[Red John]

Three things:

1) This is why hockey execs almost never allow "back room access" to media in stuff like this. It's entertaining for fans but stuff becomes public and players get hurt by it. Bet hockey USA doesn't make that mistake again.

2) Brian Burke did NOTHING wrong. This wasn't supposed to be public knowledge, it was behind closed doors where stuff far worse than that gets said all the time about players. Fans want inside access into what really goes on - then complain about what they find.

3) The problem with advanced stats is that people treat them as evidence. They aren't. Watching games is evidence - what you see is evidence. Stats is just a way to describe on paper, the outcome of what you see on the ice. Most of the time, the stats will reflect and corroborate what you see and sometimes they won't.

Most NHL executives use advanced stats, but don't put an emphasis on them because they serve only to quantify what these guys already know from having watched the games. Moneyball was an entertaining film but it suggested that Billy Beane never watched games because stats could tell him everything. That was a lie - Billy doesn't watch his teams games because it helps him to detach emotionally and not make rash decisions based on what happened in one game.

Advanced stats are helpful but there's a reason it's 99% basement bloggers that keep trumpeting them. They don't describe what actually happened on the ice, only the result of those actions.