Behindthenet Blog

Following up on this table, here are 5v5 Quality of Competition percentiles for each of the players. (Quality of Competition is calculated using Willis' method with the following modifications - only 5v5 points are included, and all opponents are included, not just forwards.)

Rob Schremp appears to have been sheltered...

Player QoC  GP-G-A1-A2   +/-
Wolski   86  65-19-13-6   42/42
Schremp  41  63-12- 5-8   34/13
Bolland  83  65-14- 9-5   32/19
Bickel   32  56-14- 5-3   32/36
Garlock  95  51-8- 14-7   36/20
Berti    78  64-6- 11-7   38/35
Meidl    82  66-5-  7-7   33/29
Kennedy  85  62-11-11-4   38/36
Reddox   82  66-15-10-6   39/41
McGrath  96  67-10-11-9   45/43
Kell     69  62-7-  8-5   26/14
Pisellini67  67-4-  3-4   25/17
Haskins  78  61-5-  9-2   28/14
Kaleta   56  65-4-  4-4   18/34
Rizk     92  67-5-  6-4   21/33
Morrison 45  64-10- 7-7   38/31
Pitton   79  66-8-  3-4   25/36
Stewart   9  57-4-  4-2   14/23

Labels: junior hockey, Quality of Competition

One very nice innovation on Quality of Competition came from Jonathan Willis at Copper 'n Blue. In order to calculate Quality of Competition, you normally need 1) TOI totals for every player; and 2) head-to-head icetime totals for every player combination. This data is only available for the NHL, and it's only available for the last three years. What Willis did was to use goal events as a proxy for icetime. That is, in the absence of TOI, Willis assumed that the total number of goals a player was on the ice for was a reasonable proxy for the amount of time he spent matched up against specific opposing players.

That changes the Quality of Competition from:

QoC = sum[(Opponent Rating)*(Opponent TOI)]/TOI

Where Rating = (GFON/60 - GAON/60) - (GFOFF/60 - GAOFF/60) for each opponent.

To something like:

QoC = sum[(Opponent Rating#2)*(Opponent + and - per GP)]/(Opponent + and - per GP)

Where Rating#2 = (GFON/GP - GAON/GP) - (GFOFF/GP - GAOFF/GP)

Or something very similar - I don't think it matters very much whether you use GP or total events as a proxy for TOI.

At any rate, I generated Quality of Competition four different ways for the Edmonton Oilers. Rankings among regular players are below:

                    QC0 QC1  QC2 QC3
ETHANMOREAU          3   3    5   1
SHELDONSOURAY        2   2   12  12
STEVESTAIOS          9   8    3   5
JASONSTRUDWICK      20  20    8   6
LUBOMIRVISNOVSKY     8  10   17  17
SHAWNHORCOFF         1   1    2   4
ALESHEMSKY           5   7    7  19
ALESKOTALIK         17  17   16   7
DENISGREBESHKOV     11   9   13  14
FERNANDOPISANI       3   6    9  11
MARC-ANTOINEPOULIOT 17  18   15  15
ROBERTNILSSON       11  15    6  10
PATRICKO'SULLIVAN    9  11   11  13
DUSTINPENNER         5   4   10  20
LADISLAVSMID        16  14    4   3
ANDREWCOGLIANO      13  13    1   2
KYLEBRODZIAK        19  19   20   8
ZACHERYSTORTINI     21  21   19  18
TOMGILBERT           5   5   18  16
SAMGAGNER           13  16   14  21
LIAMREDDOX          13  12   21   9

QC0 is Quality of Competition as calculated on my site. QC1 is the same TOI-based calculation, but it includes only the off-ice stats for games the player played in (for simplicity of calculation, QC0 includes all of a team's games.) QC2 assumes total TOI is known, but uses goal events (+ and -) as a proxy for head-to-head icetime. QC3 is the same as QC2, but uses games played as a proxy for TOI.

Some results are similar: everybody loves Horcoff and Moreau; everybody hates Stortini. But there are some substantial differences between these systems too. The TOI based ones favor Sheldon Souray, Dustin Penner and Tom Gilbert, while the proxy systems like Jason Strudwick, Ladislav Smid and Andrew Cogliano.

So my question is - given that I see maybe one Oilers game per season - which system seems to be closest to the right answer? Is the difference tolerable?

Labels: Quality of Competition