Quote:
Originally Posted by Regorium
My basis is that he is sheltered in Nashville. Even with the vast majority of his starts in the offensive zone, he still only put up 25 points.
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I just want to point out that Zone Starts are a useless stat which give no help in evaluating either a player's strengths or weaknesses or even give the slightest bit of insight into how a team uses a player - which is exactly what the stat purports to show.
If you compare Jones' Game Logs from NHL.com
http://www.nhl.com/ice/player.htm?id...52016&view=log
To his faceoff stats (All situations) from War-on-Ice
http://war-on-ice.com/playerseason.h...me1=Seth0Jones
You'll find that, on average, Jones has about 25 shifts a game, but the number which begin with a faceoff fluctuates wildly from 6 to 20. As Neutral Zone faceoffs count as essentially nothing in the Zone Start stat, the percentage of a player's actual shifts which are being considered in the stat is around 40% of their total shifts. You also end up with some screwy numbers distorting the final product.
For example, Jones "Most Sheltered Night" of this season came on December 7th against Boston, when he had a ZSO% of 100%, wow... crazy sheltered use right? Well, actually, Jones played 24 shifts that night for 19:35 of playing time.
Of those 24 shifts, he started 5 in the O-zone, 2 in the N-zone, and 0 in the D-zone, at 5-on-5, Score Adjusted, Nashville won 3-2 and Jones finished with a relatively empty stat sheet: 2 shots, nothing else to speak of. But then, if you go look at the shift chart for the game:
http://www.nhl.com/stats/shiftcharts?id=2015020405
You'll see Jones getting regular 5v5 shifts through the 2nd and 3rd periods, including a key 1:20 shift from 57:40-58:59 of the 3rd after Nashville scored the go-ahead-goal.
If Jones is being 'sheltered' by his coach, what's he doing on the ice at such a key defensive moment of the game? Up by one with less than 3-minutes to play? Sounds like exactly the wrong time to throw out your 'sheltered' guy. Except ZSO% doesn't tell us who's being sheltered. It, in fact, tells us pretty much nothing about the game of hockey. It's about as useful as +/- or GAA. Probably less.
I am a huge, huge believer in "advanced" stats and really quite enjoy them, but I
hate Zone-Starts. It is far and away the worst of the new stats being tracked and is so wildly unhelpful to the point that it is essentially deliberately misleading.
Any argument made using Zone-Starts as support can be considered automatically wrong. Zone-Starts are the loosest butthole.