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NHL Season Analysis: How Game Metrics Change Over a Season

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Quite often I find myself thinking - does the game evolve during regular season? It would make sense that there are less goals towards the end of the season, more penalties in the first months of the season, and so on. Also one thing that at least I hear quite often, is that youngest players typically have good start to the season, which is followed by less productive period after 20-25 games.  If the game really evolves within a season, that should be visible from the data.  Game statistics I took the data starting from season 2010-2011 (excluding the seasons 19-20 and 20-21, since they had special schedules), and plotted average numbers from regular season games by game ranges (Games 1-10, 11-20, etc.)   So let's take a look at the results, starting with numbers that stay consistent through the season. What stays the same Looks like that amount of goals, shots on goal, blocks, takeaways and average goal difference of game stays fairly consistent, although there seems to...
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Back-to-back games in NHL - Is rest day overrated?

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It's often assumed that teams struggle when playing without a rest day between games. But is that the case? If rest truly affects performance, how much of an impact does it have, and which teams are most suffer from them? So, how big portion of games are back-to-back games? Since 1990-1991 season, teams in average have played 17.8% of games without rest day since previous game, which is 14.6 games in average per season.  When we look at the data from each season, we can see that the number of back-to-back games has been decreasing in the recent years though - in the past five seasons, the percentage of back-to-back games is 15.5%. Quick clarification - The numbers include only second game of back-to-back games. So the first game is not included. After looking at the amount of back-to-back games, I was wondering it is common that two teams play against each other in consecutive days. Looks like it was quite common in the early 90's, but since that not very common. Expect in 2020...
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