Three Point Games

Every year during the World Juniors we hear two prevailing opinions on prospect analysis from fans and analysts: 1) it's too small of a sample size to mean anything and 2) this player will excel in the NHL because of his WJC performance. Obviously, there is a middle ground between these two perspectives, but to my knowledge, it hasn’t been explored in great detail. In this piece, I’ll be looking at what we can learn from World Juniors data. To perform this analysis, I’ll be using NHL career data from Rob Vollman link (I’m using a slightly older version cut off at the end of the 16-17 season), world juniors data collected from elite prospects, and draft data via hockey reference. The first decision I made was to consider only the World Junior performance from players that have been drafted. Although this is limiting, I think it’s safe to cut off the data to only players truly considered NHL prospects. The first exploratory step to look into is the relationship between Wo...

I recently wrote a fan post on Broad Street Hockey breaking down how the Flyers have drafted since the lockout, as well as some general leaguewide draft analysis. Here's a link . Additionally, several of these graphs or a close equivalent were featured in this article  on the Islanders draft history by Arthur Staple from The Athletic. I also wrote a tutorial on using gganimate and R to create shot location game gifs. This can be found at  http://barloweanalytics.com/gganimate.html