Quote:
Originally Posted by Itse
It does not matter what the "point" of "advanced stats" is supposed to be. Stats are stats and their correlation with reality is what it is. Just because you call secondary stats "underlying" or "advanced" or "less hindisight" is meaningless.
Corsi is pretty much only ever used for two things: predicting that teams you like are better than their primary stats indicate, or that teams you don't like are worse than their primary stats indicate. This is how you get people trying to argue that somehow the Flames, whose primary stats were indicating a downfall, was actually due to "turn a corner", and this is pretty much what I hear when you suggest that we should be looking at those secondary stats to see if the team is playing well. No we shouldn't. We should be looking at the primary stats, because those "hindsight" stats are always more likely to give the right answer to that question. Of course every now and then the secondary stats will be right and the primary stats wrong, but you should never make decisions with that hope in mind, because the odds will never be in your favor.
Of course fans like us looking for hope in weak stats is harmless. However I strongly suspect that the Flames organization did exactly the same, used the flimsy cover of positive secondary stats to ignore the big blinking warning lights of the primary stats.
Of course I can't know this, but I strongly suspect unreasonable faith in secondary stats telling "the real story" is a big reason why the management just stood by while the season wasted away.
If you have enough data you can always create a statistic that weakly correlates with what you want to see. Organizations have been doing this to fool themselves about as long as statistics have existed.
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We don’t know what stats the flames are using. It seems incredibly presumptuous to suggest you know better than 31 NHL teams who all use statistical analysis to support their coaching and personnel decisions at the GM level.
Looking at the primary statistics are useless for the purposes we are discussing. The whole point here is to examine whether or not the team’s play can be evaluated in such a way that helps predict outcomes and help determine personnel usage, strategy, matchups and even things like trades or call ups.
Since there are quite a few things the stats can’t predict they will never be perfect, but it doesn’t make them useless. Maybe the flames did play the right way, for some of the season anyways, but other factors prevented them from achieving success. Motivation, scoring skill, decision making, morale, off ice issues, luck, momentum, poor goaltending, fatigue, injuries etc could all play a role in why success never materialized.
The idea that the flames had good advanced stats and failed to find success, therefore advanced stats are useless is poor reasoning. As is the conclusion that the Flames put too much emphasis on these stats. We have no idea, none, what importance the Flames organization places on these metrics. Even if the Flames do place a lot of weight in advanced stats, their reliance on such analysis can’t even be conclusively determined to be a mistake since the issues preventing success may not have been fixable by a change in game by game strategy or systems.
The fact some people on CP used them to support the idea that the Flames’ results weren’t consistent with the statistics available should in no way lead anyone to conclude or even theorize that the Flames made the same mistake. There’s simply no evidence to support such a conclusion.
What’s funny is that I don’t follow advanced stats closely. I rarely have any interest in even reading the advanced analyses that were frequently posted as to why the Flames were better than their record.
And all that being said, the bottom line is that the stats that matter, wins and points, weren’t up to expectations and as such changes likely need to be made. That’s why I’m one of the people who believe it is possible Tre feels that he will need to make player personnel adjustments because he may believe it isn’t all on the coach. Then again, a coaching change wouldn’t surprise me either. I’ve long been saying that I believe our issues aren’t limited to a single problem like just the coach or just the depth or just the stars or whatever.