Special teams (i.e. power play and penalty kill) situations play an outsized role in determining the outcome of ice hockey games. Yet, quantitative methods for characterizing special teams tactics are limited. This work focuses on team structure and player deployment during in-zone special teams possessions. Leveraging player and puck tracking data from the National Hockey League (NHL), a framework is developed for describing player positioning during 5-on-4 power play and 4-on-5 penalty kill possessions. More specifically, player roles are defined directly from the player tracking data using non-negative matrix factorization, and every player is allocated a unique role at every frame of tracking data by solving a linear assignment problem. Team formations naturally arise through the combination of roles occupied in a frame. Roles that vary on a per-frame basis allow for a fine-grained analysis of team structure. This property of the roles-based representation is used to group together similar power play possessions using latent Dirichlet allocation, a topic modelling technique. The concept of assignments, which remain constant over an entire possession, is also introduced. Assignments provide a more stable measure of player positioning, which may be preferable when assessing deployment over longer periods of time.

中文翻译：

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曲棍球特种队的空间角色

特殊球队（即强力比赛和点球大战）情况在决定冰球比赛的结果方面发挥着巨大的作用。然而，描述特种部队战术的定量方法是有限的。这项工作的重点是区域内特种队控球期间的球队结构和球员部署。利用来自国家冰球联盟 (NHL) 的球员和冰球跟踪数据，开发了一个框架，用于描述 5 对 4 强力比赛和 4 对 5 点球杀球期间球员的位置。更具体地说，玩家角色是使用非负矩阵因式分解直接根据玩家跟踪数据定义的，并且通过解决线性分配问题，为每个玩家在跟踪数据的每一帧分配一个唯一的角色。团队的形成是通过框架中角色的组合自然产生的。每帧不同的角色可以对团队结构进行细粒度分析。基于角色的表示的这一属性用于使用潜在狄利克雷分配（一种主题建模技术）将类似的权力游戏财产分组在一起。还引入了分配的概念，该概念在整个占有过程中保持不变。分配提供了更稳定的玩家定位衡量标准，这在评估较长时间段的部署时可能更可取。