Quote:
Originally Posted by Roof-Daddy
It's not completely useless.
It just needs to be realized that every shot within each "zone" is not of equal difficulty.
Even still, the more shots you can get from the high danger area, the better. And the more you can do to make those difficult...even more better.  |
You are right, it is absolutely not useless. More goals are scored in tight than from far away. And for the purposes I am particularly interested in, they aren’t enough. We need to take a closer look.
So yes, more shots from around the crease go in than from the point. Some shots from near the post are cross crease tap ins, some are pucks jammed in to a set goalie pad. So shot location is the same, but what is different? A couple of ideas include what happened to get the puck there, and whether the goalie has had time to get set.
So the questions we are trying to answer are trying to understand what type of plays result in a shot from the same position being more or less likely to go in.
So the shot location / danger zone data rightly suggests to get pucks to the net.
The next layer is how to move the puck in tight to have the best chance of beating the goalie. (As you rightly note, how to make those shots more dangerous).
When you get to the point of trying to use the stats to be predictive, this is where using just location breaks down. And the stats on Corsica are limited by what is measured, so trying to tweak shot location, but don’t quite get to the point where you can truly identify if the situation makes the goalie move and gives him adequate time to get set.
I am almost tempted to see how we can do some analysis in-house on CP next season