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IMA Journal of Management Mathematics Advance Access originally published online on August 29, 2008
IMA Journal of Management Mathematics 2009 20(2):159-166; doi:10.1093/imaman/dpn019
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© The authors 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. All rights reserved.

This article appears in the following IMA Journal of Management Mathematics issue: Special Issue Mathematics in Sport [View the issue table of contents]

Evaluating the performance of an ice hockey team using interactive phases of play

Anthony Bedford{dagger} and James Baglin

School of Mathematical and Geospatial Sciences, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne VIC 3001, Australia

{dagger} Email: anthony.bedford{at}rmit.edu.au

Received on 31 August 2007. Accepted on 28 July 2008.

This study measures the interaction between two opposing teams in ice hockey by regressing a number of performance measures to a single measure which enables assessment of a team's performance during the course of a game. The notion of ‘phases of play’, whereby players and teams fluctuate through periods of ‘high phase’ and ‘low phase’ during a game, is used as a theoretical underpinning for the research. We also consider ‘relative phase’ that describes the overall interaction between the two teams. Team game data from the 2005/06 National Hockey League season were collected along with data for the games played up to time of research in the 2006/07 season. An optimized binary logistic regression model for both home and away teams was naturally found to model match outcome better than other methods when a team's score was included as a performance variable. This model correctly classified 91% of games as either a win or a loss. Using live match data, these logistic regression models were then used to create phases of play plots of a home team's and away team's performance throughout the progress of a number of games in the 2006/07 season. These scores were smoothed using a Tukey's T4253H smoother to eliminate excess noise in the phases of play plots. It was concluded that the results of this analysis gave an objective, simple and all-round measure of a team's performance which would be a valuable evaluative asset to coaches, the media and spectators.

Keywords: phases; T4253H; smoother; ice hockey


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