Analytics With Alison: Beyond the Stat: Faceoffs

You've heard Eddie Olczyk say it on Kraken broadcasts plenty of times: "faceoffs are a team stat." But what does that mean?

From a stats perspective, a faceoff win or loss is assigned specifically to the player (usually a center) who goes to battle at the dot when an official drops the puck. As a result, faceoff "scoring" is an effort to track "gaining possession" that goes to just one skater. But, to Olczyk's point, an entire series of play around a faceoff can be so much more than that; and each faceoff often involves many players on the ice. Not just the center.

"As much as I'm taking the draws, (a faceoff) is about almost everybody," Morgan Geekie said. "I'm just trying to give my team the best chance to get the puck. Sometimes that's me winning it right to (a teammate) and there's other times where "(the other center) wins it just to just the other side and my winger comes across and slaps it back to my D man."

But again, for a faceoff, there's just one number for one part of a play awarded to one skater. As a result, like with so many stats, we look at one individual data point and perhaps don't understand it fully or assign too much meaning to it outside of what it is actually trying to tell us.

So how might we better evaluate faceoffs?

Let's dig in.

The Data.

Our efforts to look into this were piqued back in December when The Kraken scored the first goal of the game against Washington.

If you look at the official scoresheet, this is scored as a faceoff win for the Capitals' Lars Eller and a loss for Morgan Geekie.
A faceoff loss is "not good," right?

But, four seconds later, Seattle had gained possession and put the puck in the net.

So down the rabbit hole, we went. We manually tracked four games (two wins and two losses) by the Kraken in the month of December. For each, we tracked each faceoff for the following:
In sum total, our tracking of which team ended up with possession aligned with the official scoring 78.1-percent of the time. Meaning that just over 20-percent of the time, we had a different opinion on which team ended up with possession.

Further, while a faceoff win or loss is assigned to whichever player is taking the faceoff, in our tracking, regardless of team, it was a defender who came up with "possession" 58.1-percent of the time. When it was a forward, it was more likely to be a supporting winger or non-faceoff taking skater than for it to be the center.

"It's just giving your team the best chance to start with the puck," Vince Dunn said. "(A faceoff play) is not always a perfect breakout. Sometimes you're just trying to get the possession going. I think that definitely is really important because a lot of teams now are running so many different plays off the faceoff so just try to start with the puck as much as we can (is the goal)."

Now let's be clear. It is a very big ask to live track faceoffs in a game and get each one 100-percent correct every single time. This isn't about saying official scoring is right or wrong, but more, what you are looking at on a stat sheet might need some deeper analysis before assigning it a great deal of value.

The Process.

So, to understand what we should be looking for, lets understand the process of a faceoff a bit more. The intent of a faceoff can vary greatly depending on where the faceoff is, the handedness of your defenders, the player you are facing on the dot, game state (penalty kill, power play, empty net), etc. Sometimes you need possession. Sometimes you want to execute a set scoring play. Sometimes all you want to do is get the puck out of your zone. These are all things the team will discuss as part of their game prep, and touch base in real-time play-to-play based on what players see as they set up for the faceoff.

"We start with zones and what (handedness) our 'D' are," Geekie said. "If we have two righties versus two lefties or one of each, it'll change our game plan a little bit. After that, we'll go over our scouting report on the team…what they like to do in their forecheck, and how they like to pressure off draws. After that, we'll either call weak side, (the far side where the circle isn't) or strong side and then we have a few set plays that we do, like everyone does, depending on where we are."

Equally important, as Adam Larsson points out, even if every player knows what they are supposed to do, many pucks come down to a 50-50 battle and that's where the other skaters on the ice come into play. Within the game plan, skaters need to battle for possession or provide a teammate time and space to do so.

"I think it's on the D to make a good play with the puck," Dunn said. "But I think it's on the forwards to give us time with the puck. They're the ones who (hold back the opponent), push guys in, or sprint out to create room for us."

So ultimately, a faceoff win may or may not be "awarded" to the player who gained it. And, the context of a game can dictate a different result for every single faceoff.

To that end, as part of understanding play on the dot more completely, the Kraken video staff of Tim Ohashi and Brady Morgan mark and "score" every faceoff in a game. The goal is to get as accurate a view as possible of what is happening with each center in addition to the context around each faceoff.

That helps the coaching staff identify trends because players can have different levels of success game to game. It also segments out one critical piece of that puzzle by looking first at what the centerman contributes before evaluating the resulting edge battles or whether the following play is net positive or net negative.

Faceoffs Do Still Matter.

So we can say a faceoff percentage may not always reflect who does the work to win or lose a faceoff, but we can also say that the ultimate goal of what that number seeks to represent is important. Possession is the name of the game, and if a team can gain it, and more importantly build off of it, we should value that.

A perfect example of this is the game-winner over Edmonton. Yanni Gourde fought on the dot to help his team gain possession and then put himself in the right spot to score a goal.

Ultimately, a number (like faceoff wins) tells us something but not just everything. And we owe it to ourselves to go deeper into the analysis of what goes into a player, team, and season-wide performance.