JFreshHockey

UPDATE: Plans for the Season

The 2020-21 season is actually starting in two days - it's crazy. With that in mind I thought it would be a good idea to update what my plans are in terms of updating and putting out perks for this coming season.

First thing's first. For RAPM or WAR to work, it needs a reasonable sample size. A model trained on 5 or 10 games will be essentially useless and more misleading than revealing. ...

NEW PERK: WAR Roster Builder 3.0

I'm very happy to present the WAR Roster Builder which has stronger projections and more features included than either of the first two I released. Click the lin...

NEW PERK: Defenceman Timelines 2.0

After dropping the forward timelines yesterday, I'm excited to follow that up with the new defencemen ones today.

They are available at this link. Click on...

NEW PERK: Forward Percentile Timelines 2.0

Like I said a few days ago, this week is all about updating and reuploading previous perks with new and improved data. The timelines are near and dear to my heart, and the forward timelines are now available.

2020-12-28 17:36:23 +0000 UTC View Post

NEW PERK: Player Cards!

Merry Christmas!

I'm very happy that I can finally offer my full interactive Player Cards to you guys. This has been a long time coming but with my partnership with Patrick Bacon of TopDownHockey in full swing I have much more flexibility in what I can make accessible to you fine people.  2020-12-24 17:29:34 +0000 UTC View Post

JFresh Patreon Update: An Exciting Transition

Hey guys,

You might have seen on my Twitter that I announced a new partnership with Patrick Bacon, also known as TopDownHockey. He's a stats modeller and a very good friend of mine who has built a cutting-edge WAR model that you can read about here. It makes some ...

NEW PERK: WAR Roster Builder 2.1 Update

(Link Temporarily Taken Down - See Post Here)

Excited to roll this out. The WAR Roster Builder has gotten a major update which should make it easier to use and a lot ...

PERK: Player Cards Have Been Updated!

Now that free agency has settled down, I have gone through and edited all of the classic player cards, available to $5+ subscribers. These include a number of updates, including:

• New team affiliation
• New contract information
• New age information
• Visual ...
  2020-11-30 16:25:10 +0000 UTC View Post

NEW PERK: 1st and 2nd Half RAPM Cards

Very excited about this one, the first of many collaborations with Patrick Bacon of TopDownHockey. This card is the only place where you can see isolated impact stats divided by the first and second half of the season.

This spreadsheet contains forward and defence visualizations for 1st and 2nd ...

NEW PERK: Defencemen Percentile Timelines

This is going to be a big week on this site, as I'm going to be adding a lot of new perks and updates in the next few days. This is the first one: a defenceman percentile timeline sheet.

Here is the link. In order to avoid what happened last time, when my email account was briefly listed as spam...

NEW PERK: WAR Roster Builder 2.0

It's a long time coming, but the update to the WAR Roster Generator (now Builder) is here. 

I've sent invites to the Patreon email list, but if you didn't receive one please request access here: (Link Temporarily Taken Down - 2020-10-21 16:40:36 +0000 UTC View Post

NEW PERK: WAR Free Agent Signer

Hot off the presses (and just in time for free agent frenzy), something I've wanted to put out there for a while. This sheet allows you to see how any free agent skater contract might work out based on their projected Wins Above Replacement and an age curve. It gives you the option to test any cap hit...

Reminder: How to Access Perks

Hey guys! I have noticed that some new subscribers have not requested access to the perks they're entitled to - possibly because they're not aware of where to find them. With that in mind, here's a reminder of how to get them.

Follow the links below. The perks hosted on Google Sheets require you to request access. This is super easy - once you open the link you just click "Request Access"...

New Perk: Historical Portrait Cards (Exclusive Patron Access)

New historical portrait cards are live for $5 and up subscribers. These allow you to see how any forward or defenceman since 2007-08 played according to Wins Above Replacement in any of the past twelve seasons. You can also see three-year weighted results as well to get a broader look at a player's pe...

Link to All Perk Sheets

Hey guys! I've gotten a few notes from people who haven't received an invite to access certain perks. Previously I've had to add everyone's emails manually, which could sometimes lead to typos or invitations ending up in the spam folder. So I'm going to use this post as a bit of a hub. I've added all the emails I have on file to these documents, but please request editing access if you don't ha...

New NHL Player Cards (Exclusive Patron Access)

You might have seen my new player cards on Twitter. They look like this:

Because they don't contain any paywalled data (only percentiles), I can give spreadsheet access instead of just images like I do with the other player cards. I have added each of your email addresses to have editing access, ...

Patron Exclusive: WAR Contract Rankings

I'm going to be doing some stuff with this in the near future but I figure you guys deserve a first look for all the support you've given me.

The sheet linked here contains contract rankings of forwards, defencemen, and goalies using two kinds of WAR:

1. Projected on-ice WAR over the remaining length of their contract using an age curve.

2. Projected Cap Surplus WAR - this is ...

Picking the 2019-20 NHL Awards Using Analytics - Part 4: SelkeTrophy

The Selke trophy is very similar to the Norris - it judges defensive play, which is very difficult to assess comparatively, and it tends to be based more on reputation than actual performance. A lot of the time people tend to argue it should go to players who seem like they deserve ...

What if NHL Players Were Played Like Basketball Players?

It's often said that the key difference between the NHL and NBA is that in hockey you need a team more than a superstar to win. Because even the best hockey players play less than half the game, it's harder to market the NHL based on stars, and depth is far more important. But what if it wasn't? What if an NHL starter played 34 minutes out of a 48 minute game time? What if there were only 9 men...

Picking the 2019-20 NHL Awards Using Analytics - Part 3: Norris Trophy

Is there any NHL award debate as vicious as the Norris? Because stats that actually measure defensive play are mostly unknown to anyone but a small subset of hockey fans, Norris arguments are almost always a swirling hellhole of points and hearsay that usually end in hurt feelings and nobody ...

Marc-Andre Fleury is the Most Overrated Goalie of the Cap Era

The NHL's All-Decade starting goalie. NHL.com's 12th ranked goalie of the expansion era. Surefire Hockey Hall of Famer according to Sportsnet, the Hockey News, and just about everyone else. 3rd best in the league according to the NHLPA and 6th best according to NHL.com. Marc-Andre Fleury has...

Picking the 2019-20 NHL Awards Using Analytics - Part 2: GM of the Year

GM of the Year is a weird award. While all the other awards are for work done within a season (although someone should tell Norris voters that), building a team is inherently a multiyear process. It can be hard to differentiate between the job that a GM did in one year and the overall work h...

Picking the 2019-20 NHL Awards Using Analytics - Part I: Calder Trophy

The 2019-20 NHL regular season is apparently finished, which means there's plenty of time to focus on the most important thing going on in the world right now: voting for the NHL Awards. These conversations have been especially contentious this year because so many of the races are close. Mo...

Analyzing TSN's Trade Bait (Part 2)

A continuation of part 1. 

#6 - Ilya Kovalchuk

Months ago, Kovalchuk was a league minimum cast-off that nobody wanted. Now he's a vaunted-after deadline target. Since finding a new role on the Canadiens, Kovalchuk has turned it around, re-emerging as a good middle-six...

Forward Cards - Explainer

This public blog post will explain how to read, understand, and draw meaning from my forward player cards. They are designed to communicate complex information clearly and quickly, but if you don't understand some analytics terms there still might be a bit of a learning curve. So I'm going to go step-by-step.

2020-02-13 18:31:28 +0000 UTC View Post

Analyzing TSN's Trade Bait (Part 1)

(This is a public post to preview the work that will be available to all subscriber tiers)

This year's trade deadline looks to be one of the more boring ones in recent memory (and that's saying something - who could forget the Mikkel Boedker sweepstakes). The combination of a long-overdue frugality around first round picks and a weak rental class means that there are few true impact playe...