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Today, I have a guest blog post written by Jonathan Joyce of The Sports Juice blog. Jonathan's taken an in-depth look at the Edmonton Oilers roster of players based upon their past two seasons. Specifically. Jonathan's evaluated the team as a whole using Alan Ryder's Player Contribution numbers. Admittedly, I myself am somewhat unfamiliar with the Alan Ryder's Player Contribution numbers from Hockey Analytics. From his website, it sounds like Alan himself has a background in mathematics as well as statistics. He suggests that he's been inspired by the sabermetrics of baseball to pursue the statistical analysis of hockey. To his credit, Alan Ryder has made the "engine" for player contribution available in the public domain. What does Alan Ryder's Player Contribution numbers suggest about the Edmonton Oilers? Continue reading to find out... Sliced Bread or Stinky Cheese? Your 2009-2010 Edmonton Oilers By Jonathan Joyce My thanks to Hockey Noob for giving me the opportunity to post from time to time on Low on Oil. What a roller coaster of a ride we’ve been on the first month of the season! Are the Oilers a top shelf playoff team? Are they good enough to make the playoffs at all? I think all Oilers fans appreciated that we wouldn’t maintain the hot start, but not that things have swung the other way I think we’re wondering if we’ll bounce back? Hopefully what we are currently seeing isn’t what we’re going to get the rest of the way. My personal take, ignoring the numbers, is that the team will continue to stink up the joint until Souray and Staios come back unless we have absolutely fantastic goaltending. A team can’t dress three AHL quality defensemen, who contribute nothing offensively and allow quality chances on the defensive end, and think they are going to win many games. The Oil might score 6 goals and sneak out a win once in awhile but most nights they are going to lose. Before I get into the numbers that I am using, I’ll take a bit of space to explain the numbers. I’m using Alan Ryder’s Player Contribution model over at hockeyanalytics.com, which might be new to many in the Oilogosphere. If you have an interest in stats and some acumen for mathematics, I highly, highly recommend you check out his site. Ryder has used the term ‘Player Contribution’ (“PC”) to denote his methodology to attributing a team’s wins to the individual players on the team. It quantifies offense, defense and goalie contributions to a team’s performance. For players it quantifies their offensive and defensive contribution, breaking the game into pieces. Those pieces included even-handed play, power play, short-handed and shootouts. It also factors in penalty taking and the ability to draw penalties. I told you it was awesome! For goalies, it quantifies their contribution during the game and in shootouts. During the game, the simplified explanation is that the more shots a goalie faces and the higher the quality the shots, the bigger the contribution all else equal. If Khabibulin and Brodeur had the same save percentage, Bulin would get the nod as making a bigger contribution on the basis that the Oilers give up more shots than the Devils and tend to give up more point blank opportunities. To make PC a bit easier to read, Ryder has multiplied the score by a factor of 10. If a team scored 85 points in the standings, there would be 850 points allocated across the team to denote each player’s contribution. This is probably my favourite part of PC. Unlike some of the other metrics where it is a bit tough to get your head around what the number means, PC is fairly intuitive. A player with a PC score of 50 essentially was responsible for 5 of the team’s points in the standings for that year. A rough rule of thumb for non-goalies is that 100 points is a NHL first team/ second team all star, 80 points is a team star, 60 is a team leader, 40 is a solid contributor and 20 is a weak link. Goalies tend to score a fair bit higher, which makes sense given they are on the ice the entire game and quite fundamental to team success. For the Oilers last year, Souray topped the team at 71 points with Gilbert and Hemsky in the 50’s. It’s no wonder we missed the playoffs! With that quick introduction to PC completed, let’s see what the numbers tell us. My process was as follows: 1. Pull into Excel the current Oilers roster’s 2008-2009 Player Contribution data including minutes played (broken into even handed, power play and short-handed play).
2. Take each players PC for EH, PP and PK and divide by minutes played in each situation. This gives me PC per minute of ice time. I lumped the propensity to draw penalties and take penalties into the EH play.
3. Create a theoretical roster (no players yet) that was broken into 4 lines, 3 pairs of defense, 3 power play units, 4 pk units and assign minutes played in a season to each line. I used Ryder’s allocated minutes for his theoretical all star team analysis.
4. Stick the current Oilers players into this roster, putting individuals on lines, including special teams. I used the lineup from a couple of weeks ago before we headed south in the standings, but assumed Souray, Staios and Pisani were healthy. This eliminated the Chorney’s, Peckham’s and MacIntrye’s of the world from the lineup. They at best have a nil PC so I feel this is okay.
5. For the goalies, I took Khabi’s and JDD’s last season PC and divided by minutes. I then assumed Khabi would play 80% of the games. Hopefully that all makes sense. What I’m left with is a PC value for each Oiler based on how much I expect them to play this year. For shootouts, I couldn’t really think of a projection model so I simply assumed they would perform the same as they did last year. Below are the numbers for the team. I’ve shown their PC from last year along with their PC this year. At first blush, this isn’t a playoff team with roughly 84 points. Last year it took 91 points to get into the dance. 
The good news is that we aren’t done yet with my numbers. My analysis assumes that individuals are healthy for the entire year and that they’ll play exactly the same as they did the previous year. We start to lose objectivity on the Oilers performance, but I’ve taken a stab at making these two adjustments. For injuries, I’ve simply assumed that Pisani will miss 25% of the season and Souray/ Staios will miss 15% of the season. I’ve then allocated the missed time over the remaining defensemen and Ryan Stone. I’ll assume that any AHL call-ups won’t have a positive contribution to the team’s overall performance. I then eyeballed performance for each player. Unless I’ve seen something significant in terms of a player’s play compared to last year, I haven’t messed around with their PC too much. I will note that I made the adjustments before I summed the player totals to avoid the temptation to fudge the numbers a bunch of times to derive a particular point total. Any reader thoughts on more appropriate adjustment factors are appreciated! Below is the updated PC projection for the team based on my adjustments for injury and performance: 
My numbers still suggest that the start of the season was a mirage and that we’ll be in tough to make the playoffs with 89 points. What a lousy result. I thought I was good enough with numbers to get the Oilers in the playoffs! To end on a positive I’ll harken back to my Western Conference analysis from a few weeks back on my blog. In addition to the ‘no duh’ assertion that if our young players come into form we might sneak in, the following improvements are tried and true ways to get into the playoffs: 1. Power play performance. Teams with strong power plays tend to make the playoffs. If you see the Oilers consistently doing well on the power play that bodes well for our playoff position at the end of the year. 2. Shootout performance. A lights out shootout record doesn’t really correlate with position in the standings, but regaining our form from a couple of years ago sure wouldn’t hurt. 3. Strong even handed play. The Oilers have had among the worst defensive even handed play over the last three years, which has put incredible pressure on the goaltenders. If you see that Khabibulin is starting to have some easy nights, that a great sign of future consistent success. Will the Oilers be able to accomplish any of these things? My hope is we can tread water until we can fill the roster with some healthy NHLers and then have old man Quinn get everything he can out of the boys.
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My Random thoughts:
Prior to the start of this season without roster changes, my own feelings were that we would need some good fortune to make the playoffs this year. Factors such as "the light bulb turning on" for younger players are impossible to anticipate or predict, yet they can have a huge impact.
So far, it seems that the bulb has gone on for both Smid and Penner. However, with the litany of injuries and illness, it's difficult to compensate for the type of impact that can have.
I agree and share your thoughts on fielding 3 AHL quality defensemen. With the amount of icetime that defensemen play, the Oilers or any team are going to struggle with dmen that don't generate offense and bleed scoring chances against. It's a competitive league and teams find ways of exploiting weakness.
Alan Ryder's made his calculations for the player contribution numbers available in public domain. I've taken a quick look and the document itself is a 60 page PDF file! When I get a chance, I look through it a little more closely.
Cheers,
Jay