Quote:
Originally Posted by Nelson
This is 100% true and also misleading.
The only thing that matters is scoring more goals than the other side.
The reason some people (like myself) harp on possession statistics is they correlate strongly with scoring more goals than the other side.
If you have the puck in the offensive zone (CF%), shoot (SF%), generate scoring chances (SC%) and create high-danger scoring chances (HDSC%) more often than the other side, you are likely to score more often than the other side.
This relationship is not causation nor is it near perfect correlation, but it is strong correlation so I think it matters.
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The correlation is not that high. There are lots of outliers. And there is a tremendous amount of noise in the data.
But even more importantly, if success at the NHL level were as simple and straight-forward as getting more chances, we could all be NHL coaches.