As Rhode Island High School hockey kicked off last night with Smithfield defeating Prout 4-0 in regulation, we, Fans Only Sportz Network, are looking forward to this highly anticipated season. We have a wide variety of new features coming to our broadcasts very soon with one that I am very proud of. During the duration of this season, I will be using a stat tracking spreadsheet that I have created to provide a more precise and up-to-date analytics department for all twelve Division I high school hockey teams.
This spreadsheet will include your basic stats like goals, assists, points, penalties in minutes, faceoff percentage, win-loss-ties, and save percentage. But what other Rhode Island stat tracking websites don’t have compared to mine is some more advanced stats such as power play and penalty kill percentage, shooting percentage for skaters, even strength goals, goals for and goals against per game, and much more as you can see below. [Please note: it says “DIV/0!” on the Excel spreadsheet because there is no data input into the database yet. Also if we are not covering your game for some reason, I will do my best to get as much information on the game as I can.]
Let’s go over some of these new stats that might seem confusing. PPG/GF: power-play goals to goals for addresses how much a team depends on their power play to score goals. For example, let’s say Smithfield is 10 games deep into the season and has a total of 38 goals for the year with 15 goals even strength and 5 goals on the powerplay. My spreadsheet would then express this as a percentage to show that 13.16% of Smithfield’s goals are from the powerplay. S%: shooting percentage is very different compared to the save percentage for goalies. Save percentage only accounts for shots that the goaltender makes an effort to stop and excludes shots that hit the post and go wide of the net. Meanwhile shooting percentage accounts for every shot any given skater takes. That’s why when you go on NHL.com to look at a player’s stats, their shooting percentage is fairly low even though they might have 30+ goals on the year. To put this stat in perspective, the league average shooting percentage in the NHL last year was 9.8%.
These stats can help the viewer of our website explain the analytical reason why a certain team is going on a tear at any given time of the year. Which is the reason why I have always been fascinated with numbers and analytics at a young age. I started this project to advance the broadcasts that we offer here at Fans Only Sportz Network and my career in hopes of working in an analytics/player development department for a sports organization once I have completed college. With that in mind, I will be writing articles about power rankings and top rankings for players in their respective positions while collaborating with our graphic designer on social media posts addressing leaders in goals, assists, points, and save percentage.
As I wrap up here, I’d like to thank Matthew Jolles and Ron Robert for giving me the opportunity to do this huge project for the company and everyone who has supported Fans Only Sportz Network during the past two years that I have been here. If I include any new statistics in the spreadsheet later this year, I will give a quick breakdown of it when the time comes.