Guess I should start with an introduction.

I’m Eddy Tabone, and as my tweet said after Chad announced I would be joining Expected Buffalo, I can’t skate. My hockey playing experience starts and ends with two years of instructional floor hockey at the ages of five and six. Around that time, I went ice skating (at the then-HSBC Arena, conveniently enough), didn’t enjoy myself, and concluded I’d be better served with basketball or baseball. So I didn’t “play the game”, but I have watch(ed) the game as much as you probably have.

I’m a data analyst full time in business risk in addition to the work I’ve done on the sports analytics side, but since the business risk is less interesting, let’s stick to the sports side. In April, I’ll be starting year four doing analytics work in the National Lacrosse League. You can learn more about how we (we being Rob Weber. Follow him on Twitter too @rweber44) established the first analytics department in the league for the Rochester Knighthawks here with our talk at RIT’s Sports Analytics Conference last year. 

Entering year four in the NLL, we will be serving multiple teams in the league under our newly established business, First Line Sports Analytics, where we are operating as a consulting service for sports teams and players on the business side, and on the public side, we are aiming to serve as a public forum for people to promote their public sports analytics research. So, shameless plug, if you have produced some sports analytics research without a hub to promote it, contact us through our website!

Alright, that’s out of the way. Let’s talk hockey.

The NHL returns on January 13! But before we get too far into 2021 season outlooks, I wanted my first contribution to Expected Buffalo to be centered around the takeaways I had from 2020.

Let’s begin with the Sabres *sigh*

1. Once again, inaction was the final straw

While criticism was warranted for trading a first-round pick for a goalie and a disappointing start to Kyle Okposo’s tenure with the Sabres, Tim Murray made his final NHL acquisition for the 2016-17 Sabres on July 2, striking out at the trade deadline as the team finished with five fewer standings points than they did the year before, losing eight of 10 games between February 19 and March 16 on their way to last place in the Atlantic. 

Fast forward to the end of the 2018-19 season, where the team’s leverage after their 10-game win streak slowly started to fade away until falling off a cliff to a tune of a two-win in 16 games March. In the 23 games in January and February, the Sabres won eight games, and the roster left virtually unaltered.

Then headed into the 2019-20 season, the only player to be told they were not good enough to remain in the organization was Alex Nylander. Botterill bet on a franchise turnaround centered around a coaching change, and not only lost but didn’t even make it to March.

Would Wayne Simmonds and Dominik Kahun have boosted the Sabres into the top eight in the East? Probably not. So while the COVID shutdown may have increased the incentive for relieving Botterill of his duties, the inaction of the previous summer produced 68 points in 69 games: Close to, but just short of the 81 points that the 2015-16 Sabres finished with.

Kevyn Adams may not have previous experience as an NHL GM, but in his time in the organization, he’s now seen that on the last two occasions, stagnancy does not mean job security.

2. Square one…and a half?

The hockey operations department has been shredded down to the basics in 2020, a sign that despite nine straight seasons without a playoff berth, the Sabres (again) are going back to square one. Or are they?

Scoffing at the three E slogan is probably deserved, but for Kevyn Adams, he has no choice but to work efficiently and do more with less. If the two biggest needs for the Sabres were a true number two center and another primary scoring source, he found both in Staal and Hall. 

So while there is still a surplus of replacement level defensemen, a goaltending room that has been underwhelming each of the last two seasons, and limited prospect reinforcement options for the upcoming season, Adams is doing what he can to ensure that the Sabres don’t need to get worse in order to get better with the top-heaviness of their current core.

The State of Hockey Analytics

3. The year of the power kill

At the Columbus Blue Jackets’ Hockey Analytics Conference, Alison Lukhan and Meghan Hall presented on the Power Kill, the concept of measuring the aggressiveness of a penalty kill based on their possession and offensive production. The presentation showed a trend over the past seven seasons that penalty-killing teams are producing an increasing percentage of the shot share in traditional power play situations (5 on 4). This rise has also aligned with an increasing amount of time that teams are using four forward penalty kill units and an increased focus on transition prevention when shorthanded.

We didn’t have too many opportunities for analytics conferences in 2020, but I can confidently come away from this year assigning the power kill as this year’s signature takeaway in the analytics community. The next steps will be to see which teams start the 2021 season embracing a more aggressive penalty kill (cc: Ralph).

4. Okay, NOW the tracking is implemented

With an introduction of player speed measurements and coordinate detection of the players on the ice into the NBC broadcasts of the summer bubble, we can finally be assured that the NHL’s Sportlogiq partnership is near the finish line of its implementation of tracking data. Now that we know it “officially” exists, we can head into 2021 asking the important question: Will it be available to the public? (Okay fine it’s more interesting how teams use it)

With the NFL as a reference, implementing tracking data at the team level will take years to fully extract every usage possibility. I’ll have more on this in the new year, but one thing that is certain is that once teams are able to familiarize themselves with the structure of the data and start training the software to recognize the intricacies of hockey, there will be a lot more time for analysts to hypothesize potential new advantages and get answers more quickly.

5. Seattle is NOT messing around

We’re still seven months away from the Seattle Kraken having rostered players, but Director of Hockey Administration, Alex Mandrycky, has assembled an analytics “roster” that would be able to compete with any other in the league, adding Dani Chu, who interned in the NBA and NFL while still in undergrad, in January and Namita Nandakumar, who spent two seasons with the Philadelphia Eagles as a quantitative analyst, in March. This hockey research department has what every analytics department in sports has wished they could have more of: time. Almost two full seasons of data collection and reporting to prepare to select a full roster in July and two full offseasons of collaborating with the team’s growing scouting department and front office to brainstorm any advantage they can find in their attempt to mirror the immediate success their older expansion cousin in Las Vegas had back in 2018.

Five Rapid Fire Grab Bag Takeaways

Takeaway 6 – Bubble take A: Kudos to the Lightning for not panicking after their 128 point season in 2018-19 was overshadowed by being swept in the first round. Was it easy to be patient with their advantageous salary cap? Of course, but when the collapse is that polarizing, it takes a self-aware organization to understand that running it back was their best option in 2020. 

Takeaway 7 – Bubble take B: Montreal beating Pittsburgh was funny, but more upsets water down the product in later rounds, so if there’s ever a five-game play-in round again in the future, keep it to the eight-seed.

Takeaway 8: Adidas’s success with NBA jerseys has carried over to the NHL with the reverse retro set. We’ll just tuck the Red Wings jersey to the side with the 2014-15 NBA Christmas Day jerseys. 

Takeaway 9: The 2021 Sabres need to take a note from their sibling in Orchard Park: If you want to win, outscore your opponent. The defense is (contextually) overrated. (Go Bills)

Takeaway 10: EBUG…lol

Thanks for reading my first article! If you have any questions on my background or have some sports analytics research that you would like the public to see on First Line, don’t be shy!