What interests me is the fascinating ability for humans to understand what is in front of them. I can guarantee a statistical analysis was not done to determine what the optimal rate of balanced to unbalanced pairings is, the league just found it on their own. It reminds me of baseball, where players used to enjoy a benefit of 20 points of OPS by taking the first pitch, and adjusted leaguewide by swinging at the first pitch much less to the point where first pitch swing rate is unchanging and will remain unchanged unless there is a structural break (rule change, etc.). It reminds me of an experiment done in economics that showed that poor people (who must think about money every day) are just as good at being hedge fund managers as the actual hedge fund managers. Humans are just good at learning. It's fascinating.
I also believe you've touched another key point here, and another one that's constant in the field of economics, so I run into it a lot. There is a 'statistically significant' result, as in p < 0.05, and then there is a statistically significant result, as in something that would actually mean anything to anybody. Surely you know this. I was thinking about precisely that when you showed your chart showing point estimates that the benefit was less than one shot attempt per game. I was going to ask about the value of a shot attempt, but you pre-empted me by answering that question. Sign of a good article I guess.
I'm surprised that what the league has deemed the efficient amount of off-hand pairings is only 20%. I suppose I bought the propaganda. I thought there would be more non balanced pairings than that. I suppose the question I ought to ask now is that do you think being right handed is a bankable skill? Is it worth paying for? If you took the exact same defenceman, and switched which way he holds his stick, would that change his contract value to you Aaron?
Thanks man! Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting pattern, and a really interesting coincidence that the percentage of righties evened out the season after the previous article. Seems like an example of efficient market theory.
I had a really hard time interpreting the results, cause they seemed contradictory to me. Slightly better for quantity, worse for average quality, and a positive impact offensively and negative defensively. Spent a lot of time trying different things to see it I could find something more definitive, but this was where I ended up.
On its own, I think being a right shot has a very minor impact, sort of like size. I think what this project told me is that it is being adequately captured in the overall numbers for a player’s impact, so whether I’d pay for it as a GM would depend on the specifics of my roster. If I’ve got multiple defensemen who need to play on the left side, I might prioritize a right shot, but I think a left shot with similar impacts would likely perform just as well. I definitely wouldn’t pay a premium to get a righty or build my off-season around balancing out my pairings.
I wonder if we could Moneyball the system by building a team with six left handed defencemen on it. If, say, we could pay each of them 500k less by avoiding the right hand shot premium, and just pay our full 0.7 Corsi per 60 minute penalty every game, because all of our pairings are imbalanced, maybe we could get a 3M forward that'd make up for that over the entry level guy we would've had to replace him with because we paid an extra $1.5M for three right shot defencemen.
I have no idea what kind of impact individual forwards have, so that's probably a terrible idea, but it's a fun thing to think about. 0.7 Corsi per game can't be THAT big of a gap to make up.
Haha, yeah, it’d be interesting to see how far this could be pushed. I feel like forwards have more impact overall, but I’d have to look into that sometime.
Another good one buddy!
What interests me is the fascinating ability for humans to understand what is in front of them. I can guarantee a statistical analysis was not done to determine what the optimal rate of balanced to unbalanced pairings is, the league just found it on their own. It reminds me of baseball, where players used to enjoy a benefit of 20 points of OPS by taking the first pitch, and adjusted leaguewide by swinging at the first pitch much less to the point where first pitch swing rate is unchanging and will remain unchanged unless there is a structural break (rule change, etc.). It reminds me of an experiment done in economics that showed that poor people (who must think about money every day) are just as good at being hedge fund managers as the actual hedge fund managers. Humans are just good at learning. It's fascinating.
I also believe you've touched another key point here, and another one that's constant in the field of economics, so I run into it a lot. There is a 'statistically significant' result, as in p < 0.05, and then there is a statistically significant result, as in something that would actually mean anything to anybody. Surely you know this. I was thinking about precisely that when you showed your chart showing point estimates that the benefit was less than one shot attempt per game. I was going to ask about the value of a shot attempt, but you pre-empted me by answering that question. Sign of a good article I guess.
I'm surprised that what the league has deemed the efficient amount of off-hand pairings is only 20%. I suppose I bought the propaganda. I thought there would be more non balanced pairings than that. I suppose the question I ought to ask now is that do you think being right handed is a bankable skill? Is it worth paying for? If you took the exact same defenceman, and switched which way he holds his stick, would that change his contract value to you Aaron?
Thanks man! Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting pattern, and a really interesting coincidence that the percentage of righties evened out the season after the previous article. Seems like an example of efficient market theory.
I had a really hard time interpreting the results, cause they seemed contradictory to me. Slightly better for quantity, worse for average quality, and a positive impact offensively and negative defensively. Spent a lot of time trying different things to see it I could find something more definitive, but this was where I ended up.
On its own, I think being a right shot has a very minor impact, sort of like size. I think what this project told me is that it is being adequately captured in the overall numbers for a player’s impact, so whether I’d pay for it as a GM would depend on the specifics of my roster. If I’ve got multiple defensemen who need to play on the left side, I might prioritize a right shot, but I think a left shot with similar impacts would likely perform just as well. I definitely wouldn’t pay a premium to get a righty or build my off-season around balancing out my pairings.
I wonder if we could Moneyball the system by building a team with six left handed defencemen on it. If, say, we could pay each of them 500k less by avoiding the right hand shot premium, and just pay our full 0.7 Corsi per 60 minute penalty every game, because all of our pairings are imbalanced, maybe we could get a 3M forward that'd make up for that over the entry level guy we would've had to replace him with because we paid an extra $1.5M for three right shot defencemen.
I have no idea what kind of impact individual forwards have, so that's probably a terrible idea, but it's a fun thing to think about. 0.7 Corsi per game can't be THAT big of a gap to make up.
Haha, yeah, it’d be interesting to see how far this could be pushed. I feel like forwards have more impact overall, but I’d have to look into that sometime.