Mike Murphy’s RITSAC Presentation on Women’s Hockey Analytics

If you missed Mike’s presentation at RITSAC, you can watch it here!

For the last three years I have been tracking primary points by strength for the NWHL and CWHL. I’ve also been making team stat data for both leagues — including SF/GP, SA/GP, SF/60, SA/60, PDO (all strengths) — available to the public via Google Sheets.

As a result of my work, I was invited to make a presentation on analytics in women’s hockey at RITSAC 2018 (Rochester Institute of Technology’s Sports Analytics Conference).

On Aug. 11, I made my presentation at RIT. In addition to my own modest contributions, it also included the work of other contributors to women’s hockey analytics, including The Ice Garden’s own Alyssa Longmuir. If you’re interested in seeing the livestream of my presentation, you can check it out HERE.

Below you can find another version of my presentation; one that was specially created for The Ice Garden. With the help of Casey Bryant, I put together a video that should make viewing the slides in the presentation easier. The slides are accompanied by a new audio recording of my presentation, that went a little a longer than the one I gave a few weeks ago.

The feedback from my presentation has been incredibly encouraging. In the past few weeks we’ve seen the analytics community express a lot of interest in expanding their work to include the women’s game.

More people than ever before are coming up with solutions to bring more sophisticated statistics to the world of professional women’s hockey. With the help of a lot of talented and dedicated people, we should soon have significantly more data and tools to work with.

These new tools will help us gain a better understanding of a sport that we simply don’t know enough about. In turn, they will also help us gain a greater understanding of hockey as a whole.


Reflecting on team stat trends from the 2017-18 NWHL season


Here are links to some of the things I talked about in my presentation, including the work of Alyssa, Shawn, CreaseGiants, and my counting stat sheets for the 2017-18 season.

Thank you for checking out the presentation! If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments section below or reach out to me via Twitter: @DigDeepBSB.