Models for hockey player ratings with Andrew Thomas and Sam Ventura

Open Source Sports

In the third episode of the show we discuss 'Competing process hazard function models for player ratings in ice hockey' with two guests, Andrew Thomas and Sam Ventura. The discussion ranges from paper details to thoughts on modeling in hockey and sports in general.

Andrew Thomas (@acthomasca) is the Director of Data Science for SMT (SportsMEDIA Technology), and former lead hockey researcher for the Minnesota Wild. He received his PhD in Statistics at Harvard University.

Sam Ventura is the Director of Hockey Research for the Pittsburgh Penguins, and an affiliated faculty member at Carnegie Mellon's Statistics & Data Science department, where he received his PhD in Statistics. Along with Andrew, he is the co-creator of war-on-ice.com and nhlscrapr. Additionally, he is the co-creator of nflscrapr with Maksim Horowitz and Ron Yurko, which no longer works...

Additional resources mentioned include:

• Previous work by Brian Macdonald, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0317
• Total Hockey Rating by Michael Schuckers and James Curro
• Asmae Toumi - 'From Grapes and Prunes to Apples and Apples: Using Matched Methods to Estimate Optimal Zone Entry Decision-Making in the National Hockey League'
• And check out recent work by Micah Blake McCurdy and Evolving Wild