Quote:
Originally Posted by Red John
You just demonstrated that you don't understand this. The decision about what angle to take determines who gets to the puck first, perhaps. Which influences which team takes possession...which influences a breakout...or maybe a line change. Maybe a great scoring chance occurs that wouldn't have otherwise. The head fake may have made the defenseman hesitate just a split second opening up a passing lane that wasn't there otherwise.
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Wow, not only have you continued to be unjustifiably patronizing but you've become more obtuse in the process. The fact that you're casting all of this as a skill, as if guys take a particular angle to a puck so that ten moves later it'll lead to a goal is hilarious. Often, goals result from a deliberate skill play, and often, the puck bounces off a skate right to a guy in front for a tap in. This isn't chess.
There are lots of unexpected elements that lead to goals going in or not that makes a small sample size of TOI less useful as a predictive measure. Which is why when a fourth liner has a three point night, that doesn't somehow mean he's capable of it on a regular basis. Alex Steen is not a top five goal scorer in the league, Kyle Okposo is not a better scorer than Phil Kessel, and Cam Talbot isn't the best goalie in the league... any more than Mark Parrish was an 80+ point player, the 2011-12 Wild were the best team in the Western Conference or any number of other small-sample trends that regressed to reality over time.
No one is saying that there's a silver bullet stat that explains why teams win in the NHL. All that your basement bloggers on their laptops (as you again refer to them in unbelievably arrogant fashion while typing out your opinions on a hockey message board) are doing is accumulating data and testing and tweaking the methodology to try to make a better model to predict how teams will end up performing. Why that kind of curiosity, which can't possibly hurt and can only help provide more information about hockey, would offend anyone is... silly. But not surprising, I guess, sadly.