THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

And since winning or losing fights is a zero sum game, you would have to dock your poor fighters some pay as well.  This is also like base stealing.  Anyone who is not an above average fighter should be prohibited from fighting.  If that were the case, the above-average fighters would have no one to fight.  So if winning a fight were indeed advantageous, and all teams operated optimally with respect to that knowledge, there would be no fights in hockey!

Tango, is it true that the most prolific fighters are that good (winning 10 out of 20 and only losing a few)?

I can’t remember where I saw the annual fight leaders.  At any rate, I picked a guy at random - George Parros...He was 9-7-7 last year.  He is presumably fighting too often…

mgl’s answer rules!  He’s absolutely right.

.07 goals in 10 minutes is a lot, isn’t it?  That’s .42 goals in 60 minutes, which is probably more than home-field advantage.

I wonder how it happens.  Maybe the team that lost the fight plays more aggressively and takes extra penalties?  A penalty is worth between .1 and .15 goals, right?

Here are the regular season leaders for last year:
http://hockeyfights.com/leaders/players/1/reg2009

You’ll have to click each player and count them (or I presume the Forums page has someone do that already).  I would bet that the leader out of the heavyweights will be something like 50% W, 30% Draw, 20% L.  In terms of “true talent”, I would bet they are pretty much all at 25/50/25.

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MGL: great point about optimization!

Someone did it a few years ago:
http://www.hockeyfights.com/forums/f19/players-fight-card-06-07-a-69317/

Andrew Peters had the kind of record I was talking about.

Ben Eager with Philly has the best in that list: 12-2-2.

I’d bet Georges Laraque is considerably above the 25/50/25 line that Tango mentioned.  I’ve watched him fight for a lot of years and I can’t recall seeing him have a clear loss.  He doesn’t like to fight and doesn’t fight that often but he’s clearly better than 25/50/25 IMO.  Click on my name for one where, as I recall, he was upset that Rob Ray ducked him a week earlier and (fuzzy memory) fought someone smaller on the Oilers instead.  Laraque told the press guys not to go for coffee early and then just destroyed Ray.  Great stuff.

Even looking at his losses this year, one of them looks like a win to me.  Fritz did a nice job on him though.  That’s a pretty pants crapping first NHL fight.

Laracque last 4 seasons, including playoffs:
http://hockeyfights.com/players/110

W/L/T:
08/09: 7-2-1
07/08: 10-1-2
06/07: 8-0-0
05/06: 2-0-0 (playoffs)
05/06: 7-1-1

TOTAL: 34-4-4

WOW!

So, that’s +30 in fights, times the +.01 for wins, or +3 wins in the span of 4 years.  That makes him worth about a million bucks a year, above the minimum, for his gloves.

Lucic, 19-4-2 in the NHL for his two years.  Seems about right.

Here’s my question: can you predict NHL fight success by minor league success?  I’d bet you can.  And unlike every other minor league stat, I bet you’d IMPROVE in winning fights in the NHL versus minor leagues.

Who in the heck determines who wins a fight and what is the criteria?

Might this not result from the fact that a clear decision in a fight indicates the two players fighting were not of equal skill?  That is, the fight winner takes a player on the other team who has greater hockey skill with him to the penalty box for 5+ minutes.  If this were true, the effect would peak closer to 5 minutes than 10, but not exactly 5 because everyone stays in the box until the first stoppage after 5 minutes.  I don’t know if that was studied, the article doesn’t say specifically.  So, it isn’t being a good fighter that matters, it’s picking a good fight.  You could also test this by checking the stats of the fight losers.

Wisdom of the Crowd!

Great, right?

Has it been conclusivly shown (for NHL hockey), that winning and losing (and obviously market size) is the only thing that impacts attendence and revenue?

Because I’ve gotten the impression that at least according to some people, those fights also help put butts in the seats regardless of what they do in terms of wins. If that’s the case that might have to be addressed in salary/value analysis.

If anyone would like to do any further analysis, I would be happy to help with providing the statistics.

David,

It would be wonderful to get the stats in a simple form, like:

year,player1,player2,W/L/T
2008,Orr,Parros,W (i.e., Orr won)

Tom