Quote:
Originally Posted by Cheerio
I think you're not really understanding the point of corsi/fenwick etc. The reason these stats were invented was because there were 0 ways to track possession in the NHL. If you watch a soccer game, where ball possession is tracked very well, you'll notice that possession correlates to winning. Corsi and fenwick are the best indicators of possession that exist for hockey, if you're shooting the puck, you have possession of it (obviously) and if the puck is being shot at your net, you don't. So corsi doesn't treat a bad angle shot, or a blocked shot as a good thing, it's treating it as a single data point where team X had the puck, and team Y didn't.
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Yes Corsi is an excellent way to track possession. The problem is that most advanced stats people overemphasize possession as the be all and end all of hockey without taking into account whether the team with the puck did anything useful with it. If your shot gets blocked, that is a wasted possession. If you miss the net, that is a wasted possession. In the end, hockey is about scoring goals and preventing them and the ONLY shots that have a chance to result in a goal are the ones that actually reach the net. I have seen soccer games where a team lost in spite of leading in possession. Generally that happens when they aren't hitting the net with their shots. (Check out the "On target" stat. It also correlates very well to winning.)