The 20/21 Season!!!

How excited are we all for the season to start this week?!?! Wisconsin vs Notre Dame kicks us off on Friday, and over the coming months, we will be treated to both the men and women playing mostly conference only schedules! Let's dive into how we at HockeyU will treat the upcoming season!

The Model

I planned to make my first improvements to the model, namely, implementing a Monte Carlo simulation, to more accurately sim the results of individual games as well as simulating the outcomes of things like standings, conference tourneys, and the NCAA tournament. Unfortunately, due to a combination of the pandemic as well as schoolwork piling up on me, I'll unfortunately have to postpone these improvements for the next season. We will still continue to use Oliver in it's current form for this season with data from last season now being included! With little to no intra-conference games being played, we might see some difficulty in accurately reflecting team strength since there isn't any of those games being played, however the underlying metrics for each team should paint a picture for us regardless of strength of schedule, which will be thrown off due to scheduling. I'm curious to compare! Also, I'm very hopeful that I can apply Oliver to the women's game also! Hopefully CHN fully updates the stats pages for this season, which will allow me to include them fully.

Charts and Other Content

I will continue to update the charts as the season progresses! I plan to add a couple new charts, mostly related to special teams play, and those should roll out soon. Win Shares charts will also be updated every weekend, just like the scatter plots. I also plan to try and write more articles and blog posts to complement the graphics and charts I post on Twitter. Hopefully, this will engage you all and drive more eyeballs to the site! I'm currently also working on getting Win Shares data for past seasons up, as well as Scatter/Win Shares charts up for USports! After all, the maple leaf is in the logo :) As always, if you have any comments, suggestions, or feedback, please don't hesitate to talk to me through email or Twitter (both can be found on the About page).