[The Athletic] Are the Blackhawks better than numbers suggest? A public vs. private analytics debate
December 9, 2025
[The Athletic] Are the Blackhawks better than numbers suggest? A public vs. private analytics debate
3 comments
Numbers analytics numbers analytics.
The team is a solid team still building up. As long as they keep practicing and playing hard they will be better next year than this. And we just keep building and playing as a team until we win it all. Fuck da numbas
Hockey is probably the sport where analytics means the least. Analytics doesn’t account for a weird bounce off the walls that leads to an OT goal that advances a team in the playoffs vs being eliminated.
Skill matters, but a lot of hockey is a roll of the dice and the skill is there to put you in a position to have those dice rolls go your way.
That said, the skill coming up/developing is there. It’ll just take some time. This team will look very different with Frondell, Kantserov, Lardis, etc. joining the mix. I’m not worried.
The tl,dr: the private advanced statistics that teams have access to are better than the public one used by the sites we all know and love. The reason is those private trackers have more context involved with each scoring chance (ie, what happened immediately before the chance, like whether it was a pass or not, and who is getting the scoring chance) as they are not generated solely by the league’s automatic puck tracking technology, though that has gotten much better as the tech improves.
As it pertains to the Hawks, the internal and private xG% and scoring chance models believe the Hawks are better than their dismal 31st place in the public, but its closer than some would like to claim and the Hawks are still bottom five in those as well.
3 comments
Numbers analytics numbers analytics.
The team is a solid team still building up. As long as they keep practicing and playing hard they will be better next year than this. And we just keep building and playing as a team until we win it all. Fuck da numbas
Hockey is probably the sport where analytics means the least. Analytics doesn’t account for a weird bounce off the walls that leads to an OT goal that advances a team in the playoffs vs being eliminated.
Skill matters, but a lot of hockey is a roll of the dice and the skill is there to put you in a position to have those dice rolls go your way.
That said, the skill coming up/developing is there. It’ll just take some time. This team will look very different with Frondell, Kantserov, Lardis, etc. joining the mix. I’m not worried.
The tl,dr: the private advanced statistics that teams have access to are better than the public one used by the sites we all know and love. The reason is those private trackers have more context involved with each scoring chance (ie, what happened immediately before the chance, like whether it was a pass or not, and who is getting the scoring chance) as they are not generated solely by the league’s automatic puck tracking technology, though that has gotten much better as the tech improves.
As it pertains to the Hawks, the internal and private xG% and scoring chance models believe the Hawks are better than their dismal 31st place in the public, but its closer than some would like to claim and the Hawks are still bottom five in those as well.