Quote:
Originally Posted by Phil Russell
My feelings on advanced stats is that they are probably being overemphasized as predictors of performance--there are too many intangibles in hockey team success to by able to model performance based on something like possession stats.
But, the question of whether advanced stats do model performance can, ironically, be tested statistically. The question is do we have a statistically significant sample yet to do this (enough years of advanced stats and team performance data to determine if the former predicts the later)?
Please, someone who likes stats, take this on.
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The sample size is large enough. War-on-ice.com has over 10 years of data. I would suggest going to that site and looking at different stats and comparing them to what happened. You can even make larger than one year sample sizes. You can then see for yourself if the stat matched what happened. We can't measure future because it hasn't happened.
One very important thing that has only barely been looked at statistically, is advanced stats and playoff success. So far, the only work I've seen was from fivethirtyeight.com showing that playoff success was most strongly correlated with goalie save %. The kicker? Save % for a goalie is only very rarely repeatable suggesting a hot goalie is the most important thing yet almost impossible to predict or procure.