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  PowerPlay Magazin

PPM Hockey: The Best Defence is a Good Defence, The Best Offence is a Good Offence


PPM Hockey: The Best Defence is a Good Defence, The Best Offence is a Good Offence

Introduction

Let me introduce you to Dan Rea. The 34 year old was acquired by the Redshift prior to their promotion to Canada's top league. Despite only being 34 years old, Mr. Rea is the unfortunate victim of a disease that plagues the playing career of so many PPM athletes. Known as "PPM-0/6-CL-itis", the athletes' abilities are crippled to the point where they can no longer skate, shoot, pass or do anything. Many of these players are forced into retirement, with no employment available and their playing days long gone. However, Redshift management had a role for Dan (in addition to scoring an assist in a NC game! with a "sick between the legs pass" - likely due to falling and accidentally bumping the puck to the winger). At first, many people laughed as to why the team would acquire such a player. The answer is a simple word that has been improving our world for hundreds of years: science!

You see, I have had a theory for a long time that forwards impact the defensive rating of a line. It is very simple to test actually, you can do it yourself in one weekend. If you take your lineup on Saturday, and switch LD1 and RD1 with LD2 and RD2 on Sunday, you can immediately see for yourself. If forwards had no impact the defensive line strength of LD1 and RD1 would be the same on line 1 and line 2. Same would be true for LD2 and RD2 on line 2 and on line 1. However, if instead there is an impact, what you see is that this number is not the same and is strong evidence for forwards impacting the defensive rating of a line. However, there are other things that can skew this observation, most notably, chemistry. Doing this swap with two lines at 100% chemistry is critical, as it turns out.

The problem now became, how would quantize this? I could cycle many players around and eventually get enough data to pull some estimate out and share it with you all. This is when I met Dan. Given Dan's amazing <20 overall rating, by adding him to the lineup it is essentially like playing with 4 skaters on the ice for that line. By rotating him between LW, C, RW, LD and RD on a given line, I can see what impact each player has on the Off, Sho and Def ratings of a given line. Then, looking at their attributes, I can hopefully quantize this impact. To speed up the process I purchased another player, a 7 OR one much like Dan.

Prior to this study, I had two theories in mind:

1.      The defensive rating of forwards impacts the defensive rating of a line.
2.      The overall ability of a forward (i.e. primary attribute with proper ratio) impacts the defensive rating of a line.

The two theories would have drastically different consequences. For starters, if number 2 was correct, that'd mean there'd be no reason to train defence on forwards and for most people it'd be business as usual. However, if number 1 was correct, this would completely change the way we look at PPM hockey because now, in theory, we could improve our team strength more efficiently by training forwards properly rather than focusing solely on two defencemen.

With this in mind, let's have a look at the players involved in the study and the outcome of various line combinations. I urge you to continue reading as the results are very surprising.

Results

I took my lower-line defence pairing and swapped LD3 with LD4 and RD3 with RD4. The result was along the lines of what I expected. There was a small change in the defensive and offensive ratings of each line. Cool! Defencemen impact the offensive rating and forwards impact the defensive rating! Wait a second here Scott, you just purchased two players and your 4th line doesn't have the same chemistry as your 3rd line.

I repeated the experiment with my top-2 lines, where all players have 100 chemistry. What I saw, this time, was no change in either the offense or defence rating of either line. I was disappointed, it is clear that there is no impact from this test, but I didn't want to believe it. So, I called in Dan and his 7 OR new best friend.

When injecting Dan and his 7 OR companion into the lineup the following was observed:

1 - Baseline Line Strength: 290 DEF, 220 OFF, 184 SHO
2 - Removing a 573 DEF defenceman: 144 DEF, 214 OFF, 169 SHO
3 - Removing a 615 DEF defenceman: 140 DEF, 220 OFF, 171 SHO
4 - Removing both the above defencemen: 1 DEF. 214 OFF, 159 SHO

Looking at this it appears from "2" that defencemen impact offensive rating. However, "3" contradicts this since both have mid-30s for their offensive rating. What happened between point 2 and 3 is what I mentioned earlier: chemistry. The 615 DEF defenceman was just purchased and had low chem (22) at the time compared to the 573 DEF defenceman (100). When swapping out the 100 chem defenceman for a 0 chem player like Dan, the line chemistry dropped and as a result so did the offensive rating despite only changing a defenceman. This drop was negligible for offense when removing a low-chem defenceman and replacing him with a low-chem low-OR player. So, defencemen don't impact offense, as confirmed by point 4 especially. If it did we'd see point 4 having less offensive strength than point 2. What we do see, is shooting being hindered with the loss of defenceman, even those with chem.  The punch line here is: Defencemen do not impact the offensive rating of a line. Forwards do not impact the defensive rating of a line (confirmed but only shooting data shown via points 5-8 below). All players impact the shooting rating of a line. Line chemistry impacts the performance of all players on that line. However, I have been informed by a credible source that offence on a defenceman helps your powerplay just like defence on a forward helps your penalty kill. So, train these attributes, if you wish, as you see fit.

I next had a look at quantizing the impact of shooting. There have been studies on this before and I believe they got a ratio of 2:1 in terms of the shooting contribution of a forward:defenceman to a line. What I saw in this quick test with defencemen was: 

1 - Baseline shooting: 184 SHO
2 - Removing D with 172 shooting attribute: 169 SHO
3 - Removing D with 166 shooting attribute: 171 SHO*
4 - Removing D with 172 and 166 shooting attributes: 159 SHO (86% of baseline)

I then removed forwards one by one. The results are listed below:

5 - Removing LW with 388 shooting attribute: 126 SHO*
6 - Removing RW with 315 shooting attribute: 137 SHO
7 - Removing C with 370 shooting attribute: 131 SHO
8 - Removing LW,C,RW with (388,315,370) shooting attributes: 29 SHO

* Players of low chemistry.

To test point 8 I used the two low-OR players I had plus a 6 OFF and SHO goalie (who actually had a shot that game!). The difference between points 1 and 4 is the shooting rating courtesy of the defencemen (25). This should, in theory, equal that of point 8. The few point difference (29 versus 25) can be attributed to the >1 OFF/TEC/PAS for the goalie I had at center and his high chem and exp. So, it is safe to say, that the defencemen contribute around 14% of the line's shooting strength, or thereabouts. That leaves 86% coming from forwards which, if spread evenly, is 28% each (or double the total of both Dmen).

I have plans to nail this down but to do so chem and exp will need to be kept constant/equal. I'll save this for a later publication as it will take a lot of time and effort to undertake.

 

One last experiment I wish to discuss is that of playing someone on their wrong side. That is, playing a player with PrS-R on the left side or PrS-L on the right side. We know that a player like Dan contributes 0 to the defensive rating and defencemen don't impact the offensive rating. So, if I have a PrS-R defenceman playing on the right and then on the left, paired with Dan, we can tease out the penalty based on the line's defensive through the rating drop. Consider the data below. Note, variants in shooting and offensive rating due to a difference in energy; the wrong side data was taken much earlier when the line had higher energy.

Playing on his preferred side: D-108, O-226, S-197, C-74
Playing on his wrong side: D-91, O-228, S-199, C-74

The dip from 108 Def to 91 is 16%. However, given an energy drop of 1 and a penalty of roughly 1% (from Off and Sho deltas) it is safe to say the penalty for playing on the wrong side is 15%, a nice round number. Keep in mind, prefered side penalties only are applied 5-on-5 and are not relevant on PP and PK.

 

I'd like to thank Dan and his buddy for letting this experiment be completed. However, since they're combined salary of 22/day tacks much more onto my expenses due to the excess player fees (you're welcome PPM folks!), I must go all Donald Trump on you: "you're fired!" Be sure to take advantage of Canada's free health care. Though, I doubt "PPM-0/6-CL-itis" is curable. There are rumours that it is possible but it requires a smile from Tuttle and a hair off Vlady's head. While they both are difficult to obtain, it is the later that may be the stumbling point ;). Okay, perhaps I may have photoshopped the picture linked via Vlady's name just a bit. Okay, more than just a bit... he's a good sport for allowing me to do so.