Quote:
Originally Posted by Bingo
Not sure I agree.
We keep hearing about proprietary models that can take goalie x and his save percentages by type, and plop him into team y and their propensity to give up a certain type of shot.
The math isn't that hard to run after you have those two sets.
So why not have that for defensemen?
"Chris Tanev is poor on the rush, and poor when stuck in his own zone for more than 65 seconds. His strengths are blocking out lanes, and taking away cross seam passes. Needs a partner to compliment that by also being strong positionally, and somewhat predictive"
Quinn Hugues and Noah Hanifin are very different. Calgary spends less time getting lit up than Vancouver did last year ... Vancouver was in the top five in many "against" categories, including shots and shot attempts. They spent a lot of time in their own zone.
So yeah I think you can have a model that would allow you to plop a certain player into a different situation.
If they don't ... it's coming.
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If those models for goalies were reliable, everyone would use them and no one would sign a goalie that doesn't work out or find a hidden gem or keep the wrong goalie.
The idea that you can accurately predict the future by mathematically analyzing the past is ages old and supposed breakthroughs have so often been just around the corner.
Baseball is a much better sport for stats based predictions and they've been on this a lot longer. Same with football. Soccer has been studied at the university level for a long time in Europe. Yet somehow the number of bad signings or hidden gems popping up hasn't really changed that much.
People are not frictionless objects moving in a vacuum. Hockey is complicated. People are complicated. The number of potentially significant variables is infinite. No matter how good you become at measuring some things, you will never run out of things you can't measure or just didn't think to consider in that instance, and when things go wrong, it's often impossible to know for sure what you missed.
People are also constantly changing. How do you know when Tanev is going to lose that one step too many?
It's always going to be an educated guess.