THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Nice article; reminds me of the stuff by Rob Neyer I read a long time ago that got me into sports and statistics in the first place.

I would think, however, that the GA/game is more predictive of playoff success than GA/30. Your article implies that Boston is at an advantage because Thomas is even better than his traditional numbers suggests. (Though you also do say up front that a goalie can single-handedly win a game.)

Either way, Boston is looking real good at the moment.

Would Thomas be your pick for the Vezina?

Is there a good sabermetric hockey site?

Cool!  Is this your first WSJ article?

Trying to write what I wanted into the word and time constraint imposed means that things don’t always come out as intended.

The takeaway should be on the scaling to goals allowed per 30 shots.

Phil: yup!

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Sabermetric-style hockey links:

http://hockeyanalytics.com/Links.htm

Steve: unless someone wants to argue that the quality of Thomas’ shots faced is easier than the other goalies, he should be a runaway selection.

His backup, Manny Fernandez, is a pretty good goalie in his own right, and he doesn’t have the lights out numbers Thomas has.

Unless I’ve missed something, it seems as though Tom has re-scaled save percentage onto a more meaningful scale, so that goals per 30 shots doesn’t really give us more information than save percentage.

Some 5-6 years ago now, I did some simple regressions on some college hockey data which seemed to indicate that teams with a higher shots allowed per games had lower save percentages.  That would somewhat stand to reason in that I figure teams who allow a lot of shots have worse defenses than teams who allow fewer shots.  (At least as a general rule.) This would actually tip the scales even more in Thomas’ favor if you figure that the shots he faced were of higher difficulty than the shots faced by a lockdown defense that doesn’t allow as many shots per game.