Also historically true of European goalies, where we have a bit of this too. We could count Freddie being drafted twice to really throw a wrench in this.
Like all drafting, there’s a lot of complex moving pieces at play.
Isn’t this also reflected by the fact a vast majority of goalies are taken in the third round or beyond?
This is a great point too.
7 second hockey as a concept is my arch nemesis.
This is the same phenomenon in hockey around turnovers. People said that goals happen more within 5 seconds of a turnover and some people interpreted that as if you create a turnover, you have to take the puck immediately to the net.
Who knew context and nuance may matter.
Agreed.
The idea of her playing with Wynn at the professional level (which means you also have Keller) is laugh out loud funny.
Oh I genuinely believe that Seattle’s -23 goal differential becomes a lot more like -6 to -10 with her on the first pair.
Adding one of, if not the best player, in the world on a team with some skilled shooters and solid goaltending would do wonders.
Barring some weird things where they find themselves being eliminated with 3 games left and going 0-3 to end it. That feels like the ultimate worst case scenario of this season, somehow ending up drafting second or third.
(Second or third will still be selecting wonderful hockey players)
No I think you’re right and largely do agree. I guess their “not eliminated” points situation stems from 5 teams having a negative goal differential.
Big gap from the top 3 to the bottom 5
It’s hard to imagine how much better Seattle would be right this moment if they had Harvey playing 25 minutes a night for them.
Surely it’s a 8-10 goal swing just by herself on that roster.
With an inevitable expansion in the PWHL and Caroline Harvey sitting as the easiest first overall pick in any sport in a long time, really feels like teams are not tanking hard enough.
Wonder how early Seattle would’ve declared themselves out of playoff contention to start Gold points if they could
Altogether, I’m genuinely really surprised to see these results. Score effects are such a well known phenomenon in professional men’s hockey, I assumed they’d have stability.
Ultimately maybe there’s something else going on here, always more to think about and examine.
Teams down 1 is where there’s something interesting happening. This is where we maybe start to see that the leading team is sitting back rather than the trailing team necessarily pushing. Again, I suspect this is influenced by penalty timing (more on this another time).
When teams are down 2, we don’t see the gap in offence that we see at the NHL level. In fact, teams down 2 in the second period are largely content to remain down 2 in the second period.
They do get a little bit of life in the third, but I suspect some of this is penalty timing and the empty net
I don’t have the luxury of having data that has access to the 60 minute game clock, so I have to approximate using bins of percentage time. For now, I’ve split each period into six bins, each roughly equal to 33% of the game event data that I do have.
Overall we see second periods are busier.
Re-reading a @hockeyviz.com article on adjusted possession metrics from 2014 (!!) and more recent work, and running into something I think is interesting.
Score effects may behave differently across levels of sport. Some preliminary work from Canadian women’s college hockey…
Sometimes it hurts my brain to remind myself that an “average” NHL player is a really good NHL player, even if being average is defined as them contributing less than a league average amount of points.
Amongst other things useful players do.
I’m going to simulate and impute the missing information for the season, but it doesn’t really feel good to do that. With small samples and decent amounts of variance, taking a point estimate feels bad in some ways, but an incomplete data set somehow feels worse. Much to think about.
The 2025-2026 OUA women’s hockey season is over, and my data tracking is complete. With one complete missing game (sad), and parts of four other games missing, we end up with a 180.37/182 game coverage.
A lot of hockey watched and tracked, and some sadness for goalies towards the end of the season.
Had the privilege to (briefly) coach Kaitlyn last year at the World University Games. She’s an excellent goaltender (and person) who more than deserves this opportunity.
The PWHL has announced the games at TD Garden (BOS) and Madison Square Garden (NY) have sold out.
Ticket sales indicated this was coming anyway, but the post-Olympics boom is REAL.
Add this to both Clarkson’s first years Sara and Kate Manness being first team ECAC players and everyone saying Canadian women’s hockey is doomed can breathe a little.
The current Canadian hockey system will continue to create lots of top tier players.
People slowly start standing up chanting “meat wall, meat wall”
I re read your exact article today as I was thinking/working/failing.
There’s maybe an argument to take the X% of league average? Given the much bigger disparity in college hockey than professional hockey, some teams would have wild profiles but that maybe is the best starting block.
Tagging much smarter folks because I’m having a much tougher time justifying a 13F/7D cutoff type approach and replacement level maybe has an entirely different value in a non-trading or signing system
@evolvingwild.evolving-hockey.com
@hockeyviz.com
@quarkyhockey.bsky.social
Working on a new component for some of my modelling work in college hockey around “replacement level” players.
Given mostly fixed roster properties (e.g teams may not carry more than 8 D), do we think replacement level and its underlying theory is applicable in college hockey as currently used?
I think u18s next year will be really fun. A lot of really great Canadian 09s who didn’t make this year’s team, which admittedly, was also very good.
It’s always more fun to dream and project on the future right?
I do think maybe the absence of both Cooper and Gosling on D in that age range is notable.
But as we’ve talked about, the Canadian 06s and 07s are really great, and truthfully the 08s and 09s might even be better.
This is true, the American team rocks and is super young.
Now everyone go look at the freshman and sophomore scoring leaders in the NCAA. Canada will be more than fine into the next quad.
Putting this out there so I can revisit this in the future but if the 2026 PWHL draft deviates from this order I will be disappointed.
1. Harvey
2. Murphy
3. Edwards
4. Janecke
5. Simms
I will allow (and would encourage) a team needing center depth to take Janecke at 3.
It takes somewhere between 50-60 point shot attempts in womens hockey to result in a goal (tips and screens included), and this game seemingly finally hit the 60 mark for that goal