I absolutely love hockey. Growing up in Northern California where the nearest team was 2.5 hours away, I wasn’t always a huge fan, but I picked up following the sport during the Winter Olympics in 2010. The rivalry between the USA and Canada in that tournament was amazing and there were quite a few players on the local NHL team playing for one of the two countries so it was easy to transition. Now I live, breathe, and play hockey—which is weird because I never actually started playing until I lived in New Zealand…where most people are surprised to hear hockey even exists.

I first moved to Wellington were there aren’t any rinks. To address this critical obstacle, I began playing a bastardised version of hockey called floorball (or innebandy, or salibandy, or unihoc). I started a team called Dragons & Lasers (PewPew ROAR!) and we mostly pretended we were playing actual hockey. We even caught ourselves calling the floorball court a “rink” and telling each other to get off the “ice” for a line change. During this time, our player-coach, “Oso,” taught me the ins and outs of how to be a good goalie.

Now I live in Auckland where there are two ice rinks and I get to play hockey every week! The problem is, my team keeps losing. We are really good at keeping the puck out of our own net, but we can’t manage to score on other teams. So, what happens? We keep ending up with heartbreaking scorelines of 0-1, 1-2, and 2-3.

I visited Oso last year to help nurse him to health after a surgery. While we binged on old NHL footage, I asked him for advice on my team’s scoring problem. I had a bit of footage from a recent game so I put it on the big screen. He didn’t have to watch long before he identified what he thought was our most fatal flaw. We were terrible at moving from our own defensive zone past the middle of the ice while retaining the puck. Our defensemen would often simply put the puck into open space and hope a forward was near enough to get it before the other team.

That observation sparked a bit of curiosity. It seemed strange that an event that often began deep in our own defensive zone could be the key to solving our offensive woes. But, then again, if we could get some momentum heading down the ice, we could be more likely to score on transition than if we have to slog our way down to the opposing net. It was an interesting hypothesis.

So, we decided to test to see if his theory applies beyond beer-league hockey. Oso and I spent the next few months coming up with an operational definition for what exactly we were watching for and deciding how to measure how many attempts each team makes throughout a game. The resulting statistic became known as the “Francoso” percentage. We had to name it after ourselves because Corsi and Fenwick got to do it, so why not us? Who knows, maybe we’ll moneypuck the NHL some day.

Here’s the official definition: After a team gains possession of the puck in their own defensive zone, there are two ways they to begin a Francoso attempt.

The player passes the puck towards a teammate. If the puck subsequently crosses the centre line while still in that team’s possession without being stolen, the attempt is successful. The player with the puck crosses the centre line without passing. If the puck is not stolen before the puck crosses the centre line, the attempt is also successful.

If the attempt has begun, but the puck is intercepted by the opposing team or an “icing” penalty is called, the Francoso attempt is considered unsuccessful. If time runs out or a penalty is called against the team attempting a Francoso, the attempt is also considered unsuccessful.

This definition is a way of quantifying a team’s ability to clear their own defensive zone and transition into offense without the other team hindering their momentum. The research question is, how does Francoso % compare to existing hockey statistics in terms of its ability to predict the outcome of a game?

It takes forever to collect data for this research. Each data point takes about 1 – 1.5 hours to collect because you can only get two per game. So, it’s very important to evaluate whether it’s even worth collecting a sample size large enough to be robust. If Francoso is indeed something worth considering, coaches could use this information to work on their teams’ tactics when transitioning from defense to offense or instruct their forwards to be more aggressive in the first half of the neutral zone to stymie their opponents’ advance.

So here’s this week’s question:

This research is still very much in progress so the results will be far from conclusive, but I’ll post what we have so far in the next installment.

As always, if you want to elaborate on your prediction or if you have anything you’d like to say about this research, feel free to click on the post’s title and scroll down to the comments.