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Originally Posted by Red John
Thing is these events aren't actually random. A hockey game is full of decisions every single second - decisions about what angle to take to the puck when skating, decisions about whether to make a head fake, tons of tiny little things that go on. Each of these tiny decisions ultimately makes an impact on the final outcome. People who have played the game at a high level understand this.
Skating, stickhandling, passing, and tons of little decisions that happen with every player on the ice at every moment of a game. And there is no stat out there that can track those decisions.
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Don't be patronizing. Everyone understands this. Nonetheless, goals are fairly random in terms of their source. Your decision about what angle to take did not cause you to score a goal that deflects into the top corner off a defenseman's skate. Your head fake did not cause the opposing goalie to let in a dipping shot from the blue line he'd stop 49 times out of 50. Your stickhandling skill did not cause the rookie d-man you're facing to cough the puck up the middle for an easy goal. These types of aberrations create noise. The noise is washed out given a larger sample of data, which is why you need a full season and why you use shots instead of goals. That is what is meant by randomness when associated with goal scoring.
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That's the problem, and that's why most of the "stats crowd" are basement bloggers, or at the very least not the ones who played the game and are working in the game - because they are trying to reverse engineer the game and use the final result to try and quantify the process. Instead of watching the process unfold with their eyes, drawing conclusions based on those observations, and letting the results fall where they may. If their observations are accurate, most of the time the results will provide confirmation.
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As noted, I guarantee that these guys watch more hockey than you. The notion that people who care about the stats must not actually be watching hockey is asinine. Even more so given that if they weren't watching the games, how would they be tracking the stats in the first place?