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Originally Posted by 19Yzerman19
This is not only wrong, it doesn't even make any sense. Of course stats describe what happened on the ice. Regardless of the stat, that's the case. The "goals" stat describes who scored how many goals. Plus / Minus describes who was on the ice for goals for their team and against their team.
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It makes tons of sense actually. If you watch a game and your observation is "Joe Shmuck has a great scoring touch" then at the end of the night you look down and see he had 2 goals, that's great it corroborates your observation. But if you skip the game and see the boxscore, you are missing the context. What if one goal was an empty netter? What if the defenseman fell on a routine play allowing an easy tap in? What if he scored both goals being matched against the 4th line? By looking at stats only you only see the result - not what actually happened on the ice.
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So-called advanced stats are more predictive simply because goals themselves are a rare enough event that a certain amount of randomness plays into whether a goal is created, whereas shot totals create a larger sample size and as a result, you can discern a clearer pattern that has less randomness and noise. Which is why they're predictive of who's going to be successful at the end of the year - see quote from Kent below.
There's certainly a correlation between being GOOD at "advanced stats" and being successful. From Kent Wilson of Flames Nation:
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Again, oftentimes over a large sample size, stats will often corroborate what happened on the ice. Looking at Joe Shmuck again, if he has a good scoring touch regardless of situation over a long period of time his goal stat line will likely reflect that fact. "Advanced stats" takes shots instead of goals into effect because it gives a larger sample size as you said.
But it still doesn't actually describe what happened on the ice - only the result.