Quote:
Originally Posted by kehatch
It is not meant to be. Its just old.
On one side you have a bunch of people that have strong negative opinions about the subject without the smallest bit of knowledge. Its the internet era people. It isn't that hard to have an educated opinion. Ignorance isn't really defensible.
On the other side you have a group that seems to insist on a maintaining a barrier for entry. Presumably (and they would never admit this) so they can defend their false conclusions to the ignorant masses.
These aren't advanced stats. These aren't fancy stats. Its simple data digestible by the general public. But "they" put fancy terms like CORSI and FENWICK in the title to sound really smart. (How about calling it shot attempts ... gasp). There are dozens of derivatives of the metrics with almost no consistency in how they are used. Metrics like Quality of Competition and Team Mates are calculated differently all over the place with little consensus (What CORSI or QOC metric do people use .. the one that defends their conclusion the best ...) The entire system seems to be designed to be confusing when it really shouldn't be.
They also make false conclusions. Being on the ice for more shots attempts for then against is a good thing (duh) but that doesn't mean that the player with the highest CORSI is the best player. But many of the metrics rely on that conclusion to make any sense. PDO is supposed to be the luck metric. The conclusion being that a high SH% combined with a high SV% means your lucky. But that is just one possibility. Good teams finish above 1.0 all of the time. Plus, the entire think disregards special teams like that doesn't have a significant impact on the results.
I have no doubt that shot attempt based metrics will become a major part of our game. I have no doubt that better player tracking technology will result in new metrics like zone entries. Its information and you can't afford to disregard information. But I seriously doubt these "fancy" stats of tomorrow will resemble the "fancy" stats of today. The final product will be less opinionated, less convoluted, and more accurate.
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I tend to relate the current state of advanced hockey stats to when baseball people started to realize that on base percentage was more important than batting average. It was such an obvious thing that anyone with a brain would know but sports teams for the longest time only had ex-players in the front office.
Some of the ex-players believe in what they grew up with (batting average/RBIs) and how they could just tell by seeing a guy swing how good a player would become.
It was such an obvious conclusion and there is a 0% chance that most of the teams weren't considering it but it was never spelled out in the public by the front offices or the media that when it started to come out online (and put into the mainstream by Moneyball) people thought they had cracked some code.
Baseball stats have advanced way beyond this now - defensive metrics, base running, park effects, etc to the point where they are useful beyond obvious conclusions.
Hockey stats will reach that point, but for now a lot of it is just obvious points given fancy names so people can't understand what they mean (like you say).