Recently I got asked by the guys at WI to look at the factors that influence a college hockey teams attendance.  One of my current students at St. Lawrence knows the college hockey landscape quite well so I asked Zach Nelson to work on this project with me.  

For that analysis we looked at a variety of season level metrics for all of the US Division I hockey programs over the last 10 years.  Most of those metrics focused on the things that teams do: win percentage, power play percentage, goal against average, etc.  We played with a variety of regression type models but at the end of the day the two factors that we were important for predicting a given years percent capacity were the team (i.e. Michigan or RPI or North Dakota)  and their winning percentage. 

One more thing that was quite intriguing to us was that we found that a teams winning percentage was equally affected by goals for and goals against.  That is, scoring another goal was just as important as preventing another goal in terms of predicting season level win percentage.  

Here’s a link to the article: Just Win, Ehh!