Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-178). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-102). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR31994

Thesis--Ohio State University. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: leaves 228-240.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2004. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 116 p. : ill. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

Dissertation (PhD)--University of Stellenbosch, 2008. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis--Ohio State University. / Bibliography: leaves 228-240.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Florida, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-109). Also available online (PDF file) by a subscription to the set or by purchasing the individual file.

Bone fractures, mostly of the lower leg and foot, due to impact with hockey pucks are becoming a common injury in ice hockey. These injuries can take up to more than two months to heal and return to play. In the professional levels of play, these injuries cost the team in more than one way. Firstly, a member of the team cannot play for some time and secondly the team may continue to pay the player their salary even though they are injured and not providing their full services to the team. These injuries do not appear to be researched at this time and the current equipment options do not appear to provide adequate protection to prevent injury. This work attempts to develop a testing setup, which is composed to several components, to investigate the minimum requirements that lead to these injuries. A puck-shooting machine was used to impact composite tibias and the velocity at which they fractured was recorded. Other components were designed, built, and selected to comprise the testing setup. The results obtained with the testing setup presented in this work provided valuable insight on these injuries. The composite tibias fractured at impact velocities ranging from 28.83 – 31.25 m/s. Puck orientation at impact was captured with high-speed video. Slight improvements in the testing setup and methodology could provide even more valuable information that could lead to improvements in protective devices designed to prevent these injuries. / February 2016

The metabolic demands for women hockey players (n=12) were estimated during real match play using heart rate analysis and time-motion analysis. An individual heart rate - oxygen uptake regression equation, established at steady state workloads on the treadmill, was applied to heart rates recorded throughout the match to estimate energy expenditure. A specific energy cost was assigned to each of nine discrete activities to give an energy cost for the whole match. The mean estimated energy cost for a complete match from heart rate analysis was 3873 +/-436 kj and from time-motion analysis, 2846 +/-284 kJ. In order to check the errors in these methodologies expired air was collected continually during 15 minutes intermittent activity on a treadmill (n=16) with the heart rates and work : rest ratios similar to those established in the earlier part of the study. The error in the use of heart rate to estimate energy expenditure was 3.7 +/-5.1% and for time-motion analysis was 16.6 +/-4.8%, when compared with the measured value from the analysis of expired air. It was concluded that heart rate gave a good estimation of energy expenditure during intermittent activity at workloads similar to women's hockey. In order to gain a greater insight into the metabolic demands of women's hockey both heart rate and time-motion analysis need to be applied simultaneously. The heart rate analysis suggested that the estimated energy expenditure was similar during the first and second halves, hi contrast the time-motion analysis established that less time was spent in high intensity activity during the second half. Women's hockey is played at greater intensities than previously reported with no differences in the metabolic demands when related to specific player positions.

In this thesis, we look at a number of methods to forecast success (winners and losers), both of single games and playoff series (best-of-seven games) in the sport of ice hockey, more specifically within the National Hockey League (NHL). Our findings indicate that there exists a theoretical upper bound, which seems to hold true for all sports, that makes prediction difficult. In the first part of this thesis, we look at predicting success of individual games to learn which of the two teams will win or lose. We use a number of traditional statistics (published on the league’s website and used by the media) and performance metrics (used by Internet hockey analysts; they are shown to have a much higher correlation with success over the long term). Despite the demonstrated long term success of performance metrics, it was the traditional statistics that had the most value to automatic game prediction, allowing our model to achieve 59.8% accuracy. We found it interesting that regardless of which features we used in our model, we were not able to increase the accuracy much higher than 60%. We compared the observed win% of teams in the NHL to many simulated leagues and found that there appears to be a theoretical upper bound of approximately 62% for single game prediction in the NHL. As one game is difficult to predict, with a maximum of accuracy of 62%, then pre- dicting a longer series of games must be easier. We looked at predicting the winner of the best-of-seven series between two teams using over 30 features, both traditional and advanced statistics, and found that we were able to increase our prediction accuracy to almost 75%. We then re-explored predicting single games with the use of pre-game textual reports written by hockey experts from http://www.NHL.com using Bag-of-Word features and sentiment analysis. We combined these features with the numerical data in a multi-layer meta-classifiers and were able to increase the accuracy close to the upper bound