Quote:
Originally Posted by New Era
Tell me you did not just claim +/- is a garbage stat while laying your defense of that statement with “fancy stats” as a basis? +/- is a pretty concrete stat, open to little interpretation. You were either on the ice for a goal scored for or against, or you were not. It is an absolute measure not open to interpretation. Conversely, many of those fancy stats are based on unrelated events, events that are extremely subjective and inconsistent in collection method. All it takes is one group of off ice officials to incorrectly report data - hello Edmonton and Boston - and the data becomes useless. The fact that they link two unrelated events is problematic enough, but the impurity of the data brings the validity of any findings into serious question.
I get why people don’t like +/-. At times it is unfair because a guy gets dinged during a line change. But it is very useful in looking at a team and discovering who is consistently on the ice for more goals against on a consistent basis. It is the batting strikeouts stat of hockey.
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The ditch to ditch mentality on this site just kills me some days.
It's not a useless stat, I like to know when players are on the ice for goals against then goals for.
However it's not the best stat available anymore because it doesn't take into account save percentage or shooting percentage of the players on the ice. You can get outplayed often but for whatever reason get lucky with your goaltender bailing you out and have a decent plus minus.
If that player has a bad corsi number you wonder, but even that in the Kris Russell defense could mean they are weak shots.
Then you go to scoring chances, where it's pretty hard to hide. If you get owned in scoring chance splits you have to be at least part of the problem.
Backlund is consistently top five on the team in CF% and HDCF% splits.