March 20, 2015

Good morning, blog! I have spent the last day or two reading through Statistical Analysis documents about the NHL when deciding who will be the Stanley Cup winner. My goal is that today, I will have a "Stanley Cup Winner" chosen. 

Ottawa Hockey Analytics Conference
While searching through the Hockey Analytics conference twitter feed and slideshow presentations, I found many hockey statistics websites which I searched through to gather more data for my Genius Hour. 

Hockey Analysis
 A site I came across while reading the slides from the conference was hockeyanalysis.com. I did a quick sift through this site to s
One acronym that came up frequently was CF (also seen as CF%). I also found there to be a CA. CF and CA stand for Corsi For and Corsi Against respectively. What are these? 
Corsi measures the differences in shot attempts amongst players. A team is awarded a + or - for shots on goals, missed shots and blocked shots. Naturally, shooting, scoring, saves and any percentages relating to these are important for Stanley Cup contenders (I mean, how else will you win games if you don't score and make saves?) so I figured this stat was also important to look into.
Fenwick also came up periodically which represents simply just the shots and missed shots (it does not account for blocked shots).

Sporting Charts
 Sporting Charts (www.sportingcharts.com) is another site that I found which presents real-time data for current and past seasons, teams and players and allows  you to compare and contrast different stats, teams and standings. I am looking forward to using this site for my analysis.

My Takeaway Points from Researching
From gathering information from these two sites as well as the conference site slides, I have decided to also focus on:
- Goals For percentage
- Shots For percentage
- Fenwick For percentage
- Corsi
- Corsi For percentage
- Shooting Percentag
- Save Percentage
- Goals per Game
- Shots per Game
- Home and Away Winning Percentages

References
 HockeyAnalysis.com. (2013). HockeyAnalysis.com: Advancing Our Knowledge of Hockey Through Statistical Analysis. [Website]. Retrieved from: www.hockeyanalysis.com.

Ottawa Hockey Analysis at Carleton. (2015). Statistical Sports Consulting. [Website]. Retrieved from: www.statsportsconsulting.com/ottanalytics.

SportingCharts.com (2014). SportingCharts.com. [Website]. Retrieved from www.sportingcharts.com.