With the Olympic break in full swing, and me on vacation (Note: This post was scheduled a while ago, I’m not magically posting from my cruise. I can’t. And even if I could, I wouldn’t.), there were some volunteers to help keep the content here at BSB in full swing until the NHL returns to action. Over the course of the week, you will be seeing posts from readers here. This post is courtesy of Ben, the lead writer at Bettman’s Nightmare, who analyzes the impact of fighting on the Ranger’s success. For those of you who haven’t gone there yet, you should. Ben does a fantastic job of really crunching numbers with the new hockey metrics, and makes sense of it all.
Let’s be honest: the Rangers have rarely been known for their pugilism. Yes, we’ve had Kocur, Barnaby, Colton Orr, Gresch, Kris King, Troy Mallette, Lou Fontinato, even Tie Domi. But so many of them were simply the “fighter-in-residence”; the Rangers were no Flyers from the 70s, Red Wings from the 80s, or Blackhawks of the 90s.
Despite all of this, in recent years we’ve given some attention to adding a rough edge, perhaps in response to the Flyers ridiculous cache of goons. Avery, Brashear, Voros, Boyle, Prust are all guys that throw down and populate our 3rd and 4th lines (if not the 1st and 2nd, in Avery’s case). Have we improved by providing our fans extra knuckle on their MSG sandwich?
Taking the data from game scoresheets and the wonderful site www.hockeyfights.com, I decided to throw together information on this year’s fights to see if, on the surface, they appear to be helping.
First things first, I was curious to see whether the fight was won by our player. Thankfully, Hockey Fights uses a nifty little polling system to determine whether the fight was won, lost, or a draw. I’ll combine this later with our next part of the calculation.
Next, I took down the time of the fight and determined the number of goals scored for and against the Rangers for the remainder of the period. In determining whether the fight provided a “boost,” I concluded that it is much harder to isolate a fight as a sole or main cause for a “boost” after a period break. Torts could get inspiring, who knows? If the score over the remainder was in the Rangers favor, I gave a +1; if it was not, I gave it a -1. If it was tied, it received a 0.
It got more complicated when I considered multiple fights, or fights close together. In those cases, I put them together as one event to be sure they didn’t count twice positively or negatively. More importantly, if there were two fights before a 1 to 0 finish to the period, I only counted the latter fight as a +1. In the end, I had “Fight +/-“ for the team up to this point in the season.
My argument for this basic metric is that I understand that the fight is not the only influence to positive play, but that over a substantial number of fights we should see the “boost” emerge. I was also curious to see whether winning the fight mattered to this “boost.” It’s worth noting that while I might be giving fighting too much credit for positive scores, I’m likewise subtracting for negative scores.
To add some spice to my life (and sarcasm to the current post), I kept track of the Ranger fights’ win-loss-draw record, as well as individual win-loss-draw records. Furthermore, I had individual player Fight +/-, and the Rangers’ Fight +/- when our player won the fight, lost it, or fought to a draw. So, here we go:
Rangers Win-Loss-Draw…39 Fights, 12 Wins, 18 Losses, 9 Draws
- Rangers Win-Loss record in games where a fight occurred: 11 Wins, 14 Losses
Rangers Fight +/- (F+/-)…-3
F+/- from fights “won”…-8
F+/- from fights “lost”…+5
F+/- from fights “drawn”…0
Sean Avery – 4W-2L-1D F+/-…-4
Donald Brashear – 3-4-2…+1
Aaron Voros – 2-4-4…+1
Brandon Prust – 1-1-1…-1
Brian Boyle – 1-2-0…0
Brandon Dubinsky – 1-0-0…0
Dane Byers – 0-1-0…0
Ryan Callahan – 0-1-0…0
Marian Gaborik – 0-1-0…0
Matt Gilroy – 0-1-0…0
Wade Redden – 0-1-0…0
As you can see, in the bigger picture the Rangers don’t appear to benefit from fighting. In fact, of the teams I have looked at in this manner so far (including the Penguins, Flyers, Ducks, Rangers, and Flames), only the Flames registered a positive composite F+/- (of +1). The Penguins finished the lowest, with a -5.
Other observations: there doesn’t seem to be a correlation for us between winning fights and playing well afterwards (which is a good thing since we’re 12-18-9 in fights anyway). We seem to like getting beat up. Also, Avery is our best fighter, yet we don’t seem to get a “boost” from him. At all.
Essentially, no, we can’t “fight” our way into the playoffs.
