, I just to tally up nine categories: Offensive to Offensive zone passing, Offensive to Neutral, Offensive to Defensive, Neutral to Offensive, etc. All this would take is a little bit of graph paper and to follow along with whatever game you are watching. For instance, I did the Sharks-Kings OT period in the 3/24 game just by following along:

Sorry for the cutoff, sometimes Windows Journal earns its reputation. As you can see, you're very rarely going to have to keep track of Neutral to D, or O-D or O-N or D-O, so it's not too much of a hassle. I managed to keep up with the play without having to rewind it. I suggest that we do games on this Sunday, April 3rd. I will be charting the Flyers-Rangers like this, so if anyone wants to be a team player and pick up another game(even if it's just part of it!), I would be very grateful for the data. The point of this is to see where we can get with baby-baby-baby steps. Just having raw pass totals for teams would do us loads of good.

So, if you are interested, hit me up in the comments and let's see if we can take one small step for hockey-analysis-kind. And by the way, here is the blank chart: