🏒 Connor Bedard and the value of seeing the game a different way
My Week in Sport(s): box scores as 'mental prisons', JuJu Watkins and Yoshinobu Yamamoto's 'tunnelling'
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
In this edition:
🏒 A variety of approaches to looking at Connor Bedard’s rookie season
🏀 JuJu Watkins’ first season of college basketball
⚾️ The deception of Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s splitter
🏒 Connor Bedard and the value of seeing the game a different way
Last year, I covered a pair of ‘generational’ first-overall draft picks who had yet to begin their careers in North America’s elite professional leagues.
So far in 2024, we’ve (briefly) checked back in with the NBA’s Victor Wembanyama in this newsletter — but haven’t yet mentioned the NHL’s Connor Bedard.
Bedard actually missed a significant proportion of the Chicago Blackhawks’ 2023-24 season — which is set to finish in a couple of weeks — with a broken jaw.
But in the 61 games he has appeared in, the Canadian who lit up junior hockey has produced enough to assuage any fears that he would end up a ‘bust’.
In trying to establish a benchmark for his production before the season started, I performed some pretty simple analysis: looking at the combined goals and assists recorded by 18- and 19-year-old NHL rookies this century, and adjusting them for the number of minutes they played per game.
This exercise made it clear that expecting Bedard to set records as a teenage forward was unrealistic; there has only ever been one Sidney Crosby in the modern history of the NHL.
And Bedard has in fact ended up right around where I expected:
Through 61 games, he has averaged exactly 2.9 points per 60 minutes played.
There are obvious ways we can improve this analysis.
The NHL scoring environment has changed markedly over the years, with goals easier to come by in some periods than others. Standardising Bedard’s points total to allow for comparisons across eras is an important first step.
Helpfully, Paul Pidutti has already done this work for us in a piece on the Daily Faceoff website. Bedard ends up in about the same place after standardising his points total: some distance behind Crosby (and Connor McDavid), but right alongside Kane.
Why not come at it from a completely different angle, though?
A phrase from a completely different field — which I came across via the economist and writer Dan Davies — has been stuck in my head recently.
One of his favourite aphorisms — used to capture how the conventions of financial reporting can distort and limit analysis of a company’s underlying business model — is that “every accounting system is a mental prison”.
And I’ve been thinking about whether you could make a case that traditional sporting box scores are ‘mental prisons’, too.
Statistics like goals and assists appear prominently in hockey box scores because they are easy to count — and in turn become, as Davies puts it in his context, “the things which can be backed up with numbers”.
At the same time, there are other important aspects of the game which are more difficult to track; these don’t end up in box scores — and therefore claims about them are much more difficult to evidence1 via traditional means.
They are difficult to track, but not impossible — and today’s advanced public analysis of the NHL would look very different if Corey Sznajder (Corey S.) of All Three Zones had never bothered trying.
Like in football, the task of a hockey team in possession can also be roughly split into two phases: territorial progression and chance creation.
Box scores capture the latter reasonably adequately via goals, assists and shots — but don’t even attempt to track the former.
In his work at All Three Zones, though, Sznajder effectively rejects the simple mental model of the game you could infer from traditional counting stats — and the ‘microstats’ he tracks for a sample of games every season provide a fascinating window into puck progression in particular.
Look at the simplest of Sznajder’s progression metrics — controlled entries into the offensive zone with possession of the puck, and successful exits from the defensive zone — and Bedard already appears to stack up well compared to all NHL players at his position, not just rookies.
According to the latest data available from All Three Zones, Bedard — in the Blackhawks games which Sznajder has tracked2 — is right up there with zone-entry machines like McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon.
The 18-year-old is averaging around 19 controlled entries into the offensive zone per 60 minutes at even strength this year — a bit ahead of McDavid, and not far behind McKinnon.
Coming out of his own defensive zone, he drops behind both stars — but his rate of successful exits per 60 remains not far off the average for qualifying forwards.
At every step so far on the path from basic to more advanced analysis, then, Bedard seems to have been basically as good as advertised.
But we shouldn’t stop here, either.
Everything we’ve looked at to this point has focused on Bedard’s ability on the puck — and it would be foolish to base our appraisal of his game entirely on just the most visible aspects of it.
As with any team invasion sport, there’s a risk in hockey that we significantly undervalue players’ out-of-possession actions.
And a number of ‘all-in-one’ player-valuation models suggest that Bedard is giving up about as much value without the puck this season as he’s contributing when he has it.
These models rely heavily on the volume and quality of shots taken and conceded by a player’s team when they’re on the ice — and the Blackhawks have been leaking scoring chances all year in Bedard’s minutes.
The imbalance between defensive-zone exits and offensive-zone entries in Sznajder’s microstats hints that the forward’s off-puck positioning may be one of the major reasons for that.
It’s unlikely that he’s not skilled enough to bring the puck out of the defensive zone3; he’s probably just not getting into the right positions to pick it up and help his team by doing so.
As with Wembanyama, it’s important at this point to step back and remember how young Bedard is. Given that he doesn’t actually turn 19 until July, he will have another full season in the NHL as a teenager.
Both rookies will also be getting even more support next season in the form of another top draft selection.
This is particularly crucial for Bedard — who, according to analysis performed by Dom Luszczyszyn of The Athletic earlier this season, has played with a much lower quality of teammate than many other recent first-overall picks.
And the Blackhawks should have a golden opportunity to pair another potential star4 with him with a view to creating another of the league’s great scoring duos — like the Penguins did with Crosby, and the Oilers did with McDavid.
But Bedard has been good enough already in enough facets of the game that NHL fans are already on notice — whether they look at the game through the simplest of lenses, or use more advanced measures like Sznajder’s to try and understand its mechanisms more deeply.
🏀 Run the Numbers
Can women’s college basketball in the United States sustain its narrative momentum when its main character leaves for the WNBA in a matter of weeks?
Those with a commercial investment in the sport don’t think there’s anything to worry about, according to Sportico’s Jacob Feldman:
USC freshman JuJu Watkins is one of its next tier of stars — and, given that the WNBA imposes more strict draft eligibility criteria than the NBA, she will be back in the college game again next season.
As Kevin Pelton of ESPN noted before USC’s loss to UConn earlier this week — at the Elite Eight stage of the ongoing NCAA tournament — not even Clark carried as heavy an offensive load for her team as Watkins did this year:
And, in truth, it may have been too much for her at times: she was an above-average, but not elite, scorer according to Her Hoops Stats’ efficiency metric, Points Per Play5.
But the considerable height she has for her position means she can also be a much more involved and impactful defender than most other lead ball-handlers. With a number of years yet before she joins the professional ranks, it will be fascinating to see what sort of basketball player JuJu Watkins becomes6.
⚾️ Watch the Games
The 2024 Major League Baseball season is now underway — and, with it, one of my absolute favourite types of social media content has returned to my feed.
Rob Friedman — better known as the Pitching Ninja — does a better job than anyone in showing how how the world’s best pitchers make it difficult for hitters by ‘tunnelling’ their different types of pitches.
There was a perfect example in Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s second regular-season start for the Dodgers — which went considerably better than his first did.
Yamamoto’s splitter (which drops around 32 inches on its path to the batter) is made much more dangerous by the fact that — until it’s about halfway to the plate — it can look identical to his standard four-seam fastball (which drops only 14).
And in the top of the first inning against the St Louis Cardinals last weekend, he struck out Paul Goldschmidt by tunnelling these two pitch types extremely effectively.
With a two-strike count, Goldschmidt first fouled off a 96 mph fastball which caught the outside corner of the strike zone. Yamamoto immediately followed this with a splitter on the same trajectory at 89 mph — which tailed away towards the dirt, and left his opponent flailing.
Friedman’s clip — which overlays footage of the two pitches simultaneously — goes a long way towards explaining how one of the sport’s best hitters was put in such a position.
You can watch a clip of this sequence here.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Saturday April 13th.
Sznajder has tracked 304 out of Bedard’s 928 total minutes at 5-on-5 this season.
Vinh Cao of Virtual Hockey Scout recently posted a good video breakdown of Bedard’s game, which includes a section on how he helps his team move the puck through the neutral zone despite not possessing “the type of blinding speed that can flatten any obstacles in his way”.
There’s also a non-zero chance that Bedard ends up as the second-best player on his own team, if Chicago gets the first pick again and selects Macklin Celebrini — who “has all the makings of a potential superstar”. (I’d love to see him paired with Ivan Demidov, though.)
Points Per Play is “[p]oints scored per play finished with a shot, free throw trip, or turnover”. Watkins’ mark of 0.89 is in the 77th percentile; Clark (1.04) is in the 97th percentile.
The Los Angeles Times’ Thuc Nhi Nguyen — whose coverage of Watkins this season has been indispensable — set next season up nicely in this piece after the UConn defeat.
No worries Vinh! Really enjoyed your analysis.
Bedard reminds me of Lindros.