Introducing the Michigan penalty kill tracking project

Welcome to Fresh Ice! Let's talk penalty killing.

Hello and welcome to Fresh Ice! Thank you so much for supporting me and my work. Haven’t signed up yet?

If you don’t know me, hi! I’m Bailey, a recent graduate from the University of Michigan where I covered the hockey team for The Michigan Daily for the last two seasons. When the season ended abruptly in March, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t done writing about college hockey yet, so here we are.

I was supposed to intern at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this summer, but it was postponed due to the pandemic. Instead, I decided to focus on creating my own internship of sorts and dive into tracking and analytics. That’s where this newsletter comes in.

I’ve got some big plans for this space, even before games happen, but I’m going to kick things off with a project I’ve been working on for the last six-ish weeks: a tracking project focusing on Michigan’s penalty kill across the last two seasons.

How this all came together…

This project was born when I decided I wanted to know more about the changes Kris Mayotte made to Michigan’s penalty kill when he joined Mel Pearson’s coaching staff last offseason. It took off from there.

I realized that to see the changes, I’d have to know what they were running before. That meant I needed to track every minute of penalty killing in all 36 games from each season.

Very cool people who are much smarter than me, like Corey Sznajder, do a lot of excellent tracking work in the NHL, and I was inspired to bring a much, much smaller-scale tracking project to college hockey. There’s much less publicly-available data for college hockey, which I think makes tracking projects even more interesting and useful.

So, knowing essentially nothing about what I was getting myself into, I dove into the footage. There ended up being 27 games each season available to watch, so I ended up with 343 minutes of data to track across 54 games. It pales in comparison to something like Charlie O’Connor’s Philadelphia Flyers forecheck tracking project, from which I took a great deal of inspiration, but it was enough of an undertaking for me.

While going through the footage, I tracked basically everything you can think of — forecheck systems, defensive zone formations, shots, blocks, how the puck entered and exited the zone, and so much more. In total, I tracked just under 4,000 individual events.

There are things I didn’t track, like player-specific data (for example, which player blocked the shot) and zone time, mostly because I wanted to keep things relatively simple for myself at first — and because the broadcasts I was working with didn’t always have scoreboards for me to track time. Even without those data points, I still feel that my data provides a comprehensive look at what Michigan did on the penalty kill in each of the last two seasons.

How will the data be shared?

To start with, I think it’s important to provide a general overview of the systems and tactics used each season to understand what led to the underlying numbers. On Wednesday, I’ll post a breakdown of the system used in 2018-19, and on Friday I’ll share a breakdown of the system used in 2019-20.

After that, I’ll dive into the numbers and share the biggest changes, trends and takeaways from the data. Essentially, this will be what I started this project to learn: what changed in the systems and results when Mayotte implemented his penalty kill system.

Once that post goes live, I’d love to hear from all of you about any other questions you have or things you’d like me to dive into! I want to be as educational as possible and add value with my content, so if there’s a question you have about Michigan’s penalty kill, please send it my way either here or on Twitter and I’ll see what I can do to answer it.

As a quick disclaimer, I’m not an expert on any of this — I’m just a reporter who’s watched an alarming amount of hockey in the last two years and reads books like Hockey Plays and Strategies for fun. My hope is to take you all with me on my journey to learn more about this and hopefully get everything mostly right along the way.

Again, I can’t thank you all enough for reading and subscribing. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do so to be the first to get your eyes on everything I produce — my first real story will be in your inboxes at 9 a.m. on Wednesday!