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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Nope. It's that in a lot of cases advanced stats tell us nothing we didn't already know. Anyone that watched the Leafs or Avs play last year knew they weren't going to be able to sustain long term success playing the way they were. Lots of posters here had predicted the Leafs would fall off as they did. There aren't a lot of Flames fans here that haven't said more than once that they expect the Flames will eventually hit the skids this season. It's not hard to look at the assembled talent on the roster then evaluate from their goals for, goals against, shots for, shots against, and goaltender save percentage and surmise if their play will carry long term. Myrtle's article here about the Flames is more for people out east that don't watch them or even care to take a look at their record and stats than it is for the fans of the team that already know full well that they are playing over their heads. While some of the advanced stats make for good evaluation tools a lot of it like this article is akin to a yellow book for dummies.