Quote:
Originally Posted by driveway
Our fan base sounds exactly like the leafs, avs, and wild fa bases of past years.
Whether or not corsi and fenwick measure what they claim to measure is irrelevant. They correlate strongly with winning, and it is a bad sign that we suck at them.
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I think your comment reveals the exact problem with "advanced stats," which isn't the stats themselves but how they are being used.
Strong Corsi and Fenwick says may correlate with winning, but the second part of your post was that THEREFORE "it's a bad sign that we suck at them." Being tall correlates with being rich, but that doesn't mean that "it's a bad sign that Donald Trump isn't tall."
All that these advanced stats can tell us is that good teams tend to score better on those metrics. But here's the thing: any number of "non-advanced" stats will give us the same information: good teams tend to have good goal differential, take more shots on goal, have better power play numbers and so on and so forth. Yet no one hails any of those metrics as the "thing teams must do if they want to succeed." We all recognize that these are simply one variable in a complex matrix of variables, and occasionally a team succeeds despite not doing well at one or more of them, or fails despite looking good on most of those measures.
Frankly, statistical analysis in hockey is in its infancy, and we should be cautious about raising it on too high a pedestal this early. One of the things we need our stats gurus to develop is a healthy skepticism about what these metrics are actually telling us, so we don't jump to the conclusion that a stat which correlates with success can also predict success for a given team, because logically that just doesn't follow.