In looking at "advanced" stats more, I keep coming back to one area where I find them tough to accept - they treat shots the same without any ability to look at shot quality, and they assume many instances in hockey are due to luck, which will regress to a mean over time. Though regression over time would happen, that period of time would be (IMO) longer than a season, maybe even longer than 2 seasons, which makes that assumption tougher to accept. Also, hockey analytics ignore shot quality, even though that has been proven in basketball to be a great way to measure effectiveness - as different players have better chances of scoring from certain positions, and overall trends show certain areas are more likely to produce scoring.
What would be awesome to see if the shot % outliers, then compare the zones they have shot in, and success rate in each place - removing the few empty net goals. That would be a way to track if a shooting percentage was really off, or if a player was changing/forced into changing his game.
Same thing could go for teams that have less shots but score a high percentage (e.g. the Flames) - do these shots come from certain areas, how much in each section of the offensive zone - and how does that compare to effective shooting percentages across the league?
Break the offensive zone into sectors - left and right sides, at the point, hashmarks, crease, etc.
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