Hitters and Hittees in 2013

June 23, 2013

In Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals last night, the Blackhawks came away with a 3-1 win over the Bruins. Chicago outshot Boston, took fewer penalties, and won more faceoffs. But one interesting battle won by the Bruins was in the number of hits delivered. Boston players were credited with 53 hits, whereas Chicago only registered 22. Interestingly, Boston has outhit Chicago (often by a large amount) in every game except Game 1, in which Chicago has 61 hits to Boston’s 59.

For each NHL game, you can find an event summary (like this one) which provides the total number of hits credited to each player. What these summaries do not provide is the number of times each player is the recipient of a hit from the other team. These hit-recipient data do exist, however. In this post I’m interested in looking at which players received the most punishment in the 2013 regular season, and whether there are distinct patterns which can teach us about in-game strategies of teams and players.

Hitters and Hittees in 2013

Before looking at who got hit in 2013, I’ll first give some basic stats about who was doing the most hitting. The table below shows the top ten players with the most hits in the lockout shortened 2013 season. The number in parentheses is the averaged number of hits per game, based on the number of games played by the player in 2013. As you can see, the more frequent hitters are third and fourth line forwards who are commonly matched up against the top line of the opposing team. What is also interesting is that there is only one defenseman, Luke Schenn, in the top ten.

Perhaps even more interesting are the players who received the most hits. The table below is similar to the previous one, except that the numbers on the left are the number of hits received by each of these players, rather than the number doled out.

The first thing that jumps out to me about this list is that more than half of the players on it are defensemen. It would seem to me that defensemen shouldn’t be targeted to me hit, since they’re less risk offensively. But it could be that most hits occur during scrums for pucks on the end-boards, and that defensemen often get caught up in these scrums. It also is the case that defensemen play more minutes than forwards, so they have more opportunities to be targeted. That, however, makes the earlier finding that defensemen aren’t usually the most prolific hitters even more curious. I don’t have the time-on-ice data collected yet, but once I do I’ll be able to say more accurately how many hits each player delivers and receives for each minute played.

Hittees by Team

Similar to before, what stands out from the team-by-team breakdown is that the most hit player on two-thirds of teams was a defensemen. Another thing that stands out about the table above is that only a couple of players on this list stand out as offensive threats whom the defense should want to target. This highlights my need to further analyze these numbers by normalizing based on time-on-ice.

But even without taking into account playing time, these numbers have implications. Given that they are hit more often, defensemen may be more prone to being injured. Also, the potential long term effect of these hits on the health of defensemen, particularly in their brains, may mirror (though to a lesser extent) the health problems suffered by lineman in professional football.

Get hit more, win more?

The last thing I’m going to look at is which teams were hit the most times in 2013. These statistics are below.

If I had to make a guess, I could say that the teams with the best records probably should be the ones with the fewest hits received. Teams stay healthier when they aren’t hit, and teams with more skill should probably be better at avoiding being hit. This table seems to indicate that this hypothesis probably doesn’t hold up to the empirical data. We have the two Cup Finalists among the teams that received the most hits in 2013, and one of the Conference Finalists (Los Angeles) leading the pack.

If anything, there appears to be a positive correlation between winning games and being hit. Looking at the simple correlation coefficient, I find that there a 0.378 correlation between the number of hits that teams received in 2013 and their number of points in the final standings. When I regress the number of points on the number of hits received in a simple linear regression, I find that this relationship is significant at the 0.05 level, but yields the counter-intuitive conclusion that 40 additional hits received correlates with one extra point in the standings (beta = 0.025, sd = 0.011). I’ll have to do some more thinking about this, and maybe I’ll follow up later by looking for closely at how hits given and received translate into wins.

Also, if you’re wondering which hitter/hittee combo was most common in 2013, the answer is Toronto’s Dion Phaneuf hitting New Jersey’s David Clarkson 9 times in the three games they played against each other.