A bit more on 5-on-3s

Geek alert. You may not have known, but one member of this writing staff is an Economics minor/sports stat geek. I know a lot more about the Sabermetric stuff that goes on around baseball (death to the RBI!), but some discussion regarding the 5-on-3 power play and it’s apparently pathetic 18.8 percent conversion rate.

Essentially, what I’m here to say is that 18.8 percent rate isn’t bad at all –– at least I don’t think. Just stick with me.

First, here’s the awesome research Scott did yesterday that led him to that 18.8 percent number:

5-on-3
10/22 vs. UMass: 0-1 (0:10)
11/6 vs. Maine: 0-1 (1:10)
11/13 @ Merrimack: 0-1 (0:16)
11/19 @ UNH: 1-1 (1:17)
11/27 vs. Brown: 1-2 (1:06, 0:39*)
12/3 vs. BC: 1-3 (0:33, 0:57, 1:44*)
12/11 @ RPI: 0-1 (0:24)
1/28 @ Maine: 0-1 (0:37)
1/29 @ Maine: 0-2 (1:58, 1:09)
2/11 @ UMass: 0-1 (0:39)
2/19 @ Providence: 0-1 (1:33)
2/25 vs. UVM: 0-1 (1:03)

Total: 3-16 (18.8%)

Now, here’s my thinking –– it really isn’t fair to weigh that first 5-on-3, which lasted 10 seconds, the same way you’d weight that 1:58 of two-man-up time against Maine. But when you crunch the numbers on a simple goals-per-attempt basis, the huge disparity in PP time gets lost there.

Fixing it is actually a pretty simple process. Instead of figuring things out on a goals-per-attempt basis, I re-crunched the numbers to solve for goals-per-two minutes.

If you add up all the time BU has spent two-men up, it comes to 15:15 of total 5-on-3 time this year. From there, you just calculate:

3 goals/[(15:15)/2] = .3934

Essentially, if you gave BU two minutes of 5-on-3 time, based on what they’ve done this year, they’d convert 39.34 percent of the time.

That’s obviously a lot more than 18.8 percent. It’s also much more than the 13.7 percent conversion rate BU has on 5-on-4 power plays. Of course, those 5-on-4s aren’t weighted per two minutes, so you’d expect that number to come up as you average in the power plays that get cut short by penalties, etc.

Now, as for what that means, well, I don’t have the time to go through enough data to figure that out, at least not this week.

But really, that 39.34 percent conversion rate could mean anything, because we really don’t have anything to compare it to. If there’s enough interest, perhaps I’ll go on a little research project over my spring break in two weeks (when I have the down time), and crunch goals-per-2-minutes for the power plays across Hockey East, as well as the 5-on-3s. That way, we can compare, say, how productive BU’s 5-on-3 PP is vs. BC’s 5-on-3 PP on a per-minute basis, which should give us a much better idea as to how much better BC is than BU.