Finishing Talents of Forwards, Home and Road
by Hawerchuk on Jan 17, 2012 7:00 AM EST
in Statistics
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I looked at the difference between the finishing talents of 1st- and 4th-liners last week and reader jeffgm suggested that home and road data might show the impact of line-matching on goal-scoring. Here's the data:
| Home | Home | Road | Road | |
| Quality | Shot % | Quality | Shot % | |
| Top 1/4 | 7.42 | 8.10 | 7.00 | 7.83 |
| 2nd 1/4 | 7.29 | 7.54 | 6.95 | 7.30 |
| 3rd 1/4 | 7.37 | 6.96 | 6.92 | 6.81 |
| Bot 1/4 | 7.27 | 5.89 | 6.87 | 6.06 |
Shot quality shows a home-road differential but all lines maintain the same small difference in each situation. Finishing performance, on the other hand, shows what I think we expect: shooting percentage drops on the road because the home coach can choose who to match lines with. The interesting thing is the jump in shooting percentage for 4th liners - what's going on there? It's not clear to me how you construct a scenario where the 4th line gets easier matchups on the road than at home. Over 114000 shots, it's not likely to be a statistical anomaly.
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Anomaly?
Presumably the 4th line gets easier matchups on the road because the home coach cares more about matching the top 3 lines (and somebody has to get easier matchups, they can’t all have tougher matchups).
But it seems clear from the data that the 4th lines aren’t getting matched up against each other at home. If the 4th lines were getting the same matchup at home and on the road, the other 3 lines couldn’t all be getting tougher matchups on the road. It’s a zero sum game, if somebody is getting significantly tougher matchups on the road, somebody has to be getting easier matchups.
But it seems clear from the data that the 4th lines aren’t getting matched up against each other at home.
One of the teams is always home.
If they are only getting match against 4th lines on the road, that would mean the other team is matching them against 4th lines at home.
I don’t think this is true. As an extreme example, consider a game where the away team gives each of its lines 15 minutes, but the home team only plays its 4th line for all 60 minutes.
Just thinking about this some more, perhaps the explanation is that home teams give their 4th lines a little more ice time than away teams. Those extra minutes would be easy minutes for the away team’s top lines (contributing to their better SH% vs home), and be hard minutes for the home team 4th line (contributing to their worse SH% vs away).
For example, let’s start with a league where 1st-2nd-3rd-4th minutes are distributed 20-20-15-10 for both home and away teams and lines are matched 1-1, 2-2, 3-3, and 4-4 in all games. Assuming no other home/road effects, we’d expect home and road SH% for each line to be equal. Now let’s change the home distribution to 19-19-14-13. All of the home minutes for the top 3 lines are still against their equal counterparts, but the away top 3 lines all get an extra minute against the 4th line. Meanwhile, the home 4th line gets 3 extra minutes against top lines, while the away 4th line still gets all of its minutes against their counterpart 4th line.
Two possible explanations, both of which I think we can rule out:
1: 4th lines will sometimes be matched by overexuberant 1st and 2nd lines which press too hard for offense. But you’d think this would show up in the shot quality data.
2: 4th lines are typically physical lines, at home they’re probably more concerned about getting hits than scoring goals. But again, same explanation.
Maybe it has to do with 4th line home and road zone start? I’d imagine 4th lines more often get offensive zone starts on the road, whereas at home, a coach can see the opponent putting out their 4th line in the offensive zone and match with his own.
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All I can do is speak from what I saw of Jacques Martin (I cannot for the life of me figure what Cunneyworth is up to; guess I’ll sort it out eventually). He pretty much always heavily curtailed his 4th line’s icetime on the road. Absent the ability to match them up correctly, he simply sent them less often (I think last season Desharnais’s icetime would drop almost by half on the road).
I don’t know about overall easier matchups, but I could see them getting opponents that are stronger defensively at home. To simplify, let’s ignore forwards and say the other team has 3 pairings, one good overall, one shut-down pairing and one that sucks. If you are at home, you probably want to keep your scoring lines away from the shut-down pairing. Somebody has to face them, so the best strategic move is probably to put your guys that were never going to score anyway up against them.
That might explain why shooting% goes down away but I still don’t see an explanation for the combination of shooting from better locations at home but having a lower percentage away.
Driving Play - The Blog with Three First Lines
I have a more fundamental question: the shot quality measures all went up by 0.34 to 0.42 from road to home, but the shooting percentages didn’t follow. Either everybody is a better shooter on the road (unlikely), goaltenders are much better on the road (unlikely), it’s a statistical artifact (unlikely given sample size), there’s shot counting bias in favor of the home team (possible), or there’s something wrong with the shot quality model.
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