Quote:
Originally Posted by BigFlameDog
Yeah he was on and pretty much spewed exactly what you would expect....Flames will be crashing back to earth soon. Discounted the injured guys returning as not good enough to make up fro the low Corsi. He was also careful to cover his but with some "you never know's" and "it's always possible".
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I have a few problems with what this guy said. I understand the stats, but don't take a lot from them for a couple reasons:
1) The guy frames the discussion like "The stats say they WILL regress to the mean" and then says "But it's
possible to maintain I suppose". Why are the stats an absolute?
2) Everything is seemingly attributed to luck (either good or bad). It looks to me like they just attribute luck to the things they can't account for (yet). And even when the idea of different players having better shots, better position, etc...equalling higher scoring percentages, it's just "Well we have metrics for that, but they aren't very good yet, so we'll just ignore it/assume it's statistically insignificant". He actually said that the quality of player (or quality of shot), while not accurately measured right now, is not important anyways. Well no, you can't just ignore it. Because the different skills/talents/abilities of players (an no, ability is not just scoring vs preventing scoring. It's small things like first on forcheck, smart decisions at bluelines, positioning without the puck, attitude etc...) might be the greatest reasons for differences in these numbers. These stats are takin in a vaccum and analyzed with the assumption that all players, teams, coaches, etc.. are equal and therefore will all regress to an average. But there are good teams, average teams and bad teams. Ignoring these facts and assuming equality across the competition is a huge part of why people are questioning this stuff.
I don't doubt that there's support in the analytics, but it is support for the eye-test, not the other way around. There are too many variables in hockey for the stats to show a full picture of the game now, and maybe ever. Which is fine, that doesn't discount them. But it certainly precludes them from being used in support of any sort of
absolute claim of a teams fortunes either way.
EDIT: He was also adament about teams not showing these tendencies year-to-year, and thus they arent repeating and reliable, or don't show a skill because it's random. No mention that players and teams improve or regress season-to season. AND he used the Flames and their 1-goal wins as an example. Forgetting that the Flames had a bunch of 1-goal games last year across the league. Now we are winning some/most of them. To me that's not an aboration, it's improvement.