Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinordi
I think one of the reasons there's so much antipathy to "advanced stats" is that they refute long held tropes, biases and stories we tell ourselves about team X or player Y. We don't like that, we like the story of "heart" and a player being "clutch." It creates a causal and hence relatable nature to the game. Watching the game and drawing conclusions is available to anyone who wants to do it whereas those who want and are able to evaluate data is a much smaller segment of the population. That's seen as an attack by many, that somehow there knkowledge of the game isn't as valuable as new knowledge, of course there would be almost a visceral pushback.
But that's the precise value of the stats, they provide a way to 'ground-truth' your biases and assumptions. Are they perfect, no but should that preclude them from being used? Are they any less perfect that Joe fan sitting on the couch complaining about how terrible Phaneuf is?
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I get what you're trying to say, and I agree that statistical analysis is incredibly valuable, but I think all others are saying is that you can go too far and become a robot that is only interested in data. This is still a game played by humans where emotion and psychology play as much of a factor as the actual skill itself. That makes it wildly unpredictable over a short term, and really this team's data from this season is still too small to make assertions of what will definitely happen to them. You could use data from last year as well, but there are different players on this team (Gaudreau, Raymond, Hiller, Bollig, Engelland, Jooris) than last year even, so it's really only 3/4s of last year's team that is the same, making some of that data irrelevant.
I don't have a problem with what Mirtle said, it's just that he's ignored a lot of other data that is still relevant, namely goal differential. Also, when you look at the experience level of our centers, it's not surprising that we lose a lot of face-offs and don't have as much possession as a result. Also, if you were to watch this team, they don't look the same as the Leafs he mentioned, or the same as the Avs of last year which other posters have mentioned. There's a harmonious marriage between analytics on paper and analytics with visuals, and neither should be considered more important than the other.