October 12, 2010

Diving Update

As per a request in a comment I am posting an update re: diving. My original post can be found here.

- The Y-axis is the number of diving calls in the previous 100 games - ordered by game #
- The X-axis is the "season" year using the year of the last game (so we're in the NHL season 2011 right now) - The first dot represents # of diving calls in the 2007-2008 season between games 0 & 100.

The graph does a good job summarizing what has changed since 2007: Diving calls have disappeared. One thing that may be happening is that the NHL could be calling them something else on the scoresheet: "unsportsmanlike conduct" instead of "diving" - which I'm going to watch for. There have been 151 Diving calls in 3690 games (1 diving call every 25 games).

Also, when I previously reported these numbers I also reported how often the referee also called a penalty against the player who "caused" the dive. In 2006 & 2007 it was close to 80% (77% and 82% respectively), since then it has jumped to 90%, so of the 151 penalties 15 were independent of any other penalty.

Does anyone believe there are actually fewer players diving though?

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