Sports Reference Blog

Today on Hockey Reference we're rolling out two new stats for goalie pages: Adjusted Save Percentage (SV%+) and Goals Saved Above Average (GSAA). First, you can check Broad Street Hockey for a great explanation of adjusted save percentage and goals saved, but for a simple look, consider the 2012-13 NHL season. League-wide, there were 41,827 shots overall and 3,684 goals scored, for a goals against average of 8.81%. Vezina Trophy winner Sergei Bobrovsky had a goals against average of 6.87% -- 29% better than league average, giving him a SV%+ of 129. Taking that 29% better performance into account combined with the number of shots he faced, we say he saved 21.48 goals more than an average goalie would have, given equal playing time.

These stats are especially helpful for comparing goalies across eras: Patrick Roy led the league in save percentage in the 1991-92 season with a .914 SV%; in the 2012-2013 season that would have placed him as the 26th best goalie between Ben Scrivens and Jonas Hiller. However, we can look at his SV%+ of 130 for that year and see that he was actually 30% better than the league average at stopping goals -- better than Bobrovsky, even.

Note that SV%+ has a minimum requirement of 4 shots faced per team game, so that we don't have goalies who stopped 7 of 7 shots faced in their single period played skewing the results. These stats are now up for goalies as far back as the 1983-84 season (the first year we have shots against data for the NHL), and for the entirety of the WHA (1972-1979), and will be updated throughout the year.

You may have seen our in-game Tweets and the win probability graphs on our box score pages -- we now have a detailed explanation of the win probability methodology from Neil Paine if you're curious how it works.

Using the play-by-play data that powers our play finder, I've built detailed season split pages for each team on offense and defense, as well as league total splits and league average splits for the year. Now you can compare your team's performance by field position to the league's, or see which team is best in the fourth quarter. If you can think of a situation you want to see that's not covered here, leave a comment & we'll see what we can do.

We often get emails about some of the more... let's say "esoteric" positional abbreviations in the P-F-R database (the most confusing of which date back to the earliest days of professional football). Here's a handy guide in case you ever get stuck wondering what in the world some of these positions are:

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Mike Trout Statistics and History - Baseball-Reference.com.

Ignoring for the moment there is another game to play tonight, I ran the sim scores this afternoon and uploaded the pages. I'll get around to rerunning them tomorrow, probably for the Rays and Rangers. Here is our explanation of sim scores.

In the interest of unifying our college football and pro football sites a bit better, we've added draft information and links to pro stats for college players from Karim Abdul-Jabbar to Eric Zeier.

Batting Game Finder -- - Baseball-Reference.com.

The batting game finder now has criteria and sort options for BA, SLG and OBP, so you can do things like find out easily how often Ted Williams when 3 for 3 or better (37 times) or how many times Barry Bonds reached base in every PA of a game (no min.) 153 times.

The other things is we will be adding this weekend (should show up Sat. and just for 2013) a split for the player results in PA's where they swung at the first pitch and PA's where they took the first pitch. We'll do it for our historical data when we run the whole shebang at the end of the season.

Thanks to the research of Neil Paine, we now have lists of team executives and owners dating back to 1936, a page for each executive, and owner/executive lists for each team. These lists are complete for active franchises, though we have partial data for defunct franchises as well.

Sports Reference Videos - YouTube.

One of the challenges of a site this big and dense is making users aware of what they can do. To accomplish this we are working on a series of how-to videos for various site features. Our first video is an overview of everything you can do from our baseball-reference.com player pages.
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Retroactive All-Star Game Project: Vote for the 1916-1932 All-Stars | SABR.

SABR has a fun little project up where they are collecting fan votes for pre-1933 "All-Star Games". They will then simulate the games and post the results.