Home vs. Away

by Hornecker on Jan 5, 2012 12:28 PM CST

I got to thinking, why is this team so Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde when it comes to home games vs away games. I took the CSSI adjusted stats for every skater that had played more than 10 games at home and 10 games on the road and adjusted weighted them as if every skater had played 21 home and 21 away games. Here are the rather surprising results.

	Home	Away	Difference
Brad Stuart	11.1	8.0	3.1
Cory Emmerton	-1.8	-2.5	0.7
Danny Cleary	4.1	10.5	-6.4
Darren Helm	17.3	19.3	-2.0
Drew Miller	8.2	4.4	3.7
Henrik Zetterberg	14.0	5.0	9.0
Ian White	-1.2	-1.2	0.1
Jakub Kindl	6.8	-1.2	8.0
Jiri Hudler	6.8	9.5	-2.7
Johan Franzen	8.2	4.0	4.2
Jonathan Ericsson	-6.4	-3.5	-2.9
Justin Abdelkader	4.7	2.5	2.2
Nicklas Lidstrom	12.3	-1.0	13.3
Niklas Kronwall	8.8	-2.0	10.8
Pavel Datsyuk	22.8	15.0	7.8
Todd Bertuzzi	-3.8	0.0	-3.8
Tomas Holmstrom	6.6	4.9	1.6
Valtteri Filppula	16.9	16.3	0.6

So what is going on with Cleary, Zetterberg, Kindl, Kronwall, and Datsyuk and especially Lidstrom that they are disappearing on the road? Is it a that they miss home cooking, are they getting worse matchups on the road or are they just sick of taking on inferior teams and embarrassing them in front of their home crowds?

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Comments

Excellent look!

It warrants some additional looking to be sure. I’m very curious to see how much QualComp for these players changes between home games and road games to see if it matches with the idea that Babs isn’t doing well at getting the matchups on the road.

Would you mind if I edited this post to change the difference difference column to show positive and negative (it would turn into home-minus-road, so we could get a better visual on which players are doing better away from the Joe).

by J.J. from Kansas on Jan 5, 2012 12:57 PM CST reply actions

Not at all

by Hornecker on Jan 5, 2012 1:08 PM CST up reply actions

Done, Thanks!

So the players who do better on the road than they do at home are:
Cleary
Helm
Hudler
Ericsson
Bertuzzi

Based on these figures, it seems as though it would still support the concept about a big difference in line matchups at home versus what other teams do against Detroit in their own buildings, especially when you look at the Wings’ stars and what kind of positive home-road ratings differences they’re pulling.

Althought it’s very interesting that Hudler’s better on the road, Filppula is only BARELY better at home, and Zetterberg is significantly better at home.

I’ll need to do more digging later when I get a chance to take an in-depth look at the matchups. Another thing to consider (especially with Helm and Cleary) is penalty kill time. The way that CSSI has worked out, players are actually slightly more likely to pull pluses for PK work than minuses for PK failures. With Helm, the ice time difference is negligible (about 2 more minutes spent on PK this season in away games), but with Cleary, he’s spent 14 1/2 more minutes playing PK in road games than he has in home games. I’ll continue to dig more into it when I get a chance, but I’d welcome any kind of ideas other than what looks like an obvious coaching disparity between home and road games.

by J.J. from Kansas on Jan 5, 2012 1:33 PM CST up reply actions

Another question would be how does the average PP and PK compare for home and road? Are we spending significantly more time on PK while on the road?

by Hornecker on Jan 5, 2012 1:48 PM CST up reply actions

Home:
1 hour, 58 minutes, 55 seconds PP time
1 hour, 51 minutes, 18 seconds SH time
Road:
2 hour, 1 minutes, 46 seconds PP time
2 hour, 3 minutes, 47 seconds SH time

by ChuckyD on Jan 5, 2012 2:04 PM CST up reply actions