NEW PERK: Updated 2021-22 Player Cards (Patreon)

It's the 2021-22 season, which means a new set of analytical tools and visualizations will be rolling out! First up is the updated Player Cards, which now include 2021-22 data.

If your last name begins with A-L, access them through this link: Access Here 

If your last begins with M-Z, access them through this link: Access Here 

You might be wondering what has changed here, since at first glance the cards don't seem all that different. Here's an explanation:

What Has Changed, and Why 2020-22?

The mechanism behind WAR is called RAPM, which basically absorbs all of a player's data, his context, his teammates' data, his opponents' data, etc. to form an estimate of how he is individually impacting things on the ice. The larger a sample you have, the more the model has to "learn" from and the more confident you can be in the results. As a result, you want as large a sample as possible. 

So that presents a problem in the early going of the season, because there is a tiny sample - things obviously change over time and we want to keep updated on player performance without having to wait several months. But if you were looking at WAR or RAPM data from the 2021-22 season only, it would be unreliable to the point of meaningless because it has barely any data to go off of. One option would be to just shrug our shoulders and publish that early data with a "small sample" caveat, but that's just asking for really bad analysis (like the "Holl for Norris" thing from last January) and horribly misleading information. We're not interested in putting out bad data.

Patrick and I have come up with a solution that I think works best. Last season was, of course, shortened, meaning every player played a lot fewer than 82 games. So we've decided to combine the 2020-21 season and the 2021-22 season until the time comes (a few months into the season) when the 2021-22 data can stand on its own. This will give the best assessment of a player's current performance level, the best projection of their abilities moving forward, and a much better and more usable model. The WAR model will learn new information about these players every night, especially ones who have joined new teams and have whole new sets of linemates.

You might be tempted to say "but I want to see how players are performing this season, not in the past two seasons combined." But the unfortunate fact of the matter is that this early in the season, no metric exists that can tell you that. This is the best option.

So on these player cards, the 2020-21 data has been replaced with combined 2020-22 data, with no changes in weighting - this is beneficial since 2020-21 was already a small sample to begin with.

When there is enough of a sample that we can be confident in the outputs, I will release a new set of player cards that includes only 2019-20, 2020-21, and 2021-22 - probably around the end of December. But for now, these will have everything you need.

What's Next?

So this is just the start of our 2021-22 content. Next up is the long-awaited website. I am putting the finishing touches on a site that will host daily-updating visualizations not only from this season but all previous ones as well. I would like to put it out this weekend but I do want to make sure that all of the issues are ironed out before it launches.

Thank you as always for subscribing, and enjoy the season!

Jack