NIHL North: The League by Numbers – Breaking Down the Statistics

(Image permission: Duncan Speirs)

BILLINGHAM, UK – To add something different to the media output in NIHL North, new Pro Hockey News contributor Anthony Lowe takes a look at the key statistics produced by teams in Moralee D1 so far this season.

The stats explored in this blog will be powerplay and penalty kill percentages and their combined special team effectiveness, shots on goal and shots against, shooting percentage, five-on-five goals for and against and five-on-five differentials.

Special Teams

With the abundance of penalty calls that seem to be taking place with the new rules and new interpretations, special teams are more important than previous seasons.

Sheffield Steeldogs lead the league in powerplay percentage with 36.38% success rate. They are followed by Solway Sharks at 33.33%. Nottingham Lions sit at the foot of this particular table with a powerplay conversion rate of just 9.68%.

Onto the penalty kill and things do look up for the Lions who sit sixth in this area. Hull Pirates top the pile with a 95.45% penalty kill, followed by Blackburn Hawks who sit at 95%. Billingham Stars and Solway have the most porous penalty kills at present with each having a PK at 66.67% and allowing a goal every third penalty kill.

Combining these two stats brings you your special team effectiveness. Sheffield and Hull are first and second, as you would expect as they led the two disciplines, while Billingham are looking up at everyone else.

Shot Statistics

These can be skewed slightly as teams behind in the third period will often look to get pucks on net or, if you are really analytics savvy, you may know that some teams like to get pucks on net early to bump up the shot count. However as a general rule of thumb if you’re shooting more than your opponent you will have more chance of scoring.

The Sharks lead the way in terms of shots per game having 52.67 per game make it on net. Solihull Barons are not far behind on this with 52.6. Nottingham hold onto last place for this one which is hardly surprising given that they took eight shots in a full game earlier in the season.

Looking at shots conceded and Nottingham allow the most shots against with a whopping 60.67 shots allowed per game. Sheffield are the stingiest team with an impressive 25.25 shots against per game. When you subtract the shots against from the shots for figure it gives the shot differentials. This shows a clean split of five with positive numbers and five with negative numbers.

Five-on-Five

The purest form of the game is five-on-five hockey. No penalty trouble, just the two teams at their best slugging it out. Again this breaks down into goals for, against and differential.

At full strength, Telford Tigers score the most goals with seven markers per game through their four outings. Nottingham sit at a lowly one goal per game with a full complement of players on the ice, while they also concede a massive 9.67 per game giving them a five-on-five differential of -8.67.

Sheffield’s stinginess in terms of shots against seems to pay dividends as they are the only team to give up less than one goal per game at five-on-five, conceding just 0.75 goals per game in this way. However, it is actually Hull who lead the way in five on five differential with plus 5.5 goals per game.

What does it mean for this weekend?

On Saturday, joint fifth placed Solway take on fourth placed Solihull in Dumfries. Aggregating the positions of the teams in all of the tables above however, would swap those numbers with Solway. Arguably the game of the weekend.

Also on Saturday, newly-promoted Sutton Sting take on the struggling Whitley Warriors. The North East side sit ninth in the table and the same when aggregating positions. Sutton are currently joint fifth, but the game statistics above suggest that they may drop as they sit eighth by the numbers.

Sunday sees Blackburn (6th) host Solihull (4th) in what the table would suggest may be a close game. Aggregate positions would dictate that the away side should take this one, but the mini mountain in Lancashire may be difficult to scale for the Barons.

Finally our least difficult game to predict sees last place Nottingham play host to leaders Hull. Those positions stay the same when we look at the numbers with Hull being statistically the best team in the league and Nottingham holding everyone else up. Surely an easy win for the Yorkshire side?