When people ask me how to get into sports analytics, I always suggest starting with a question that they’re interested in exploring and using that question as a framework for learning the domain knowledge and the technical skills they need. I feel comfortable giving this advice because it’s exactly how I got into hockey analytics: I was curious about goalie pulling, and I couldn’t find enough data to satisfy my curiosity. There are plenty of articles on when teams should pull their goalies, but aside from a 2015 article on FiveThirtyEight by Michael Lopez and Noah Davis, I couldn’t find much data on when NHL teams were actually pulling their goalies and if game trends were catching up to the mathematical recommendations. I presented some data on the topic at the Seattle Hockey Analytics Conference in March 2019, but the following analysis is broader and includes more seasons of data.
Read the entire article on Hockey-Graphs here.
The Tableau dashboard that accompanies this article should show below and is also available here.