A Weekend Behind The Computer

TigerBlog spent most of his weekend in Hobey Baker Rink.

He did the statcrew entry for all four hockey games this weekend, the two the women played against St. Anselm (combined final score, 15-0 Tigers) and the two the men played in the ECAC (an 0-1-1 weekend that showed the Tigers can compete with anyone in the league).

The women won 5-0 Friday afternoon and 10-0 Saturday afternoon. It was a big weekend for, among others, the Fillier sisters: Sarah had four goals and three assists and Kayla had her first career goal.

As for the men, they lost to Dartmouth 4-3 in overtime after tying the game with 16 seconds left Friday night and then tied No. 15 Harvard 3-3 Saturday night.

Princeton has gotten off to a slow start on the men's side in the ECAC race, though Ron Fogarty has clearly shown that he knows how to turn seasons around on a dime. The Tigers are at Clarkson and St. Lawrence this weekend and then have first semester exams, and after that it'll be the February run up to the ECAC playoffs.

Doing stats for hockey isn't that much different than doing stats for lacrosse. The program is very similar - at least now, though there's a potentially big shift in the world of college athletic statkeeping coming with a new competitor to the long-established StatCrew brand - and the stats themselves are also somewhat alike, with shots, saves, face-offs, goals, penalties.

There are two big difference between the two though.

First, there are a lot of stats in lacrosse that aren't kept in hockey, such as ground balls, turnovers, caused turnovers. TB has much more experience with lacrosse stats than hockey stats, and his instinct was to constantly add the ground ball to the face-off win or the turnover when the puck changed sides.

The second difference is plus/minus. After each goal in hockey, you need to account for everyone who was on the ice for both teams, and this can be tougher than you think.

TB entered 28 goals this weekend, and on 27 of them he was still entering plus/minus after play had restarted. The only time he didn't was on the OT goal in the men's game Friday, since play never restarted.

It was during Saturday's game against Harvard that TB had one screen open to do stats and another screen open to watch the ESPN+  broadcast of the Princeton-Penn men's basketball game.

For most of the basketball game, the two screens overlapped so that TB couldn't see the basket at the left side of the court.

Also, at one point, Richmond Aririguzoh made a free throw, and TB started out to enter it in the stat program, only to realize that he wasn't actually doing stats for that game.

The Tigers looked very good against their arch-rival, leading wire-to-wire for a 78-64 win. If your goals are to win the league or finish in the top four to make the Ivy League tournament, having a win over Penn on its home court is a good starting point.

Princeton scored 78 points in the game, and 60 of those came from three players - Arirugzoh (15), Jaelin Llewellyn (18) and Ryan Schwieger (27). Between them they shot 21 for 35 from the field, and almost all of that was inside the three-point arc, as those three were a combined 2 for 5 from distance.

If you want to win big games in your league on the road, you need performances like that from your stars.

Each time that it looked like Penn was going to make a run at the Tigers, Princeton answered. That's another good way to win a big league game on the road.

The Tigers had tremendous success inside the arc, with a season-best 52 points in the point against the Quakers. 

Next up for Princeton is another game against Penn, Friday evening (5 pm tip) at Jadwin Gym. After that is first semester exam break.

Oh, and one more thing for today: If you're in the Princeton area this afternoon looking for something to do, go over to Dillon Gym at 2 for the men's volleyball match between No. 10 Princeton and No. 2 UCLA. It'll be great entertainment.