Five-Season Quality of Competition Leaders
by Hawerchuk on Feb 6, 2012 7:00 AM EST
in Statistics
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PrintAs you may (or may not) know, we calculate Quality of Competition for NHL players by averaging their opponents' Corsi shot differential rates across all of their head-to-head ice time. While sample sizes of a year or less can sometimes give cryptic results, the five year average of the stat seems to do a very good job of picking out the players with the toughest defensive assignments: (minimum 162 GP and 10 minutes 5v5 TOI/game)
| Player | QoC | Player | QoC | Player | QoC |
| Lidstrom | 1.43 | Veilleux | 1.11 | Phillips | 1.02 |
| Bolland | 1.41 | Zetterberg | 1.09 | Hanzal | 1.00 |
| Seabrook | 1.32 | Chara | 1.08 | P. Bergeron | 1.00 |
| R. Niedermayer | 1.28 | Robidas | 1.08 | Callahan | 1.00 |
| Bouwmeester | 1.27 | Regehr | 1.07 | S. Niedermayer | 1.00 |
| W. Mitchell | 1.27 | N. Thompson | 1.05 | Pominville | 0.99 |
| Pahlsson | 1.27 | Marleau | 1.04 | Martinek | 0.97 |
| Girardi | 1.23 | Moen | 1.04 | Hecht | 0.96 |
| Keith | 1.17 | Hejda | 1.04 | Doughty | 0.96 |
| Ward | 1.17 | M. Staal | 1.03 | Pavelski | 0.96 |
Are there surprises in here? Not many. I'm not sure I knew that Stephane Veilleux played quite so much against top competition - and it's possible that no one else did either, because he left the NHL for Europe two seasons ago and has spent this entire season in the AHL. The same goes for Nate Thompson, who was waived by the New York Islanders in 2010.
Incidentally, this list uses what's known as "Corsi Rel Quality of Competition" - instead of averaging a player's raw Corsi number, we average his Corsi number relative to his team. If we use unadjusted Corsi, the Quality of Competition leaders come from just a handful of teams: primarily Columbus, St. Louis and Nashville, all of whom played significant numbers of games against dominant Detroit and Chicago teams.
And who's at the other end of the spectrum? If we didn't restrict the list to players with 10+ minutes of 5v5 TOI per game, we'd get a who's who of goons this time. Instead, we get a cryptic list of 3rd and 4th liners, along with bottom pairing or 2nd-tier offensive D:
| Player | QoC | Player | QoC | Player | QoC |
| Nystrom | -0.24 | M.A Bergeron | -0.35 | Pardy | -0.58 |
| Cheechoo | -0.25 | Campoli | -0.37 | Woywitka | -0.60 |
| Salei | -0.27 | Schubert | -0.37 | Sbisa | -0.61 |
| Kostopoulos | -0.28 | Fistric | -0.37 | Lebda | -0.68 |
| Barker | -0.30 | A. Miller | -0.38 | Hnidy | -0.70 |
| Strudwick | -0.31 | Montador | -0.42 | S. Brookbank | -0.71 |
| Picard | -0.31 | Gilroy | -0.44 | Babchuk | -0.74 |
| Ericsson | -0.33 | Boynton | -0.51 | Abdelkader | -0.77 |
| Alberts | -0.34 | Foster | -0.52 | Franson | -0.81 |
| Huskins | -0.35 | Helm | -0.52 | K. Russell | -1.07 |
Aside from taking their raw stats with a grain of salt (which you probably already do), I don't think there's much we can do with this list of the most-sheltered players. You'll notice that these QoC numbers are much less negative than the guys at the top are positive. Again, no surprise here - if you can't play NHL-level defense against 2nd and 3rd lines, it's pretty unlikely that anyone will want you on their team.
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I'm assuming
that’s Jordan Staal on the top list?
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by Bettman's Nightmare on Feb 6, 2012 7:22 AM EST reply actions
doubt it. considering where girardi is i would be guessing its marc.
by Ahmad Bradshaw on Feb 6, 2012 9:31 AM EST up reply actions
I think it might be interesting to “balance” Corsi using CrQoC the way Eric T. did for zonestarts, although I suspect you’d get similar results. I’ll try to work on that.
It was suggested to me at the time, but it didn’t come out to be terribly straightforward.
The problem is that fourth line players often have a terrible Corsi and a very low CrQoC. The result of having weak players play each other (and to a slightly lesser extent, strong players play each other) is that an attempt to correct for quality of competition works backwards — the balancing says “well, most people who have low CrQoC have Corsi’s of -15, so this guy’s Corsi of -10 is really impressive.” But a Corsi of -10 against weak competition actually isn’t so good…
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I dont' know the Rangers' roster too well, but I suspect Rangers players are really common on the extremes.
Tortorella really likes to super-specialize his players – Callahan and the top D Pair (Girardi Staal usually) get insane competition, while the bottom players get the worst of the worst.
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Well, I look at that list and I see a bunch of shutdown D: Lidstrom, Keith, Seabrook, Mitchell, Doughty, Girardi, Staal, Phillips, Chara, Bouwmeester, Regehr, S. Niedermayer, Ward, Robidas, Hejda, Martinek. So lots of players get this kind of usage.
I think you only see a handful of teams using their forwards like this – Detroit, Chicago, Anaheim (under Burke), San Jose, Buffalo, Boston.
Tortorella last year hammered Dubinsky-Anisimov-Callahan, but even then he went through a 20ish game stretch where he was really relying on Fedotenko-Boyle-Prust.
This year, it’s been mostly Callahan and Richards, but late games he’s used some combination of Fedotenko-Boyle-Callahan-Dubinsky-Anisimov-Hagelin. Definitely not as extreme as last year. Only constant in the group is Callahan, he’ll always draw the toughs.
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by George E. Ays on Feb 7, 2012 10:26 AM EST up reply actions
I have a question on the BehindTheNet data
I know you have the Quality of Competition information so I was wondering if you also have the “Goals For/Game” and “Goals Against/Game” information for players opponents?
Here is an example. You have two players. One player plays against tougher competition that average 3 goals per 60 minutes played. And when that player is on the ice, he keeps those players to 2.8 GA/60.
Now a second player on the same team only plays against opponents that average 2 GF/60. And that player gives up 2.4 GA/60.
So the first player is at a -.2 rate and the second player is at +.4 rate. However if you just look at GA/60 the second player is “ranked” higher.
It is SO HARD to show the impact of defensive forwards. If you could show the differential between what the opposition normally scores and what they do when these defensive players are on the ice, that would just be awesome.
Also, if you could have that for the players then you can also show the teams affect. What is the opponent impact for teams like the Canucks in an easier division or Chicago, Detroit in the tougher one?
And of course, you can do the same thing for scoring.
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