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The 2019-2020 MotherFucking Season Thread

That's hilarious.
zeke said:
seventhatauston.wordpress.com

A Thorough Review of the Changes Made Under Paul McFarland

By Shawn Ferris and Olivia LinSpecial thanks to all of the resources we either directly used while working on this project, or helped drive our curiosity. That includes Evolving Hockey, Natural Sta…
seventhatauston.wordpress.com seventhatauston.wordpress.com
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This article is pretty great.

It confirms some of our main suspicions about why last year's PP was not quite as good as the metrics made it seem - I.e. all those shotpasses mitch would shovel to tavares for straight on tips just aren't great chances but get registered as tbe best kind:

In 2019, Mitch Marner contributed about 6 fewer shot assists per hour than in 2018. This should be expected as many of his shot assists were in the “To Net” cluster that season.

He was essentially the main culprit of the problem. Many of these shot assists were deflections and not the good kind. They were rather weak and wouldn’t hinder a well-positioned goalie. However, not all of the blame can be placed on him. Shooting isn’t Marner’s greatest strength. With the bumper being left-handed, there was no one-time option for Marner to pass to, forcing Marner to either shoot himself, look for a deflection, or pass the puck back to the point.
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and why this year's PP has been more successful despite worse metrics:

In 2019, 43% of the shots from the low chaos cluster crossed the royal road, a significant increase from 23% in 2018. Even low in the zone, there was far more focus on horizontal movement under Paul MacFarland.

Horizontal movement, specifically royal road passes, forces the goaltender to change positions in order to adjust to the new depth and angle, giving the shooter an advantage. Given the limitations of the NHL’s play-by-play data, this cannot be accounted for in public expected goals models. So while the Leafs may have been taking shots from farther out and wider angles, they were more than making up for it through their pre-shot movement
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The number of low chaos shot assists to Matthews and the number of those that were royal road passes more than tripled between the two seasons. In 2018, the minimal amount of royal road passes Matthews did receive were all on his strong side, making it difficult for him to truly take one time shots. Adding this play to Matthews, who is already a dangerous shooter now playing his off-wing, allowed for more low one-timers off royal road passes. In 2019, Matthews took 10 one-timers off low cluster royal road passes, or 40% of his shots off total low cluster shot assists.

Similar to the general observation we made about the Leafs’ passing patterns, we believe public expected goals models that are unable to account for pre-shot movement do not accurately capture the quality of the shot assists Matthews received in 2019. While his rate of expected goals at 5v4 did decrease between seasons, Matthews was actually taking dangerous one-timers on his off-wing off low royal road passes in 2019 that he wasn’t attempting or getting opportunities for in 2018.
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And of course the upgrade to Willy:

Auston Matthews receiving more dangerous passes was in a large part due to William Nylander playing the net-front/low position on PP1 in 2019. Nylander excelled in the position because he was both an excellent passer and a scoring threat, second on the Leafs to Auston Matthews in 5v4 goals scored this season. In fact, Nylander scored 8 5v4 goals in 2019, exactly as many as John Tavares did in 2018, in 20 fewer minutes played.

When looking at total royal road passes, Nylander made 4 times as many royal road passes as Tavares, nearly half of his shot assists. Even when narrowing it down to just low chaos shot assists, Nylander still completed 14 royal road passes. To compare to Marner, who is considered the Leafs’ best playmaker, Nylander’s 16 royal road shot assists were more than Marner’s in both seasons (11 in 2018, 9 in 2019).
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Damn girl, lookin real gud.

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zeke said:
It confirms some of our main suspicions about why last year's PP was not quite as good as the metrics made it seem - I.e. all those shotpasses mitch would shovel to tavares for straight on tips just aren't great chances but get registered as tbe best kind:
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Yeah, it really felt like the numbers just weren't right. Not nearly enough puck movement, not nearly enough goalie movement, a whole lot of Mitch holding the puck and settling for a bitch wrist shot from 25 feet out.
 
Waiting now for the inevitable "which of your teammates are you most attracted to as a female".
 
The idea of these leagues getting started again during basically the peak of the outbreak in the US (NY skewed the numbers before and considering they aren't playing in NY their numbers don't matter) was always adorable. I'll never forget zeke's cute statistical analysis a month or so ago <3 <3 <3
 
Preston said:
The idea of these leagues getting started again during basically the peak of the outbreak in the US (NY skewed the numbers before and considering they aren't playing in NY their numbers don't matter) was always adorable. I'll never forget zeke's cute statistical analysis a month or so ago <3 <3 <3
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Sadly enough, I think it's just as adorable to think this is the peak of the outbreak in the States.

Looks like it's still ramping up pretty steadily in the Jesusland portion of the country.

But yeah, this is just about how I foresaw an attempt to conclude this season going.
 
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