Julian Brandt and the Hockey Assist
Earlier in the week, I wrote about hockey-style Plus-Minus in football. Today’s post also has a hockey theme — the hockey assist.
During Borussia Dortmund’s 5–0 demolition of Fortuna Düsseldorf on Match Day 14, I tweeted this after Dortmund’s second goal:
What’s the difference between a football assist and a hockey assist?
- In hockey, up to two assists are given per goal. In football, a goal can only have up to one assist.
- Hockey is much more liberal about crediting assists. In hockey, an assist chain is only broken if the opposing team gains possession. Assists can still be given after rebounds and other deflections. In football, if an opposing player touches the ball before the goal scorer, an assist is usually not given.
- If a hockey player scores after completing a give-and-go with another player, the secondary assist is given to the player who passed to the goal scorer before he passed to the primary assist provider (because the same player cannot be credited with a goal and an assist on the same goal).
Clearly hockey is far more motivated to give assists than football. It’s too bad — since there are far fewer goals in football than hockey it would be nice to have some more numbers to work with.
I went back and watched all of Borussia Dortmund’s goals from the Bundesliga Hinrunde and assigned secondary assists. I also assigned primary assists with the more liberal scoring that hockey uses. I added the primary and second assists to get total assists and then added goals to total assists to get hockey-style “points”.
I then included onG (Goals scored by the team when the player was on the pitch) from FBref’s Playing Time table. That allowed me to calculate Involve% — the percentage of goals the player was involved in while he was on the pitch.
There’s a lot to unpack here:
- Julian Brandt: Brandt was the inspiration for this post. In the Düsseldorf match alone, he had three secondary assists (and would have had a fourth but a goal was called back for offside). The official Bundesliga statistics show him with just a single assist all season, so a casual fan could be excused for thinking he hasn’t been a prolific playmaker. But he leads the team with eight secondary assists, bringing his overall assist total to nine. By the traditional stats, Brandt has only been involved in 10% of BVB’s goals scored while he was on the pitch. By this new method, it jumps to 36.7%.
- Jadon Sancho: Where to begin? Sancho officially has nine goals and nine assists this season. He adds a tenth primary assist via Dortmund’s 4–0 against Leverkusen. His shot was saved and fell to Raphael Guerreiro, who put it away. No assist was given, but in hockey Sancho would have gotten one. He also adds a remarkable seven secondary assists, just one behind Brandt. That means if assists in football were scored like hockey, he would already have seventeen assists. He has been involved in 26 goals of the 36 that happened when he was on the pitch, a staggering 72.2%.
- Raphaël Guerreiro: Raph had three secondary assists, raising his assist total from one to four.
- Achraf Hakimi: Hakimi already has six assists and adds three secondary assists for a total of nine.
- Marco Reus: Reus also gains a primary assist through the more liberal scoring and adds two secondary assists. His assist total of three rises to six.
- Thorgan Hazard: Thorgan is the third player to gain a primary assist and also adds two secondary assists, bringing his haul to double digits.
- Paco Alcácer: Paco even adds a secondary assist under weird circumstances. He actually took a corner, playing it short to Thorgan. Thorgan assisted Sancho for Dortmund’s first goal against Köln. This additional assist means Paco is the only player other than Sancho involved in more than half of the goals that occurred while he was on the pitch.
Manuel Akanji and Julian Weigl also added a pair of secondary assists. It was interesting to see Weigl since he has somehow never been credited with an assist as a Borussia Dortmund player.
A final note on Sancho — if a player was able to be awarded a secondary assist on a goal that he scored, then he would be Dortmund’s leader in goals (9, tied with Reus), primary assists (10, two ahead of Hazard), and secondary assists (9, one ahead of Brandt). Twice in the Fortuna match he made the pass to the primary assist provider and then received the ball back and scored (once with Hakimi and later with Reus). Since the goal scorer can’t also get an assist, the secondary assists go to Guerreiro and Brandt, respectively (so I suppose he would have an advantage of two over Brandt in secondary assists, then). Even with some early season struggles, Sancho is having a remarkably productive season.
While I think including the secondary assist gives you a better idea of who is helping to create a squad’s goals, I don’t really see hockey assists as an incredibly useful advanced metric. Rather, I see it as an improvement on the existing standard statistics. I think newer concepts like xGChain and xGBuildup have more potential. But hockey assists are a system already in place in another sport, so it’s relatively easy to understand. Plus, it’s not an expected number — it’s something that actually happened.
Finally, anything that sheds light on how important Julian Brandt has been this season is a good thing to me.
Update: All Competitions
I followed this post up with one that looks at these stats across all competitions — the Bundesliga, Champions League, DFB-Pokal, and DFL-Supercup.
I encourage you to check it out, but here’s the All Competitions table:
