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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Quote:
Originally Posted by JiriHrdina
The basic problem is not the stats themselves, but how they are used. At times it seems like reporters have a theory and then they go out to find the numbers that support it. It happens in business too. The better approach is look at the stats and decide what narrative they are actually telling you.
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I think these two comments are really interesting. Tinordi, I get what you're saying, and hockey certainly does have an old school mentality at times (most times). But simply because there is a push back doesn't automatically mean that new knowledge is good knowledge because it threatens the entrenched status quo. It hasn't really proven itself to be good knowledge. There are enough people trying to carve out a piece of the NHL pie that if there was a system that worked, people would be all over it.
The problem I have with advanced stats is basically what Jiri outlines. They're used to explain a narrative that is already in place. What I'd like to see is a blind analysis based on these stats. Take all 30 teams, assign them a blind ID without seeing their team name or their overall record, and try to predict where they would be in the standings based on these so-called stats. It's easy to take a team that is obviously exceeding expectations like the Flames and point out a bunch of stats that should have them lower in the standings. But do that league-wide when you don't have the benefit of history and the standings and show me where the Flames should be.
Maybe it shows the Flames should be 15th to 23rd. Maybe it doesn't. But picking out one team and saying "oh the PDO is way off their winning %" without analyzing the rest of the teams and just cherry picking one stat makes the analysis basically meaningless.