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Let's go to the phones

Now that the bulk of the free agent signings are behind us, and we face a dearth of hockey news leading up to the beginning of training camps, I'm working on formalizing the data that I use into fixed database structures, rather than the ad-hoc spreadsheets I've been using previously. While I'm doing that, I wanted to poll ye dwellers of this vast connection of tubes called the Internet and get your thoughts:

When it comes to statistical analysis, what areas of the game do you think deserve more attention?

My research assistant is standing by!

Remember that I can only deal with the information publicly available, so while it would be neat to know "time on attack" or "successful pass percentage" information, to my knowledge it doesn't exist in any public forum. To jump-start your brain cells, here are a couple things I'm thinking of:

1) Look at team performance in the period of time after individual players take a Fighting major, to see if there is any verifiable "momentum" endowed on a team when particular players fight as opposed to others. Lots of people assume such a boost exists, but can we identify it?

2) Back-testing the PythagenPuck model that was used in November to predict that the Senators would end up alright despite their sub-.500 record at the time, and determine at what time it starts to become a reliable gauge of a team's prospects. Is it 10 games? 15 games? 20?

3) Back-testing the playoff prediction model I used this spring to see if some of the parameters can be tweaked to make it more accurate, and also see how it might have performed during the regular season.

So please, fire away in the comments and let me know where you think the spotlight should be directed...
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