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December saw the NWHL hire advanced analytics architect Carolyn Wilke (also known as @Classlicity, an analyst with Puck Intelligence), who has proceeded to revamp the NWHL’s stats on their site, turning what was once unreliable numbers into rock-solid, fact-checkable data points. Like the league itself, this seemed to come out of nowhere, but for those who were following along with the fancystats community in hockey, it was a natural step.

Wilke, a regular contributor to Today’s Slapshot, presented at the RIT Hockey Analytics conference in October and was on her way home from Rochester when she learned a friend would be attending the first-ever Buffalo Beauts game just an hour away. “It wasn’t hard to convince me to go,” she laughed, and having just come from watching Jennifer Lute-Costella (@RegressedPDO on Twitter) present on a tracking project she had done, going back multiple years on thousands of goals netted by dozens of players, something clicked.

“I was like, ‘This is something that needs to happen. We need to start tracking the NWHL, because I highly doubt they’re going to have the ability to do all of this stuff that the NHL does,'” Wilke said. “I put a call out on Twitter and got a really great response initially from people willing to give a few hours a week to track basic shot information — the stuff that makes up Corsi — and fun things. That’s kind of how it all started.”

Wilke spent two months on her tracking project, organizing independent researchers across the country who donated their free time to tracking shots, goals, assists, zone entries, faceoff stats and more for the fledgling league. By mid-December, when Wilke had begun to see some real results from her data collection, the NWHL came calling; they wanted to hire her, moving up her timeline and giving her more resources to work with.

Since she was given a blank slate to begin with, Wilke had free reign to develop her own points of reference. One of the areas she’s been able to focus on has been secondary assists, which as followers of NHL advanced analytics will know, has been a point of contention with the NHL.

“First and foremost, any secondary assist I put in there is actually an assist,” Wilke stated firmly. “There’s a passing play. If Decker passes to Knight and Knight passes to Dempsey then Decker gets an assist but if Knight creates a turnover, Decker crashes the net but Dempsey gets the actual shot off, Decker doesn’t get that assist. In the NHL Decker would often get that A2 and that’s why there’s this big movement in the NHL arena about primary points.

“In the NWHL all secondary assists are actual points, repeatable points, rewarded for repeatable behaviors. Secondary assists matter in the NWHL.”

Shot-assists were also something Wilke focused on implementing, and is currently unheard of when it comes to the NHL’s stats site.

“It’s a behavior that is measurable, repeatable and important,” Wilke said, when asked why shot-assists were a focus. “If you look at the stats the Pride are so much better at it than anyone else. And it shows – their actual Corsi percentages and goal-scoring are so much better, too. I think knowing that’s a huge boon, especially for coaches or fans.

“There are so many who stand out: Kelly Babstock, for instance. There’s a reason she gets so many assists. If I’m right,” Wilke paused, thinking, “She’s the highest person on the Whale right now without last weekend’s game on there at 25 percent. That means that 25 percent of the time when there’s a shot on ice, she created that play.”

That’s the kind of statistic Wilke hopes to highlight: something that explains a player’s use or ability to a crowd that might be caught up in the razzle-dazzle of a goal and miss the play that led up to it. She sees the focus of her work as providing fans with the opportunity to better understand the game analytically and driving interest in the decisions that go into playing a complete 60 minutes.

But asked what she would consider the most telling stat of all when it comes to teams and players and Wilke goes in an unexpected direction.

“I think the biggest stat is save percentage,” she said. “If you look at the 6 games the Pride and Beauts have put up, well, we look at that and we say, oh, man, goalies are getting absolutely hammered, looking at the save percentage. But if you flip it out to even-strength save percentage they look a lot better.”

She goes on to explain that it all comes down to situations. “So you can kind of see the Beauts’ penalty kill is really what’s the problem here. And it’s not to say their even-strength save percentage is good, because they’re still lower than the league average, but they’re significantly better (at even strength). Same with Nana Fujimoto. For a while, her all-situations save percentage was really low. Her even-strength save percentage was much higher. That’s when you can tell that the shift in the system is the major issue, not necessarily the goaltender herself.”

While Wilke is still part-time for now, working with the limited budget and manpower a start-up can offer –– for example, she is unable to track time on ice, considered a very basic stat by NHL standards but, realistically, far out of reach for the NWHL stats team — she envisions a future where she has a team big enough to generate everything from basic to advanced stats for the league, leaving nothing untouched.

“I think the idea is to stay on the forefront and stay on the cusp of advanced analytics,” said Wilke. “The big next step next season or even just down the road is to get more accurate shift tracking and to get those stats that we really want.

“The NWHL and everyone I’ve spoken to is very excited about having this information,” Wilke said. “They really want to do it right and that’s why they brought me on board, so they could make sure they were getting accurate shots, getting the kind of information analysts want to do those really cool visualizations to, you know, inform the fans.”

The work Wilke is doing can impact not just how fans understand teams and games, but also whether or not coaches and GMs want to ask certain players back next year; it has a larger impact than it might in the NHL because every player here is on a one-year contract. They are all singing for their supper, so to speak, and Wilke’s work will have a much wider impact in the future than it might at the moment.

She’s aware of it, too. “If I had my way we’d have our own Bob McKenzie doing Free Agency day with all this information at their fingertips,” Wilke laughs.

Plans are currently in the works for improving the NWHL’s site and building out more visualizations. Wilke herself hopes to spend more time making charts and graphs, similar to the work she’s done with War On Ice data. In the meantime, Wilke plans to make any and all information available to those who request it; not all the stats have been lumped into the Google document she regularly updates.

“I’ve got breakdowns by period, I’ve got breakdowns by date, I’ve got breakdowns by powerplay, four-on-four, four-on-three, penalty kill…” Wilke trails off. “I’ve got all this information. I just haven’t got time to do anything with it at the moment.”