[Red John]

Originally Posted by 19Yzerman19

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.

You're quite right, this isn't chess. It's even more complex. Pieces are moving at the same time and each with an independent brain, not one move at a time like in baseball or controlled by one mind like in chess.

That's why sabremetrics to this point haven't really gained traction in hockey. It's too fluid a sport to really be accurately tracked.

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.

Yep, the bigger sample size is the more accurate results one can draw. Never said otherwise.

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.

Don't really understand why you are so upset. Go back and read my posts (even though they are long winded). Never said advanced stats were useless or stupid. Heck, go back and read some of my first posts on this forum. Had tracked Flames zone entries a couple years back in a few games as part of a theory from watching the team. My observation was that the Flames were struggling to navigate the neutral zone and were having troubles entering the offensive zone effectively. Tracked zone entries via dump and via carry and sure enough the stats confirmed that in fact the Flames were struggling to keep possession of the puck through the neutral zone. Was even contacted by an advanced stats blogger that wanted to publish my findings elsewhere.

Advanced stats aren't bad. But the biggest stat-defenders tend to not use them correctly. Example - a stat geek watches a game on TV and a scout watches it live. Lets say Phil Kessel scores two goals. The scout says Kessel scored twice because he has great offensive instincts. The stat geek says Kessel must have great offensive instincts because he scored twice. That's backwards.

See the difference? Advanced stats just need to be used properly - as an additional tool to watching games as it helps to confirm what was seen. Not as a substitute to watching the game and then predicting future results blindly.