One of the things I like to keep an eye on is how defencemen are being matched up against opposing forwards. While there’s a debate about the extent to which that matters, when you look at the data it’s pretty obvious that coaches believe in it. There a million ways to do this but the approach that I like to take involves classifying opposition lines based on who the coach likes to use. In order to do this, I’ve simply classified the forward with the highest average time on ice for the season as the first line. I eliminate him and his two most common linemates in that game from the data and then classify the forward with the second highest average time on ice from the remaining nine as my proxy for the second line. Everything else is bottom six minutes.



What this does is let us look at ice time profiles for a team’s defencemen. Defence is a position where reputations sometimes last longer than a coach’s faith in a player. Looking at things like...