I'd like to ask for the help of the Oilers fans on this board for a project I'm working on: assigning errors to the major culprits on goals scored against the Oilers.
Every game the Oilers play, I look at the even strength and shorthanded goals scored against the Oilers and assign errors to the Oilers who are most responsible for the goal against.
Just as there are three points awarded when the Oilers score a goal (one goal, two assists), I've been assigning as many as three errors per goal against.
Awarding assists for a goal scored is a mechanical process, with assists going to the last two teammates who touched the puck. But assigning errors is more of an art form. It's open to debate, interpretation, and that's why I need your help.
When I assign an error, I look for the goalie who gives up a juicy rebound or muffs a shot that a good goalie would stop, the defender who doesn't check hard enough or fails to clear the puck, the forward who fails to backcheck, the players who are badly out of position, that kind of thing.
I try to assign as many errors for goals against as there are points for a goal scored, so most goals against will have two or three errors assigned.
The only way for me to know, though, that I'm assigning errors in a reasonable manner is to have other people look at goals against the Oilers, assign errors themselves, then check them with my findings to see if we concur.
What I'd like to do then is ask for your help in his matter. For instance, in last night's game, I assigned errors to Hemsky and Staios on the first Phoenix goal, and to Grebeshkov, Stoll and Garon on the second goal.
But do you see it the same as I did?
Who would you assign errors to?
If you want to post on this, please assign your errors and briefly explain your decision. I will study the results and if I'm convinced that I'm wrong on my assigning of errors, I'll change my assignments.
So far, I've looked at all 45 Oilers games and assigned errors. Roloson, Smid and Staios lead the team in errors, with Reasoner being the forward who has committed the most errors.
P.S. If you're interested in this subject, I've written about it at length in several posts on my own blog in the past month.
Cheers, David Staples, The Cult of Hockey at the Edmonton Journal.
i think for the 1st goal you could give one to both staois and tarnstrom.... moreso tarnstrom though, as he made a few mistakes on the goal.... he was covering staois' side of the net, he got caught looking at the puck and he let his man sneak in behind him for the goal.... im not sure anybody should get an error on the 2nd goal, as it was kinda strange goal... i suppose you could give an error to whomever was supposed to be covering boynton, and didnt tie up his stick? but thats being kinda nit-picky.... in all honesty, as good as garon played last night, id give him the error before anybody else on the 2nd goal
I'd like to ask for the help of the Oilers fans on this board for a project I'm working on: assigning errors to the major culprits on goals scored against the Oilers.
Every game the Oilers play, I look at the even strength and shorthanded goals scored against the Oilers and assign errors to the Oilers who are most responsible for the goal against.
Just as there are three points awarded when the Oilers score a goal (one goal, two assists), I've been assigning as many as three errors per goal against.
Awarding assists for a goal scored is a mechanical process, with assists going to the last two teammates who touched the puck. But assigning errors is more of an art form. It's open to debate, interpretation, and that's why I need your help.
When I assign an error, I look for the goalie who gives up a juicy rebound or muffs a shot that a good goalie would stop, the defender who doesn't check hard enough or fails to clear the puck, the forward who fails to backcheck, the players who are badly out of position, that kind of thing.
I try to assign as many errors for goals against as there are points for a goal scored, so most goals against will have two or three errors assigned.
The only way for me to know, though, that I'm assigning errors in a reasonable manner is to have other people look at goals against the Oilers, assign errors themselves, then check them with my findings to see if we concur.
What I'd like to do then is ask for your help in his matter. For instance, in last night's game, I assigned errors to Hemsky and Staios on the first Phoenix goal, and to Grebeshkov, Stoll and Garon on the second goal.
But do you see it the same as I did?
Who would you assign errors to?
If you want to post on this, please assign your errors and briefly explain your decision. I will study the results and if I'm convinced that I'm wrong on my assigning of errors, I'll change my assignments.
So far, I've looked at all 45 Oilers games and assigned errors. Roloson, Smid and Staios lead the team in errors, with Reasoner being the forward who has committed the most errors.
P.S. If you're interested in this subject, I've written about it at length in several posts on my own blog in the past month.
Cheers, David Staples, The Cult of Hockey at the Edmonton Journal.
I was going to try to do something similar, also including scoring chances and (specifically) blown chances but thats a little unreasonable when you're there to watch the game and don't have access to all the footage afterwards as well as not getting paid for that type of stuff. Its a difficult process and a big problem is that its all judgment calls.
Are there always "at faults"? Did the shift before actually have more to do with scoring the goal than some of the guys on the ice did? etc. I applaud your efforts but it will be tough to reach conclusion.
One of my favorite examples: When a player makes a bad pass but a goalie should make the save, I don't think the player should be faulted really, especially if its obvious the play he was trying to make and the opposition made a good play themselves to counter the effort.
i think for the 1st goal you could give one to both staois and tarnstrom.... moreso tarnstrom though, as he made a few mistakes on the goal.... he was covering staois' side of the net, he got caught looking at the puck and he let his man sneak in behind him for the goal.... im not sure anybody should get an error on the 2nd goal, as it was kinda strange goal... i suppose you could give an error to whomever was supposed to be covering boynton, and didnt tie up his stick? but thats being kinda nit-picky.... in all honesty, as good as garon played last night, id give him the error before anybody else on the 2nd goal
How does Ales Hemsky not get an error on the first goal? He turned the puck over in a horrible area.
I was thinking the same thing as Smytty Heart. I don't mind the idea as long as there is an allowance that sometimes the opposing team just executes really well.
If you want to keep a level of integrity to a pretty useful idea, i would suggest you spend a bit of time recruiting a group of people that you consider knowledgable and reliable.
Asking for opinions on a messageboard, not only HF... but yes especially HF, where it is a community with known personalities/conflicts and predispositions on many topics/players you likely may see more trends on popular opinion than an objective view.
Finally, knowing positioning, rotations, etc isn't a casual fans field. You might want some people with coaching, or indepth knowledge of the game that you can trust to make your effort worth while.
It could be an interesting metric to review if you pull the reigns in a little on it.
Might be better for your popularity and readership though if you include the masses as you are doing
Why not also detail the positive? Typical Oiler fan negativity, yet again. You could track which wingers successfully clear the zone when the pucks comes around the boards, which center is getting back deep into his own zone to help the defence, who is making the heads up plays, who is covering for the D on the point when they go in deep, who is providing the distraction in and around the net which allows others to score goals, etc. etc.. Think outside the typical Oiler fan box, please. Objectivity means seeing both positive and negative, something that is sorely lacking on this board.
If you want to keep a level of integrity to a pretty useful idea, i would suggest you spend a bit of time recruiting a group of people that you consider knowledgable and reliable.
Asking for opinions on a messageboard, not only HF... but yes especially HF, where it is a community with known personalities/conflicts and predispositions on many topics/players you likely may see more trends on popular opinion than an objective view.
Finally, knowing positioning, rotations, etc isn't a casual fans field. You might want some people with coaching, or indepth knowledge of the game that you can trust to make your effort worth while.
It could be an interesting metric to review if you pull the reigns in a little on it.
Might be better for your popularity and readership though if you include the masses as you are doing
Funny enough, likely most of the people who post here could agree on one or two guys who made a mistake on a play.
Its just interpreting what those mistakes menas thats a problem.
For instance.
Hemsky, carrys the puck alot in offencive zone = high giveawy rate.
If a stay at home defenceman had the same give away rate, that would be a worse thing.
The second goal last night was definitly Garons fault. It was a routine saved and he muffed it. I find it pretty harsh to blame anyone other then him for an error that was blantly his.
For the record before I get crusified here Garon has been amazing and playing great. I am not saying he should be traded, benched, or put on waivers. But he does make a mistake from time to time.
The second goal last night was definitly Garons fault. It was a routine saved and he muffed it. I find it pretty harsh to blame anyone other then him for an error that was blantly his.
For the record before I get crusified here Garon has been amazing and playing great. I am not saying he should be traded, benched, or put on waivers. But he does make a mistake from time to time.
Besides that I think this is a good idea.
All goalies make mistakes from time to time.
Cue Luongo's little soccer practice against the NYI.
Guys and gals, there's a good way to review the goals against.
If you want to watch videotape go to NHL.com, go to "schedule," find the Oilers/Phoenix game, and you can watch footage of the two goals against. I usually watch a goal about ten times before I'm sure of the errors I assign.
Why not also detail the positive? Typical Oiler fan negativity, yet again. You could track which wingers successfully clear the zone when the pucks comes around the boards, which center is getting back deep into his own zone to help the defence, who is making the heads up plays, who is covering for the D on the point when they go in deep, who is providing the distraction in and around the net which allows others to score goals, etc. etc.. Think outside the typical Oiler fan box, please. Objectivity means seeing both positive and negative, something that is sorely lacking on this board.
+1
I completely agree! There are times when I avoid this site because I'd rather not be fed only negatives about the Oilers and their play. I don't want to only dwell on the positives, but I'd like to see some of them once in awhile. Even when we lose, there are usually positives. Now I know someone with a skewed negative attitude is reading this and thinking: "I'm just being a realist" - to that I say realism is recognizing the good and the bad, because it's rarely all of one and none of the other.
If you want to keep a level of integrity to a pretty useful idea, i would suggest you spend a bit of time recruiting a group of people that you consider knowledgable and reliable.
Asking for opinions on a messageboard, not only HF... but yes especially HF, where it is a community with known personalities/conflicts and predispositions on many topics/players you likely may see more trends on popular opinion than an objective view.
Finally, knowing positioning, rotations, etc isn't a casual fans field. You might want some people with coaching, or indepth knowledge of the game that you can trust to make your effort worth while.
It could be an interesting metric to review if you pull the reigns in a little on it.
Might be better for your popularity and readership though if you include the masses as you are doing
I think anybody that comes to this board over any period of time is quite capable of judging for themselves who is watching the games and who is "sitting in the stands winking at the girls".
More to the point of the OP is that what you are doing is far easier to do from the stands than in front of the TV where you are at the mercy of the cameramen and you don't always get to see how the play developed. Or where you are in the stands and don't see the closeup or slo mo replay that allows you to see if the goalie should have had it. From the stands last night I didn't think Garon blew the 2nd goal - it looked like a good shot from where I was sitting and the mistake was made about 10 seconds earlier when an Oiler failed to clear it when he had a chance. Without a replay I don't know who that player was because I followed the puck rather than picking up the number.
As for the comment, "Why not detail the positive?" well, this stat does that over the long term. I can now tell you who makes the least amount of errors on the Oilers blueline -- Tom Gilbert.
And I can tell you that Garon makes very few errors, a huge positive for a goalie.
So this is a positive stat, depending on how you look at it. It's also a more "positive" stat than plus-minus, I believe, in that you can have nothing to do with a goal against, but can still be awarded a minus, simply because another teammate has made a major error.
Now, as I said, I've already assigned errors for the Phoenix game, and here is what I was thinking, as I posted at my blog . . .
Phoenix scored two even strength goals against the Oilers.
On the first goal by Keith Ballard, Hemsky made two critical errors. First, he lost the puck along the boards to the pinching Ballard, then he failed to track Ballard to the net, leaving him open in the slot. Instead, Hemsky tried to help out Steve Staios, who failed to contain Shane Doan. Doan got the puck out front, and Ballard slammed in the goal. No chance for Mathieu Garon on the play, or for Dick Tarnstrom, who was left covering two Coyotes in front of the net because of Hemsky's gaffe.
So errors go to Hemsky (who has four errors on the season now) and Staios (15 errors).
On the second goal, Denis Grebeshkov is a little soft on his check in the corner, Jarret Stoll (pictured) is a little soft on the shooter Nick Boynton and Garon was soft on the goal. So errors to all three, Grebeshkov (14 errors), Stoll (5 errors) and Garon (12 errors).
Interesting topic, and dangerous. I'll keep my eyes open against Calgary on Sunday
Must someone get faulted on every single goal? sometimes its just a great shot from the point that is tipped perfectly etc.
Yes, someone must be at fault on every goal. At least that is how I see things now, and I haven't yet seen a goal where I can't find someone who makes an error.
My aim is to have this stat be the mirror image of the "point" stat. So just as there is always a goal scorer, even when the puck is inadvertently kicked into the net, there will always be someone assigned the error, most likely the guy who should have been checking the goalscorer.
Now, you can say a defender did everything perfectly, but the attacker still made the perfect play to get off the perfect shot to score. But I haven't seen an even strength goal against the Oil that fits this category yet. If I do see one, maybe I'll agree that on some goals no error should be assigned.
When I assign errors, I include the nitpicky mistakes, and I think this is reasonable. We all know that not all goals and assists are created equally. Some goals are brilliant, others go in off a guys butt. But they are all counted as "goals." The same goes with "errors."
Of course, each stat has it's strong points and weak points. My thinking on this is that the "error" is a better way to look for defensive mistakes than the "minus," as players can get a minus who have done nothing wrong on the ice.
