It’s been about four years since I wrote the primer about using simulations. I haven’t called it the Stocky since early in 2018 and I use a completely different set of metrics as inputs, so it’s time to have a more up-to-date reference point. The purpose of simulations is to use the magic of random… Read More Primer – Sims
People familiar with my philosophy will know that I put less stock in wins than most people. The binary nature – you either take everything or get nothing – means that a simple win-loss record is not a particularly nuanced and, unless you have a very long timeframe to work with, doesn’t necessarily reflect teams’… Read More Primer – SCWP
WCL is a means of estimating the probability of a team winning a rugby league match at a given point in the game. The WCL system finds all instances of a given margin at a given point in the game in that league and calculates how often a team in that position won the game.… Read More Primer – WCL
A big thank you to Lorna Brown (@_Lorna_Brown) who provided me with the dataset and whose ongoing updates to the same mean that we should be able to do some form of Super League player analysis. She has – presumably through some sort of black magic and/or competence with programming – managed to scrape a… Read More Primer – Rismans
For the third season in a row, I’m changing the player rating system. We mourn the passing of Statscore (not really) and PPG (again, not really) as we slowly converge on to a system that I can take for granted and don’t have to refine any further. The core of the system hasn’t changed. The… Read More Primer – TPR
Turns out that StatScore didn’t pan out the way I had hoped. There were some conceptual errors but the biggest was that I wanted a measure of rate and a measure of volume and you can’t have one statistic that does both. It’s like having one number that meaningfully states that a boxer is both… Read More Primer – PPG and WARG
Poseidon ratings are a new team rating system for both the NRL and the Queensland Cup. For those who don’t have time to read 2000+ words, here’s the short version: the purpose of Poseidon ratings is to assess the offensive and defensive capabilities of rugby league teams in terms of the number of tries they… Read More Primer – Poseidon ratings
The biggest off-season story in the NRL was the transfers of Cooper Cronk from Melbourne to Sydney and then Mitchell Pearce from Sydney to Newcastle. From the Roosters’ perspective, for two players likely on similar pay packets, how did the Roosters decide one was better than the other? Then I wondered if it were possible… Read More Primer – StatScore and Win Shares: rating NRL players
If you’re wired for numbers, like I am, it can be hard to deal with people’s feelings and understanding why they think the things that they do. That’s why I’ve decided to quantify the feelings a team generates into five distinct indices: Power, Hope, Panic, Fortune and Disappointment. Each index has two components. There’s a… Read More Primer – How do the Indices work?
The Greeks is the collective name given to a series of Elo rating models for tracking performance of rugby league teams and forecasting the outcomes of games. I usually refer to them as if the philosopher himself was making the prediction, even though the Greeks have mostly been dead for a couple thousand years and… Read More Primer – Who are the Greeks? 2018 Edition
Pythago NRL 