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Score and venue adjustments

One of the more interesting parts about hockey is that the losing team gets the puck more frequently - a team with a lead plays more defensively, while teams who are trailing will press more offensively, generating an outsize number of changes.1 The dynamic differs whether the team is at home or on the road, with the home team generating chances at a higher rate whether leading or trailing.2 3 The methodology for the score and venue adjustments included with chickenstats is employed by both Evolving-Hockey and HockeyViz, which is itself an improvement on an earlier methodology proposed by Eric Tulsky, who is now the GM of the Carolina Hurricanes.

Score and venue impacts offense

Methodology for adjustments

Adjustment coefficients

  1. See, e.g., Evolving-Hockey (glossary on score / venue effects / adjustments), Hockey Viz (more on Micah's methodology below), Yahoo Sports. It's possible that the chances generated by the losing team, although higher volume, are of generally lower quality, but that requires further research ↩

  2. Again, see, e.g., Evolving-Hockey (glossary on score / venue effects / adjustments), HockeyViz (more on Micah's methodology below), Yahoo Sports. ↩

  3. I vividly remember the twins at EH writing that teams' scorekeepers generally overstate scoring chance quality when at home (i.e., chart the puck closer to the net, on average), however I can't find this on the site anywhere. It would be very tempting to recreate the research... ↩