Just finished our fantasy hockey projections for all skaters heading into next season. You'll never guess who we have ranked #1 overall. Huge surprise. Connor "Valeri Nichushkin" McDavid

We have very exciting news to share with all of you! This past Friday was the last day at our respective day jobs. We are now full-time employees of Evolving Hockey! Going forward, maintaining, improving, and creating things for EH will be our full-time job. A thread... For the better part of 10 years, we've both worked 40 hour-a-week jobs to pay the bills and support our respective hobbies. Around 6 years ago, one of those hobbies became hockey stats. After we created Evolving Hockey in the summer of 2018, it became something of a 2nd job.

It's funny how Wild fans are mad at the Eriksson Ek contract.

It's been a while since we've ranted about how terrible points are as an evaluation tool, but I think we might need to crank that dial up again. Here's the first tweet: points are bad for player evaluation in the NHL. Most of the time they're really bad.

Funny story - for Father’s Day our mom had the idea that we all combine our powers and buy our dad a smoker - like a wood pellet slow cooker grill thing. She had it shipped to our place and we assemble it. Problem is - the grill was damaged during shipping - multiple dents, etc. So, our Father’s Day surprise was partially ruined but oh well we’ll return it. Our mom emails the grill company with pictures asking how we return it - they reply saying we should just try and knock the dents out lol. They then say they can send a “replacement part”.

I've been wanting to tweet about rink bias adjustments to the NHL's event coordinates for a while - specifically regarding the data on Evolving-Hockey - so I'm just going to start... We currently do not adjust for event location recording biases at the different NHL arenas. Is this because we don't think it's a problem? Not at all. It's because, simply, our xG model was made before we could actually adjust for rink bias (like, actually do it ourselves).

There are a few teams that really have nothing to offer Seattle in expansion. Like terrible players outside their protected lists (and in a few cases, like, even in their protected lists). The forwards available, in general, are quite underwhelming. And even if someone like Gourde is available, I have to imagine TB is going to trade him to a team that can protect him ahead of the draft instead of leaving him exposed.

There's a lot of discourse surrounding "analytics" consistently being wrong about the Islanders after their series win tonight. I think that's just a bit misleading.

A quick little thread... Since '18-19 (which is the period being discussed), the Islanders have played a total of 41 games against 8 opponents in the playoffs. That's half of a normal regular season. And 22 of those games (including 4 for their play-in round) were in '19-20.

Here are our early NHL Awards picks for the 20-21 season. There is obviously a lot of season left - these are our frontrunners right now.

Hart:
1. Matthews / McDavid / Girard
2. Stephenson / Eriksson Ek Norris:
1. Girard / Makar
2. Petry / Brodin / Faulk

Seeing some discussion about PDO and whatnot today. A reminder: that stat is kind of just made up and doesn’t really mean anything actually. To clarify: just because a team has a higher PDO doesn’t necessary mean they are getting “lucky”, or we should expect them to “regress”. The opposite is true re: unlucky. If a team has good shooters and good goaltending etc, they may just be a good team with a high PDO.

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We've hinted at this over the years, but before our current hockey stats obsession took hold (sometime in the fall of '16), we had a different obsession that we devoted all of our time to: music. We've been on hiatus so to speak, but we're getting back into it now. Given the uncertainty of the current global situation, the absence of hockey, and a natural stopping point for us in general, we're planning to revisit our musical endeavors. Of course, we will still be maintaining @EvolvingHockey - nothing will change there.