Models

Not all shots are equal. While you get 2 points for both a breakaway dunk and a tightly guarded, off-balance 20 foot jumper, the dunk is the more valuable shot because it is going to be made nearly every time. Multiple people have created shot quality models to estimate the probability a shot is made based on various factors. You can read about some of them here and here . The better public models all used the no longer public SportVU shot logs. [Read More]

Last summer I was invited by Emmanual Perry , who created corsica.hockey , to participate in a prediction contest for the upcoming NHL season. Having never built a prediction model, and not really following the NHL, I figured it would be a fun challenge undertake. Manny was kind enough to share a dataset with over 5000 variables for all games since the 2007-08 season. This saved me a lot of time that would have been spent gather and cleaning data. [Read More]