With the NFL preseason upon us, the NHL season isn’t too far away. In hopes of gaining some optimism for this season after a 62 point year for the Buffalo Sabres, I explored what factors are most crucial—statistically speaking—in a teams overall success, in order to start a discussion on how the Sabres might fare in these areas in the upcoming season.
I accomplished this by utilizing a Generalized Linear Model (GLM). It’s “fancy stats”, but the results are fairly easy to interpret. Long story short, it’s a more complicated version of that good old point-slope Y = mX+b formula, in which multiple inputs are used to predict a variable.