Earlier this summer Oakland Athletics' General Manager Billy Beane wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal on the future of sports and how technology and advances in analytics will affect it. Here's one part I really like:

The current modus operandi of building rosters to maximize the sum of individual talent also will be challenged; data compiled using new technologies will enable management to assemble players in new ways, emphasizing their ability to complement one another. Whereas current metrics describe players' performance in isolation, front offices will increasingly rely on statistics that measure a player's value in the context of the rest of the team, picking up externalities such as how a player's defensive abilities may compensate for the deficiencies of those playing around him.

I wanted to take a look at the Flyers below the surface, and try to find out exactly which players are good at what aspects of the game. Obviously there are many many things to consider when going about this, but to start off I wanted to focus on puck possession as seen through shot attempt differential since it has been shown to be a good predictor of future goals and wins. Here are a few links if you want to read about that:

http://objectivenhl.blogspot.ca/2011/03/loose-ends-part-i-predictive-validity.html

http://www.broadstreethockey.com/2013/3/13/4099158/kangzzz

For puck possession at the player level, we typically look at CorsiFor%, which is an overall measure of on-ice shot attempts (goals + shots + missed shots + blocked shots) for the team versus on-ice shot attempts against the team. It can be broken down into components CorsiFor and CorsiAgainst to help get a better understanding of how each player is impacting the two parts of shot attempts: generation and suppression.

Forwards

Let's look at a player usage chart for the Flyers forwards in 2013-2014 to see how they were deployed.

Here you can see Giroux and Voracek with pretty heavy offensive zone starts against good competition, Couturier and Read with pretty heavy defensive zone starts against good competition, and Brayden Schenn and Simmonds with heavy offensive zone starts against weak competition. One of the issues with the Flyers roster the way it was deployed in 2013-2014 was the Schenn line needing sheltered usage, along with the the Giroux line getting a lion share of offensive zone starts, left the duo of Couturier and Read buried under quite difficult 42% zone starts. Perhaps there is a better way to deploy the Flyers roster in 2014-2015 so that the team is more balanced and more effective at even strength and would rely less on the power play to score goals and win games.

Now let's look at a player comparison (of 2013-2014 season numbers) with the players most likely to make up the Flyers top nine forward group in 2014-2015. First I sorted it by CF/60 (shot attempts generated for the team per 60 minutes of ice time)

Not much of a surprise who is at the top of the list, or how this list bares itself out through the rest of the lineup. Wayne Simmonds is a bit higher than I had expected he would be.

Compare that list with this one sorted by CA/60 (shot attempts against the team per 60 minutes of ice time)

At the top of the list is Michael Raffl, showing he's an excellent shot suppressor, and if you look for him in the CF/60 list, you can see that he's pretty good at generating shots as well. His results across the board show a player that should get a lot more ice time. He should find a spot in the top 6.

Looking at the bottom of this CA/60 list you see Brayden Schenn, Wayne Simmonds, and Vincent Lecavalier, basically showing why those three needed so much sheltering with offensive zone starts (leaving Couturier and Read buried in the defensive zone). Those three should never ever be a line. They are all bad at preventing shot attempts against. Wayne Simmonds is fairly high up on the CF/60 list. The team would benefit from putting him with some players who are stronger at shot suppression and maybe a bit weaker at generation, like Couturier and Read. A line of Read - Couturier - Simmonds would probably work pretty well if you put Raffl with Giroux and Voracek and then split the zone starts between those two groups so that the second line in this scenario would get closer to 50% zone starts.

Something else to consider is how Quality of Teammate issues affect these numbers. We can look at the data in the following chart and see how each player performed in CF and CA relative to their on-ice teammates. This can be seen by comparing individual performances with TMCF and TMCA, which are averages of all teammates weighted by time spent on ice together. If a player outperformed their teammates in either suppression or generation, it's fairly safe to say that's a skill they have relative to the rest of their current team, which is a structure we're working inside of here with the end goal of deploying the team in the best way possible.

Here we can see that, as to be expected, both Giroux and Voracek did very well in CF20 and CA20 (which, here on this chart, is CorsiFor and CorsiAgainst presented by 20 minute segments of ice time instead of 60), with Voracek doing better in each category.

Raffl did very well in both CF20 and CA20.

Matt Read performed well in CA20, while doing slightly worse in CF20. Sean Couturier underperformed his teammates just a little bit in both categories. Some of this can be explained by those 42% zone starts. A possible explanation for Couturier underperforming Read (by just a little bit) could be in the Quality of Teammates Couturier had during the 7 games Read missed due to injury. There were a couple of games he was with Lecavalier and McGinn.

Wayne Simmonds performed very well in CF20, but did quite poorly in CA20.

Brayden Schenn underperformed in both CF20 and C20, and Lecavalier was kind of a disaster in each.

Line Combinations

Keeping all of this in mind, there is another option for line combinations that would perhaps be a bit more unconventional, but I think could work. That would be the idea of splitting up Giroux/Voracek and Couturier/Read and making these lines:

Read - Giroux - Simmonds

Raffl - Couturier - Voracek

This gives you balance across all your top six forwards. On the first line you have Giroux, who is very good at shot generation and pretty good at suppression, playing with Read, who is highly skilled, has a great shot, and excels at shot suppression, and Simmonds who is particularly good around the net and does well at shot generation but not so much suppression.

On the second line you have Couturier, who has a good all around game, but does better at shot suppression, with Voracek who is just fantastic at both aspects of possession, and Raffl who is very good at shot suppression and also pretty good at generation.

You can take these two lines and split the usage between them so that both get around 50% zone starts, which would give Couturier and Read the much needed relief from playing so much in the defensive zone.

This basically leaves a third line of something like Umberger - B Schenn - Akeson, which you would still be able to shelter decently with sufficient offensive zone starts. Lecavalier is quite bad at both shot generation and suppression, so it would probably be best to play him on the fourth line (and give him power play time) simply because it would limit the overall amount of time he is on the ice at even strength.

Quick Note on Giroux, Couturier, and Zone Starts

We saw earlier how Giroux received fairly heavy offensive zone starts last season (54.8%), while Couturier got very heavy defensive zone starts (41.8%). Could Claude Giroux handle more defensive zone starts? The evidence says absolutely he can and has. Looking at the past four years, only in 2013-2014 did Giroux receive zone starts above 50%. In each of the three years prior, he started more often in the defensive zone than the offensive zone. Here's how he fared in those conditions:

This clearly shows that he can handle more defensive zone starts, which would do a lot to lessen Couturier's burden of being buried in the defensive zone for most of the game. I went through Couturier's game log from last season and took out all the games in which he received extreme zone starts and then divided it up into segments. It came to 23 games at less than 30% ZS and 37 games at less than 40% ZS. That's some pretty insane usage for a top 6 (by TOI%) player. Here is a comparison with those zone start situations, including performance in terms of CorsiFor% and Even Strength Points/60:

We're dealing with relatively small sample sizes here, but I think it suggests a clear trend of substantially increased offense for Couturier when his defensive usage is lessened. That should be a main focus for the Flyers coaching staff next season, so that we can have more of this:

And this:

Data used in this post was collected from extraskater.com and stats.hockeyanalysis.com

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