NHL Hockey: Concentrate on Winning the Second Half

As Bear Bryant once famously said, "Don't give up at halftime, concentrate on winning the second half." And that's pretty much all that hockey players and fans can do at this point. With only 48 games to play in the season left from the lockout, the NHL teams have half the time to work for that three and a half foot trophy that is the oldest in North American sports; The Stanley Cup.

The Blackhawks defeated the reigning Stanley Cup Champions

26 teams played today, for a total of 13 games sure to keep most (if not all) hockey fans content with their lives.

Games included:

NJ-NYI 2-1
PIT-PHI 3-1
COL-MIN 2-4
OTT-WPG 4-1
CHI-LA 5-2
NYR-BOS 1-3
TOR-MTL 2-1
WSH-TB 3-6
CAR-FLA 1-5
DET-STL 0-6
CBJ-NSH 3-2
PHX-DAL 3-4
ANA-VAN 7-3

Aging Martin Brodeur picked up a key win in today's game versus the Islanders

Now anyone who even knows a moderate amount notices that some of those scores are not what is normally predictable. St. Louis shutting out Detroit? Toronto beating Montreal? Anaheim crushing Vancouver? And these are not pre-season games, sparing fans the pain of how terrible their 3rd and 4th lines are. These are the big games, with the starting lineups.

With the depart of Nicklas Lidstrom, Detroit was still expected to be a superior performance in this season, while the New Jersey Devils were expected to fall with the elderly Martin Brodeur in the crease. Pittsburgh defeated Philadelphia with the return of Wunderkid Sidney Crosby. Philadelphia appears to still have some goaltending problems in the way of Ilya Bryzgalov.

Detroit suffered a surprising shut out versus St. Louis; conference rivals

In perhaps the biggest upset of the day, the Chicago Blackhawks defeated the reigning Stanley Cup Champions, the Los Angeles Kings, possibly showing their prowess to obtain the Cup once again in the 2000s. Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, as well as Marian Hossa and goalie Corey Crawford showed true teamwork and offensive talent, enough to take on the league for the remainder of the 47 games.

Once again, the favorites to win the Cup include San Jose, Vancouver, Tampa Bay, Pittsburgh and Boston. The West could come away with the trophy again, but as everyone knows, game 1 is far to early to be making predictions, regardless of the lack of games.

It's a Great Day for Hockey.

Do Goalies have to keep with the trend of Bigger and Badder in today's NHL setting?

It's been an avenue of speculation for years, since the 1980s of small, fast players seems to be coming quickly to an end. Especially with the draft on its way, and every radio, talk show, podcast, NHL station pondering, does an organization need a giant in between the pipes to ensure victory?

Well, if the facts are assembled, goalies in the NHL don't really deviate from 74 inches (or 6'2") so it can be hard to imagine. Only one goalie under 6" is in the top 10 of the NHL and at 5'11" that man is Tim Thomas. Only two others break the top 30 of wins and they are also slightly away from 6" at 5'11"; Jaroslav Halak and Jose Theodore. 

With the top goalie for the regular 2012 season being an enormous 6'5" it's no wonder GMs and Coaches yearn for a tall, thick goaltender between the pipes. But, what happens when you bring statistics into the game? Does it level the playing field for shorter, less physically intimidating goaltenders? Or, does it just reenforce what experts have been saying for the last 15 years? 

When data is gathered, taking into account the top 60 goaltenders in the NHL, and ranking them by their Wins divided by their Games Played (so W/Gp) you get a pretty even spread of guys from 5'10" to 6'6". It seems like a stretch, but out of 60 people, a deviation of only about 1 and a half inch on average isn't too shabby. Then, cut that list in half, and have your "top 30 goalies" and your "bottom 30 goalies". That way, we can test if height really does matter, or, if it's just a speculation with no math to back it up. 

I converted height to inches, just for the sake of testing. The top 30 goalies averaged 73.8 inches, or about 6'1.8" and the bottom goalies were around 73.6 inches, or around 6'1.6". On paper there is a difference, but is that .2 of an inch significant enough to say that goalies need to be taller in order to perform better?

I ran the data in two separate lists through a 2-sample T-test. This uses the mean, standard deviation and degrees of freedom to determine if goalies over 6" are better at their job. The data was as follows:

 

where t = .475

and p = .318

Now, I won't bore you with tedious details, but interpreting this basically means that goalies DO perform better when they are above the height 6". Now, as anyone who knows anything about statistics will know, there are a number of things wrong that we can't COMPLETELY trust these results. 

For one, I only used the top 60 goaltenders in the NHL. So the results can only account for the goaltenders in this league. Secondly, it's obvious this belief has been held in the NHL for a very long time, therefore the average height of 6'2" says something. Organizations aren't thinking just now that they need to draft bigger goaltenders. It's been happening for a while. Thirdly, to really hit a point home, the data for all goaltenders drafted in 2012 would have to be used in comparison to the NHL goaltenders.

However, for now, it seems as if the bigger the goalie, the more the team wins.