Statistics Stuff

I swear that one day I'll bring the level of nerdiness in hockey up to par with other sports like baseball and basketball. I'm trying to come up with better stats for college hockey, and here's where I am so far.

One of the my first priorities is one of the most flawed stats in all of hockey: powerplay/penalty kill percentage. It's something people talk about a lot, but doesn't make a lot of sense. A powerplay counts the same for a team's percentage whether it's 5 minutes, 2 minutes, or 10 seconds. A much more accurate way to measure would be a ratio between the number of powerplay goals scored or allowed against the amount of time actually spent on the powerplay.

The only problem with this is that no one that I've seen keeps track of actual powerplay time. They just keep track of the number of penalties taken. That means the only way to find those numbers would be to go back through box scores and add up all the powerplay time. I may try to petition SIDs around the country to try and keep track of it in the future. If anyone is that interested though and wants to find those numbers for their own team, I'd be more than happy to post them.