[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Again, you have demonstrated that you don't know what you're talking about.

Originally Posted by Calgary4LIfe

PDO IS garbage, sorry. Yeah, I understand where the math part comes from, it is just a completely stupid rationale. It is using simple math to justify something that it shouldn't. No, it doesn't always equal 1.000.

League-wide, it does, by necessity. As I said, it's just a shorthand. If you see a team at the top of the standings you weren't expecting, you look at the league PDO table, and if their PDO is high, then you can say, okay, well, their shooting percentage or save percentage (or both) is probably driving that. Then you'd have to do a lot more looking to figure out what's really going on. It's just an off-the-cuff indicator about how a team is winning (or not).

Also, I am not 'against' metrics, and you really don't have to talk down to me here. Please go and see any actuary and he will look at CORSI and will tell you that the confidence interval is WAY too low to trust. Most risk-based industries will fire you on the spot with confidence numbers that low.

Totally, but then you have to effectively discard stats as a useful tool to tell you anything about how a team is doing and just go with "we won / lost the game, that's all that matters". All these things are useful for is to give you more information about what trends are going on throughout the season, which hopefully will indicate - better than the win / loss record - what's likely to happen if X or Y tweak was made. No one is suggesting that Fenwick or XGF or RelTM can reliably predict the future; otherwise everyone would make a killing betting on hockey.

No, these metrics that you are passionately defending are not infallible

I have neither passionately defended them, nor have I suggested they're "infallible". I suspect your very long post would be shortened somewhat if it just responded to what I said, instead of creating straw men.

CORSI - what is CORSI? What I mean is what is the measurement describing? In the end, it is attempting to describe possession, correct? By using total shots + missed shots + blocked shots, at even strength 5on5, minus the opposing teams total shots + missed shots + blocked shots. In this way, you can infer possession, right? Do I have this right?

No - hilariously wrong, considering this is a basic stat that has been publicly tracked and available for well over a decade now. Corsi is shot attempts including blocked shots; you don't deduct anything. What you've described is Corsi +/-, which I don't know of anyone referencing when Corsi% is available.

It's also not exactly possession - it's offensive zone possession. Or rather, a proxy for offensive zone possession. So are shots on goal, and goals, by the way. Shot attempts just create more data points. It's just more information... You can use it to support well-reasoned conclusions or poorly reasoned ones. There's nothing inherently good or bad about data.

You seem to have strong opinions on these stats but can't actually describe them at even a basic level. I'd hate to see the gears turning as you attempt to figure out RelTM.

Well, now you have to count on the people tallying up these numbers have it right. Some arenas are notorious for poor counting stats - just shots on goal. Less of them to count, but they often get it wrong. "Nah, that was just a dump-in". So your data set is a little unreliable at it stands, but not (hopefully) terribly so.

This is really obvious, which is why you just have to take a look at the home / road splits to determine if anything particularly funny is going on, which it typically isn't.

And then you use these numbers to state that it is showing possession, but without any regard at all to 'more patient teams' that like to pass the puck around a bit more, or teams that are way more effective on the cycle and have tonnes of zone time but generate few shots on net, etc. That isn't captured, so the numbers are further skewed.

Except, first, that's not the case, based on the limited numbers of times that various people ten plus years ago just used a stopwatch to calculate offensive possession and then compared it to the corsi numbers and determined that they're basically the same. But whatever, if you want to just dream up hypothetical teams that cycle the puck around and don't try to shoot it, go ahead. The reality is that those teams tend to a) actually take more shots, and b) spend less time in their own end because they spend it in the other team's, so it winds up being a wash. But you dream up whatever scenarios you like, if that's what makes you happy.

Still, you can't argue that 'more shots' is usually more conducive to winning. Being out-shot isn't a sustainable winning strategy. So regardless of actual time of possession correlating with CORSI, out-shooting (or attempting to out-shoot) the opposition usually correlates with winning the game, right?

Typically, yes. You can get by with your goalie bailing you out and having 12% of your shots go in for a month, and for about one team every year, longer. Long enough to make the playoffs, even. Hockey's a chaotic, frantic game with lots of variables and bounces.

Except when it doesn't. Like Hartley's Calgary Flames for 1.5 seasons (and other teams that unexpectedly didn't make the playoffs, or that made it 'un-deservingly' from an analytical perspective).

How do those teams do in the post-season compared to those that play hockey the "right way" from a possession standpoint? How do they do the following year? Like I said above, are we really doing this again? If you still think there's no correlation between being a good possession team and long-term success I just cannot help you.

Yeah, I'm not bothering with the rest of it. It's just a bunch of motivated reasoning and ex post facto justification of results that didn't hold up over time, just as anyone with a brain in their head could have predicted. You don't need to read the shot attempt differentials to figure out that having the puck more than the other guys is a good way to win.