Quote:
Originally Posted by Fan in Exile
The advanced stats advocates are drinking the same koolaid as Lowe and McTavish:
IJay Palansky from The Toronto Star:
In one recent example, Sportsnet ran an article on Nov. 20 headlined “Flames and Oilers Heading In Opposite Directions.” The headline is the one thing we can agree on.
Calgary and Edmonton are indeed two teams heading in opposite directions, but it’s not the directions the author and most other people think.
The writer contrasted Calgary’s surprising 12-6-2 start at the time with Edmonton’s disappointing 6-11-2, and marvelled at the Flames’ “character” and “courage,” and delicately declaring that “Calgary has more guts than a killing floor.”
Fortunately, analytics gives us much better metrics for gauging performance. Twenty games isn’t a huge sample, but there’s enough to get a sense of what’s going on.
And what’s going on is that, despite its uncanny ability to give up prime scoring chances with disturbing regularity, Edmonton is a better team than Calgary.
Much like the Leafs’ early success last season, Calgary’s start this year is smoke and mirrors.
I guess there's no arguing, right? The "advanced stats" say the Oilers are better than the Flames so goals for and against, records and head-to-head results be damned; they ARE a better team. The circular reasoning employed here reminds me of the reasoning of a religious fanatic.
I hope the Oilers hire this guy. They deserve each other. |
That's the problem with NHL stats at the moment. Nothing wrong with new Advanced Stats we keep talking about, and they certainly help analyse the games and help give us more directional information.
As someone else mentioned, the problem is, in the NHL, the stats, advanced or not do not provide the same level of insight or reduced margin for error that advanced stats do at this point in baseball for example. There is a lot of "assumption" and "proxying" that goes into what "advanced stats" are in the NHL. They are far less direct correlations being made from stats. For example, on base in baseball means exactly that, on base. But shots in NHL mean nothing more than shots taken that make it through to the net (and it's still subjective at that), yet it's being used as a proxy for possession and even quality scoring chances, both of which it does not definetly equal at all.
So what does this all mean? Doesn't mean that advanced stats in the NHL are useless, but it means drawing conclusions from them with certainty of outcomes is subject to a much much higher probability of error than if they were more accurate. So when people say Flames fans for example are just arguing against the odds with NHL advanced stats, it means much less than if we were talking about baseball because those stats have a much smaller margin for error, and therefore a much smaller chance that the Flames are legitimately not going to be subject to law of averages.
Anyway, it also means, that you can't just look at the stats sheets I the NHL and not watch the games. Anyone that has watched the Flames and Oilers play, realize there is a reason for the discrepancy for records, and it's not luck for the Flames and bad luck for the Oilers. But a Toronto Star columnist who doesn't watch the games is only going to put the effort in to look at stats, not watch, and assume his conclusions are solid, even though he's using very directional data at best to make his conclusions.