Analytics with Alison: Trending for Success

Game results matter, but so does underlying behavior. Just like a final score, we can measure unique aspects of play that are part of the trends for success.

In the Kraken's first game against Vegas, the team lost 4-3 after a valiant effort to come back from a 0-3 deficit. Afterward, one thing coach Dave Hakstol wanted his team to correct was not "feeding the transition (of opponents) too much."
What does that mean? When an opposing team is trying to score, you want them to start as far away from the goal as possible. You want to make opponents work to get close enough for a quality chance.
In the season opener, some of the Golden Knights' scoring chances developed from disruptions of Seattle's breakout attempts (when the Kraken were trying to get out of the defensive zone) or other neutral-zone turnovers. In addition to shortening the runway to the goal for Vegas, that can sometimes give an opponent an odd-man advantage off the rush.
In preparing for the next game in Nashville, Hakstol said the team would "take a lot of the good things (from the Vegas game), build off of those, and fix 1 or 2 things, not more than that."

When the final horn sounded Thursday in Music City, the score was again four goals to three, but this time Seattle was on the winning end. Does that mean they improved in the areas the head coach wanted to see?
Let's dig in.
If we look at the transition game using data from Sportlogiq, we see that Vegas was able to exit out of their own zone successfully 86 percent of the time. Additionally, they created scoring chances off the rush eight times, plus had 11 completed stretch passes (a longer pass that challenges the defense to catch up and/or spread out to try and stop the resulting chance).
But in Nashville, there were signs of improvement. Nashville successfully exited their own zone only 77 percent of the time and had two scoring chances off the rush, with 10 total completed stretch passes.
"We were better, [the game against the Predators] was a step in the right direction," Hakstol said post-game Thursday. "Much like Vegas, Nashville…can go, they can transition. A big challenge you have with both of these teams, certainly with Nashville... they have guys on the backend joining the rush.
"We didn't get beat up ice. That cuts down the number of outnumbered rushes entering our zone. It calms everything down and settles everything down a little bit."
Two games is obviously a very small sample size and there are 80 games remaining for the Kraken to show who they really are on the ice. But watching for progress game to game comes not just through our eyes, and by tracking not just the final score, but by tracking all the behaviors that put you in position to win a game.