Pittsburgh Penguins: Takeaways from the CBJHAC

At the Columbus Blue Jackets Hockey Analytics Conference, there was a lot to be learned. Here’s what we learned about the Pittsburgh Penguins.

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the Columbus Blue Jackets Hockey Analytics Conference, hosted by the Blue Jackets at Nationwide Arena. It was very well organized and a tremendous conference. There was a lot of interesting stuff there and some of it had to do with the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Alex Novet of Hockey Graphs was one of my favorite presenters of the day. He spoke about how we can enhance traditional player shift analysis with transitional play data. Novet found that we do see a big impact on expected goals immediately after shift changes.

By making a change as your opponent enters your offensive zone, you are affecting the possible outcome of the offensive players. You are also putting your defending teammates in a much worse position in terms of their potential results. This makes sense.

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Novet’s findings confirmed what had been suspected. The data showed that defensemen tend to get off of the ice when their team (or puck) is heading towards the offensive zone. With forwards, there is a greater variation and willingness to let the player jumping over the boards to let someone else handle it.

Novet and Micah Blake McCurdy both found that the period of the long change does not have much impact on this study or on team shot rates. Coaching, puck possession, team style, and players changing in clusters are all factors in this data. Novet found that this tends to be both a repeatable and predictable trend from a

While Sidney Crosby is the best player of this generation, he is amongst the worst forwards in the NHL in terms of making good line changes. Crosby is in the offensive zone the majority of the time (oftentimes down along the goal-line) and that can be tiring. Future hall-of-famers Jaromir Jagr and Henrik Sedin also fare poorly here. In other news, at least New Jersey Devils forwards are good at something.

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Corey Sznajder spoke in regards to how team systems and individuals defend their blueline. Sznajder has done a great job of manually tracking zone entries, zone exits, and passes for over 1,000 NHL games. In the 2018-19 season, the Penguins were not very good in terms of making it difficult for opponents to enter the offensive zone. There were four Penguins defenders who are in the “open door” quadrant in terms of pass denials at their defensive bluelines. I strongly suspect Jack Johnson and Olli Maatta were amongst them.

The other two Penguins defenders were hovering around league average last season, with one in the high-risk quadrant and the other barely in the holding the line on the x-axis of the graph. As Sznajder went on to point out, Penguins’ opponents last season gained the offensive zone with control of the puck just over 52% of the time. Pittsburgh was allowing a lot of passes shortly after the puck got into their defensive zone. This led to miscommunication and defensive breakdowns.

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This season, Pittsburgh has been much better from a defensive standpoint. They are allowing fewer odd-man rushes and slot shots. Systematic adjustments and different forward personnel could be reasons for Pittsburgh’s improvement defensively this season.

From a systematic standpoint, the Boston Bruins, Florida Panthers, and San Jose Sharks held their bluelines very well. Boston reached the Stanley Cup Final last season, while both Florida and San Jose have made coaching changes.

Meghan Chayka, who is the co-founder of Stahletes took a deep dive on rush and non-rush contributions at the player level. This was a particularly interesting topic to me, as I had never seen any previous data or studies that had tried to measure this.

We know Connor McDavid is the best generational talent the NHL has seen since the arrival of Sidney Crosby in 2005. McDavid’s unparalleled speed with the puck is a treat to watch. We did not how just how much of a generational talent he was on the rush.

As you will see below, McDavid is far & away the best rush talent in hockey. Notice Evgeni Malkin and Penguins trade target Jason Zucker ranking 10th and 11th in terms of their individual effects on 5on5 rush goals expected goals for. Malkin also went on to be the second-line center on Chayka’s Team Chaos roster.

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Chayka found that there is a 95 percent chance that Connor McDavid’s offensive rush impact in terms of expected goals is above 52 percent. In simplest terms: Chayka’s data found that we would witness an offensive rush talent at McDavid’s level once for every 5,000 NHL skaters. There have been roughly 7,000 skaters in NHL history. As Chayka pointed out, the Oilers expected goal rates when McDavid is involved in 2 on 1s and 3 on 2 rushes jump substantially. McDavid is the best and most explosive offensive rush talent of our lifetime and likely of all-time.

This conference was a blast. It was great to be surrounded by some of the most innovative and informed people in hockey. If you ever get the chance to attend one of these, I strongly suggest attending. Thank you to Alison Lukan and the Blue Jackets for being gracious hosts. Thanks for reading!