Quote:
Originally Posted by savemedrzaius
What season are those stats from when playing with Bozak? Because a lot of those players didn't play with the Leafs this year. Gustavvson, Crabb, Komi, Schenn! These stats must be really old.
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They don't include this season, but that makes them more reliable, because including data from when they were playing on different teams would be misleading. No, they're not old - they're all inclusive. That is everyone. I said, "everyone is better at everything with Grabovski than with Bozak". That chart sets out CF% and GF% for every player who played more than 200 minutes with either Bozak or Grabovski when they were on the Leafs.
Also, he's not youngish. He's 27. We know what we're getting out of Bozak at this point. This season he has an on ice shooting percentage of something like 12%. This is how we evaluate luck: is it more likely that his on ice shooting percentage this year (which is basically driven by Phil Kessel being awesome) is an aberration, or is it more likely that he's as good at creating offence as Martin St. Louis and Ryan Getzlaf of the consistent ~11% ONSH%? Meanwhile, from a possession standpoint he's like 16th on the team, and the team is bad at possession. The only thing I get from Bozak's "good season" is that Phil Kessel and James Van Riemsdyk are dragging their team around the ice, and without elite level goaltending (like the Leafs were getting earlier in the season) that's not going to win you games.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Enoch Root
And the advocates will pat themselves on the back for being right, and then continue to ignore all the times that they are not.
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This is a really good article on this point:
http://theleafsnation.com/2014/3/31/...-i-told-you-so
For me, I don't think this does really vindicate the possession crowd so much. Because while the results were sort of similar to what the statheads predicted, the Leafs are still outperforming expecatations even finishing out of the dance, and no one could have predicted how they got where they are. The path actually tells us quite a bit about how useful these measures are as predictors.
Look at Toronto vs. New Jersey - both about to finish just outside the playoffs. Toronto is an awful possession team, while Jersey is roughly top 5 in that department. How are they in more or less the same spot? Toronto manages to outperform its own possession game on the strength of a top 5 shooting percentage and is 6th in the NHL at ES save percentage when the game is close. The Devils are 23rd and 28th in those numbers. It's a pretty good example of how there's more than one road to success in the NHL, where the statheads have always preached possession. A strong possession game is still the best road to success (there's a reason that the top 5 teams in the league at this are LA, CHI, SJS, STL and BOS) but the Leafs give a lot more context and colour, and hopefully allow for more accurate evaluations in the future.