Quote:
Originally Posted by ricardodw
...As for the correlation and causation my hypothesis is simple. You don't win enough hockey games with 4+ soft hockey players.
Is that too simple to comprehend?
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Can you explain how you arrived at +1.0 in your index as the breaking-point between "soft" and "gritty" players?
It appears at a glance that this number was selected because it conforms to your own preconceptions. As I understand the index, you are basically arguing that no successful team will have more than four players who fail to average +1 hits, takeaways, or blocked shots than giveaways per game. With how subjective all of these statistics are, and with how much variance there is between their interpretation from one building to another, it seems to me that a difference of ±1/game is fairly negligible, and in the end doesn't really translate into anything particularly useful.
Something that does seem to contradict your hypothesis is the primarily inverse relationship between individual point production and "grittiness". 3/4 of the Flames forwards who scored -1.0 on your index ALL scored at a +.64 point/game pace, and are among the top-five scorers. Five of the top seven Flames forwards according to your index scored at under a 0.2 point/game pace, and were among the lowest scoring players on the team. Similarly, the top five most productive forwards in Chicago are the bottom-five forwards according to your index, and the only three (!) forwards to register below 0.2 points/game are the top-three players according to your index.
I would expect if your index were to accurately reflect the relationship between "grittiness" and team success, then the distribution of highly productive and less productive players would be much more even. Afterall, since the object of the game is to outscore the opposition, should we not expect SOME correlation between individual player "grittiness" and productivity IF "grittiness" contributes to team success?
Quote:
Originally Posted by ricardodw
Show me a team with 4+ soft players and I will show you a team that is not in the playoffs.
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Have you performed this evaluation for all 30 teams?