Project 94 Offseason Updates

It's been a quiet summer from Project 94, though that has no reflection on the NHL Offseason and the recent activity in Women's Hockey. The PWHL launched with their original six teams (New York, Ottawa, Boston, Minnesota, Toronto, Montreal), the league's draft order was announced, and free agency opened on September 1. Similarly, the NHL saw signings, trades, retirements, and franchise changing draft picks. But while all this was going in the foreground of news and hockey world, Project 94 was going through energizing renovations that hope to engage the hockey world in innovative statistical analysis.

Data

The first, we were able to change our data source to SportRadar's NHL API, unlocking more detailed play by play information, as well as historical performance analysis. While this required a heavy lift to ingest and store this data in proper data warehousing best practices, as well as the data engineering for the ELT process, the speed, reiliability and granularity of SportRadar's data will certainly make it worthwhile.

Website Features

With the new data, there will be new features! The website will add new tools to output customized charts and cuts of data, giving users the ability to explore and make the visualizations produced in newsletters and articles. Though the tools will be rolled out iteratively, the goal is to create tools that people find useful and insightful in understand player and team performance. New features will include:

• Cumulative charts to track season progression in statistics like points, goals, shots, etc.
• Moving averages of statistics to track if a player is consistently improving their 'per game'
• Tables showing how many times a player is 'on-ice' for events like Goals For, Goals Allowed, Hits, Giveaways, Takeaways, etc.
• More TBD!

Models

In addition to features added to Project94.io, the offseason and new data provided an excellent opportunity to create models that evaluate different aspects of the game. The first model being developed is a Shot Quality Index (SQI) to evaluate the probability of a shot being a goal based on features that are not skill-dependent factors, such as shot location, shot type (wrist vs slap) and situation (e.g. powerplay). The second model is a traditional expected goals model, which includes the features used in the SQI plus more skill related fefatures and player-specific tendencies, both for the shooter and the goalie.

The third modeling exercise is actually a model, associated with two predictions, to create a player evaluation system. The model will estimate a player's cap hit, and therefore AAV, based on their career information, like years in the league, historical performance, and contract type (ELC, RFA, UFA). The second prediction uses the model and ignores the first two contract types, predicting the player's value if they were an unrestricted free agent. This leverages age and historical performance to truly assess what a player's performance value is with respect to the salary cap.

Morning Report

The Morning Report newsletter will be back next year with a similar focus to last season but with an emphasis on identifying trends in team and player performance. Using statistics to capture improved player performance game by game in areas other than goals and assists will be an increased focus this season! Another exciting part of using data is not only capturing trends, but also identifying, player season and career accomplishments, game anomalies, and other important daily updates!

Fantasy Hockey

Last but not least, Project 94 will be incorporating a fantasy hockey component to player evaluations and projections. Because of the increased visibility into plays players were on the ice for, thanks to SportRadar's data, there can be a greater understanding into potential fantasy value for categories. Good examples are powerplay time, shots on goal, goals/shots against, and more. It is also a good use case to further player value insights as fantasy hockey forces valuation with respect to a starting spot or at the league draft.

Final Thoughts

It is extremely exciting to see the 2023-2024 Season start up as we are not only anticipating NHL training camps, but also eager to see the start of the PWHL. As new features roll out and articles are published, Project 94 wants to hear from you what readers and users find insightful, and what could make the website more useful as fans of hockey. Stay tuned for the updates as they are released!