I guess I'm on a bit of a roll here, making charts about OT. I thought this was vaguely interesting too:

I like this plot - differing incentives:

This suggests that players start to get very sleepy around the middle of the second OT:

I thought this was moderately interesting - 5-minute moving average over the last 25 years:

And the percentage of games still in progress:

We track Zone Starts on behindthenet.ca, and the impact they have on a player's stats seems to have registered with the media and some portion of the general public. But what to make of Zone Finishes? Here is individual season zone finish % plotted against zone start %:

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Tom Tango and I wrote this piece a while ago, but today seemed as good a day as any to post it.

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1979 was a momentous year for professional hockey: safety finally trumped long-standing tradition, and National Hockey League President John Ziegler announced that helmets would be mandatory for all players entering the league. Since then, the best-of-seven Stanley Cup Finals have gone to a seventh and deciding game eight times. Notably absent from those eight games? Despite their status as another long-standing tradition in hockey, there were zero fights in these high-stakes matchups.

Nor have there been any fights in the final games of the Canada Cup, World Cup of Hockey or the Olympics. In international play, fighting leads to ejection, so it should come as no surprise that fights are almost non-existent.

But regardless of the punishment for fighting, high-quality games can occur with no fighting, nor threat of fighting. There’s no need to change the punishment system against fighting: we simply need to change the incentive system.

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Not just individual player stats and team stats, but also game-by-game stats:

e.g. LA-Vancouver, game 2: http://behindthenet.ca/charts/Shots_Playoffs_2011_30152.php

Unfortunately the pages that point to these suckers are down, so you'll have to familiarize yourselves with NHL.com game codes for the playoffs (301xx - ie 30151, 30152 for the LA-Van series)

Here's a side by side comparison of the Jets and last year's Thrashers team for pretty much any stat you can think of.

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Back in July, I asked you to project the final point totals in the Southeast division. And how did you - and Tom Awad's Vukota - do?

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