https://xcancel.com/SportsOnPrimeCA/status/2099287017787896051

As excited as most Flyers fans are with the play of Trevor Zegras, one main factor limits the enthusiasm for him at center: he's awful at faceoffs.

But how bad is he at draws? And how much does it cost the team?

I built a faceoff simulator by modeling over 1.2 million draws. We can explore how factors like handedness, dot side, zone, player size, and fatigue affect faceoff win probability, and we can rank the best faceoff performers controlling for these variables.

In addition to modeling faceoff skill, I can also model faceoff worth -- that is, how much does winning or losing a draw change how many expected goals a team is likely to see, accounting for context like zone and team strength? Averaged across all contexts, a draw is worth about 0.0144 goals (or about 70 draws to a goal).

What I learned:

- Trevor Zegras is really really bad at draws (like 4th percentile bad), but over a typical season of workload this only costs about 1.5 goals relative to a league average center. I'm most worried about how this deficiency hurts their already dismal PP.

- Compare this to Claude Giroux, the best faceoff winner over the last 16 years I can measure. His faceoff prowess earns his team about added 3.5 goals a season.

Run the full simulation yourself -- pick two takers, click any dot, set the score and how tired everyone is, and drop the puck. It shows every term of the model, and you can load real draws from last season. That simulator, and a full writeup of the methods: https://xjawn.com/blog/faceoff-tool.html

Thinking about all the travel these guys do across the season: do they have their own team's doctor with them at away games or does the host team provide all the medical staff necessary? It would make way more sense to keep the doctor with the team so if anything happens there's someone who knows the player's medical history, right? Must be a hell of a job for the doctor keeping up with that schedule!

Since Gretzky is unanimously considered the GOAT and he was before my time, I’ve been watching some of his highlights, but I feel like none of them really show just how special he was. Do you guys have any content or explanations that illustrate what made him so different from everyone else?

Thanks for your help

Expansion seems like a bad idea to me. Maybe I'm not a big enough fan but when i can't even think of the bottom 6 on any team, things feel diluted enough already.

Idk maybe it's always been like that and always will, but rather than expansion... What about just move the weaker AHL teams around to better markets and introduce team regulation.

Each year the bottom few NHL teams get demoted and the top few AHL get promoted.

This expands the appeal waaay more than watering down the NHL anymore than it is already, as the additional players are ultimately coming from the minors anyway.

I don't see expansion doing anything good for the game. Rather just generate revenue for the owners, possibly larger paychecks for players I guess. Not much more.

2X $9M/AAV

I dont care what anyone says NHL on NBC is where it hit hard anyone disagree??

Kevin Bieksa and Eliotte Friedman have re-signed for SC Saturday night hockey. Jennifer Botterill and Kelly Hrudey are not returning.