>I knew the answer to this one because I had posed it myself a few years
>back.  But it has always seemed to me to be the wrong way to keep track
>of it.  A 6-second power play is not very meaningful in that you will
>almost never have an opportunity to actually score during that 6
>seconds.  To me a much more meaningful statistic would be a ratio of PP
>goals to PP seconds (or turn it over as seconds/goals for readibility
>sake, or even convert back to minutes for the ratios).  A 6 second power
>play during which you do not score barely affects that ratio and this
>makes more sense to me.

While I agree that it is probably more meaningful, it is also quite a bit
more difficult to figure out. That is why we will probably never see a
switch made.

>Someone once suggested that when you actually kept track of things this
>way (PP/minute of PP time versus PP/opportunity) you got virtually the
>same result.  Maybe, maybe not - it still would make more sense to me.
>And notice how that clears up the problem of the 5 minute major.  So why
>not?

The only experience I have, in relative terms, is from a league whose
stats I did last year. In that case, the standings remained identical
on both the power-play and the penalty-kill side.

Without going into it too deeply, I think what happens is that the odd
6-second power-plays are cancelled out by the odd 5-minute power-plays,
and in the end everybody ends up with an average power play time somewhere
between 1:30 and 1:40, typically.

The reasons why not, then, are two-fold.

1. People recognize what the percentages mean, in terms of whether a team's
power play or penalty-killing is good. We know that a 20% power play is
pretty good, while anything under 10% means you should start
declining penalties. There is no such recognition with power-play
time, for the most
part. I've done enough with it to know, but I'm probably one of the few.

2. Power-play time is much more time consuming to figure out than simple
opportunities. To figure out power-play opportunities, all you have to do
is check off any penalty that causes a power play (giving majors as many
checks as they require, of course). In most cases, you can do that within
about two minutes after a game. It can get messy, if there are multiple
penalties.

Figuring out power-play time, OTOH, is much more involved. This is because
not only does one have to figure out if a penalty caused a power play, you
now have to determine whether the power play (a) ran the full 2 minutes,
(b) was shortened by another penalty, (c) was shortened by a goal or
(d) some combination of b and c. Adding and dividing times is also
more difficult to do than simply adding whole numbers together. If a
game has a
lot of penalties (and power-play goals), figuring out the power-play time
can be quite a lengthy process.

I know Stat Crew does compile power-play times, but other than that they
are very difficult to find. collegehockeystats.com doesn't seem to have
them anywhere. If a league is in a situation where everyone is using
StatCrew (or a similar program), they can probably get that data, but if
their crews are still doing stats by hand, it is probably too difficult.

John

--
   John Edwards - Professional Stats Geek - [log in to unmask]
                Carleton Football - Undefeated since 1998
The opinions expressed are mine alone, because everybody else says I'm weird.