chances is…

Though plus-minus originated in hockey and has been tracked by the NHL since 1968, development of the stat really picked up when it was adopted for use in basketball in the last decade. In 2000 Wayne Winston and Jeff Sagarin developed their WINVAL system for basketball, which starts with basic plus-minus but then uses linear regression to control for the quality of the player’s teammates and opponents. The methodology behind this has been public since Dan Rosenbaum wrote about his NBA version of adjusted plus-minus in 2004, but surprisingly, until earlier this year there had been no public examples of using regression to adjust plus-minus for hockey players (Vic Ferrari came the closest here). So I was excited to see Brian Macdonald’s paper “A Regression-based Adjusted Plus-Minus Statistic for NHL Players” become available in June. It hasn’t gotten much pub around the net (no mention on any of the hockey blogs as far as I can tell), but hopefully more people will become aware of it.