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GOLD COAST, Australia -- The Wallabies completed back-to-back wins with nerve-jangling finishes to stay in contention in the Rugby Championship, holding off a storming finish from Argentina on Saturday for a 32-25 victory. Skipper Michael Hooper crossed for tries at the start of each half and Australia built a 29-13 lead with 20 minutes remaining. But the Pumas rallied with tries from Marcelo Bosch and Joaquin Tuculet and got themselves into a position to draw the match with a last-minute scrum five yards out, under the posts. The powerful Pumas pack conceded a free kick at the crucial moment, though, giving Australia a reprieve only a week after its late comeback win over South Africa. The Wallabies have two wins and a draw in four matches in the tournament, but are six points behind New Zealand and are also behind the Springboks on points differential. Wallabies coach Ewen McKenzie said Australia did well to control the game for 50 minutes but later in the match "we found different ways to give them the ball." "The Argentinians got back into it, put a lot of pressure on us," McKenzie said. "Thats what they do. They did it to South Africa and New Zealand. We dont feel like the odd one out there. Youve got to be able to deal with it, and we did at key moments." Light rain before kickoff made the ball and field slippery and contributed to a grinding, error-strewn clash. Australia had most of the early chances and led 14-7 at halftime with three penalty goals from Bernard Foley and Hoopers third-minute try, when he ran into a yawning gap near the quarterline after 10 phases of possession. The Pumas responded quickly to the opening try, taking a 7-5 lead when Manuel Montero swooped on turnover ball and fended off opposite winger Peter Betham, Hooper and Foley on his long, solo run down the left touchline. Foley regained the lead with a penalty goal but the Wallabies wasted chances to go further ahead when Nick Phipps took a quick tap from close range instead of a shot at goal and Foley bombed a try-scoring chance when he took on the defence instead of passing to unmarked Rob Horne within touching distance of the tryline. Tatafu Polata-Naus return to the Wallabies lineup for his 50th test lasted until halftime, with the veteran hooker appearing to struggle with an ankle injury before being replaced. Hooper scored again four minutes into the second half after sustained pressure from Australia and the kickers traded penalties to make it 24-13 before Phipps slid through an opening on the fringe of a breakdown near halfway and floated a pass to Betham, who crashed over in the right corner to extend the lead to 16 points. But just when Australia appeared to be coasting to victory, Argentina hit back hard. The Pumas took a quick free kick in the 64th and caught the Australian defence on the back foot, with Bosch scoring out wide. Argentina pounced again in the 71st after the Wallabies turned over the ball on their own tryline. Flyhalf Nicolas Sanchez kicked a grubber in behind the defence and fullback Tuculet dived on the ball in-goal to narrow the gap to four points. Sanchez narrowly missed the conversion -- hitting the right post -- and Foley landed a penalty at the other end to make it a converted-try difference. Then Argentina blew a chance when replacement scrumhalf Tomas Cubelli knocked-on at the back of an attacking ruck with five minutes remaining. Right at the end, the Pumas earned a penalty and opted for a scrum close to Australiias line, hoping for a push-over or a penalty try, but the resulting free kick ended the rally. "Were happy with the last 20 minutes we had, but were not happy with the game," Argentina captain Agustin Creevy said. "We spent most of the time on defence and that made us tired toward the end. Only in the last 20 minutes could we make our game -- we were close to getting a draw." It was a frustrating night for the Australians, who dominated possession and won the rucks and mauls 88-52, but lost too much ball in contact situations with 14 turnovers -- three more than the Pumas, who have yet to register a win in this years tournament. Montae Nicholson Jersey .com) - Wimbledon runner-up Eugenie Bouchard notched a win, while second-seeded two-time champion Ana Ivanovic, third- seeded Australian Open runner-up Dominika Cibulkova and fifth seed Sabine Lisicki all exited the draw at the Generali Ladies Linz tennis event. Zach Vigil Jersey . Neither striker Demba Ba nor Fernando Torres came close to scoring as Chelsea was left unsuccessfully appealing for penalties in this drab penultimate game of the season. "Our strikers are good strikers, no doubt about that, but players with some specific qualities," Mourinho said. http://www.cheapredskinsjerseysonline.c ... y-online.m. ET, CBSOPENING LINE — Falcons by 3 1/2RECORD VS. Tim Settle Jersey .ca. Hi Kerry, Thursday nights Bruins-Blackhawks game had a goal by Patrice Bergeron initially waved off by the referee, but video review clarified it was a good goal. Jeremy Sprinkle Jersey . Every. Single. Game. Thats 1,230 in total to cover the regular season. The man is Corey Sznajder, a soft-spoken 23-year-old Salisbury University grad who lives in Annapolis, Maryland and has been charting zone entries and zone exits throughout the NHL. I love big projects, he said. No kidding. At the 2013 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, I met Eric Tulsky, who presented research on the value of controlled zone entries (short answer: about twice as valuable to enter with control of the puck rather than dumping it in) and Sznajder had charted a couple hundred games that were included in that study.A few weeks ago, I got into a discussion on Twitter about the merits of actual time that an NHL team spends in the offensive zone, compared to more widely-known shot attempt metrics, like Corsi and Fenwick. The issue at hand isn’t so much that one particular measure has to be more valuable than another, it’s more about what we know based on available evidence and what to do about that which we don’t know. I spoke with John Chayka, a co-founder of Stathletes, a Canadian company that has been providing comprehensive data analysis to NHL players and teams. While they track zone time, that’s a tiny portion of the data that Stathletes compiles. Now and then, zone time shows up on a TV broadcast. It’s an interesting tidbit, but it comes without context. Outsiders don’t know league-wide numbers (leaders, averages, etc.), so it’s difficult to compare and if you can’t compare, there’s not much statistical value. It’s one thing for me to say that I drove my car 100 km/h. It’s another matter entirely to do it in the left lane on a wide-open highway and another to do it in a school zone in a quiet neighbourhood. Without that context, you don’t know much about how I drove my car, beyond the stated 100 km/h. The puzzle that I was trying to resolve was about whether the Colorado Avalanche could simultaneously be one of the league’s worst by shot metrics last season, yet somehow one of the best when it comes to time spent in the offensive zone. We’ll get to that. STATHLETES One of the things that Chayka said, several times during our interview, was, “We don’t know what we don’t know.” Stathletes takes a Big Data approach, to the point that they have game-trackers analyzing every NHL game in minute detail. It’s not quite fair to say they track everything, because Chayka notes that they keep adding new categories, but they have built a formidable database. Zone time or shot attempts are merely pieces of that puzzle, but once there are years of data in the bank, that’s when statistics start to reveal their significance. It’s one thing to have suspicion, for example, that a team exiting the defensive zone with control of the puck has such-and-such a value; it’s another to have measurable data that can either confirm or refute that idea in tangible terms. Chayka acknowledged that, in compiling their massive repository of information, that Stathletes may very well track some things that don’t appear to have great value or correlation to winning but, since he’s been surprised about the effects of some of the categories they’ve chosen to track, it’s hard to really know what impacts winning until the data is pulled together. As Stathletes started to grow as a company, they talked with a lot of hockey executives, trying to learn what those experienced hockey minds felt was important to being a successful NHL player. Chayka noted that some could be resistant, saying, “None of this data matters. I just want to know if a player competes.” To which a company collecting data responds, “What does it mean to compete?” Answers to that question helped them try to find a way to measure what hockey experts consider being competitive. “Some of the most analytical minds out there are those that think they dont like analytics,” Chayka said, referring to old-school NHL coaches and general managers that have provided the company with valuable insight. “Coaches know a bunch intuitively,” Chayka continued. “How a player handles pressure, whether he takes contact. It can be tough to quantify.” The challenge for a company involved in analytics is to take those insights and intuitions and somehow use them to provide objective measurement. STATISTICAL SECRECY The public is reluctant to blindly accept information that hasnt been evaluated out in the open. On Twitter, it’s regularly referred to as a Black Box, where there is a cloak of secrecy over results and statistical findings, so there is immediately skepticism if those numbers dont fit with what is more widely known. There’s a reason for the secrecy. As this summer made abundantly clear, there is a market for selling data and analysis to NHL teams and if the research and data hasn’t been refuted, then there may be teams that find it valuable. Like it or not, this may be what the future holds when it comes to statistical findings in the NHL. It has already happened in the NBA and MLB, where pro teams have hired a lot of talent that was operating in the public space, and suddenly their research isn’t available for the world to see, it goes only to their employer. That lack of public scrutiny casts doubt on findings that are developed in secret. It doesn’t mean there can’t be value there, only that the public doesn’t know the value one way or the other. However, when there are pieces in the public space which compare zone time to shot attempts and they present a very strong correlation, it becomes more difficult to just accept the differences. TRACKING Those who are critical of using shot attempt metrics, rather than the detail of measured time in the zone, expect that once optical tracking technology is prevalent in the NHL, as it is in the NBA, there won’t be such a need for puck possession proxies. Tracking, it is assumed, will be the holy grail of data collection. Undoubtedly, player tracking will provide more detail and mountains more information than is currentlyy available, but it’s not like player tracking will start one day and untold hockey truths will emerge the next.dddddddddddd “Its going to take time for teams to understand what it means and sort it out,” said Chayka. “Were already on the way. It will be a big evolution for everyone, but we feel were at the forefront. Having multiple years of data should be an advantage.” Already knowing how to work with a mountain of data does figure to help when a new mountain shows up. This is a big factor when it comes to the evolving acceptance and use of analytics. When talking to Columbus Blue Jackets Director of Hockey Administration Josh Flynn for Episode 3 of The Hockey Analytics Show on TSN Radio, one of the common threads between Flynn and the guys at Stathletes, is that they recognize the need to get years-worth of data in order to have useful sample sizes. Flynn noted that the Blue Jackets are looking into tracking systems and how that is going to apply in the future, but acknowledged that it requires a cost-benefit analysis. “It’s expensive to gather it, right now,” said Flynn “And you’re going to basically be investing money for a few years to get data that is going to be at least a few years before you can use. It’s a big sunk cost before you actually get value back.” BACK TO THE AVALANCHE Back to the initial question that sent me down this rabbit hole. How can we reconcile that last season’s Colorado Avalanche were one of the top teams in offensive zone time, yet were one of the worst when using shot metrics? Is the answer that the Avalanche hold the puck for an abnormally long time at one end and allow shots at a really quick rate at the other? That kind of stylistic hypothesis doesn’t appear to my naked eye, when watching the Avs play, and it doesn’t appear to have any correlation to ever-elusive shot quality, as the difference between the shots taken by the Avalanche and their opponents didn’t appear to be dramatic. Without definitive answers to how a team could be ranked so highly in offensive zone time and so poorly in shot differential, here are some theories: The Avalanche played a lot of their games at 5-on-5 last season, ranking fifth in the league in total 5-on-5 ice time, so if the context is merely raw zone time during 5-on-5 play, then that would give Colorado a leg up in terms of raw time counted, though it doesn’t explain how they would still manage to get outshot so significantly. As Chayka pointed out, zone time and possession time are not necessarily interchangeable. Stathletes also (separately) tracks stick-on-puck possession time and it’s theoretically possible that the Avalanche spent more time in the offensive zone without actually possessing the puck. Over the course of a full season, though, that’s also a tough logistical sale. Using the data being compiled by Corey Sznajder on zone entries, David Johnson (of Puckalytics fame) found that the Avalanche had a strong net carry-in percentage and it’s not unreasonable to infer that carrying the puck effectively into the offensive zone could lead to more time with possession in the zone, but it still doesn’t account for the shot discrepancy. Ultimately, I don’t have a resolution for how the Avalanche could have top of the league time in the offensive zone and bottom of the league shot metrics, but that stalemate brought a follow-up question: If given the choice between measured zone time and shot attempt metrics, which has more value? To those of us in the public space, we already know that there is a correlation between shot attempts and future goals, so knowing that correlation makes it valuable. Not knowing the correlation between offensive zone time and future goals, or the repeatability of zone time metrics, we’re left to wonder. Maybe zone time is more valuable, but maybe it’s not. Assuming definitively either way would be irresponsible. Baseball statistics pioneer Bill James recently reflected on his career and noted how he was probably too critical of what could not be measured when he started into the field. “I have to take my share of responsibility for promoting skepticism about things that I didn’t understand as well as I might have,” James told NBC Sports’ Joe Posnanski. “What I would say NOW is that skepticism should be directed at things that are actually untrue rather than things that are difficult to measure.” Like Chayka said, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Some might look at measured zone time skeptically and, citing the lack of context to give it real meaning, there’s reason for doubt. It reminds me of Blackhawks GM Stan Bowman’s quote to Mark Lazerus in this Chicago Sun-Times piece about the Blackhawks’ use of analytics “People can say we’re drawing the wrong conclusions, and that’s fine. But I don’t think we are. I’m not looking to get it adopted league-wide. I like what we have, and I believe in it.” So it goes with the evolution of analytics in NHL circles. So long as the team using them believes in their value, then there is a place for them in the decision-making process. As teams get more and more secretive as the use of data evolves, how would a team know if their belief was misplaced? With more analytics work being done in private, the answer is that teams will have to figure a lot of it out on their own. 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