How Screwed are the Flames?

[Dienasty]

Originally Posted by Enoch Root

You keep referring to your sig...

It is actually a great example of where so many of the analytics guys go off the rails - overconfidence.

The example is a pure random event - a coin flip. It has a 50% probability of either outcome. A grade 7 student could tell you that those odds are in your favour and that you should keep betting because the stats will eventually take care of you.

I will ignore the fact that some people seem to think this is wisdom, and move on to the more important issue: Corsi is nothing like a coin flip. Even though teams will oscillate around 50%, does not mean that being above 50% puts you in the driver's seat.

There are far too many other variables involved.

Even though the analytics supporters know that, they still talk like they have 'additional knowledge' and an inside track on understanding the game. Instead of talking about the analytics as one (incomplete) piece of information within the conversation, they immediately dismiss anyone who questions them as troglodytes.

When you use Corsi to determine which teams are better, you are NOT getting better than 50% odds on a coin flip. But the analytics crew act like they are. And that pisses people off.

http://www.sportingcharts.com/articl...tatistics.aspx

Except that there is a correlation between using advanced stats and total team points, so your 50% hypothesis is incorrect. it is closer to 65%- 35% which if I was a betting man I would take the 65% odds.

Again there is room for error (hence the correlation is not 100%) but to say it is 50-50 is no true.

[Dienasty]

Originally Posted by SuperMatt18

In Baseball advanced stats have been around longer, and they still don't predict anything at the team level. Good at looking at individuals but ignores a lot of other variables when building a team.

Look at the last couple years, the Oakland A's have still yet to win a world series. Yet a team that seems to spit in the face of all the advanced stats has won 3 out of 5 world series, on what advanced stats call "luck".

To say that advanced stats have nothing to do with success in Baseball is extremely ignorant. WOW.

If advanced stats meant nothing on a team level then guys like Epstein, Beane, Friedman, Luhnow would not get paid millions of dollars to run a franchise.

Also SF spits in the face of analytics?

"GM Brian Sabean and manager Bruce Bochy have reputations for being old-school baseball types, but it's not accurate to call them anti-"Moneyball."

San Francisco has a small, stable front office that doesn't talk much about analytics; that's to avoid taking credit from the players, CEO Larry Baer told the New York Times. But Sabean and others insist the Giants have always incorporated statistical information and resultant strategies.

For instance, Bochy utilized the stolen base and sacrifice bunt less than any other NL manager in 2014, saying, "I believe in going for the bigger inning." And one of the pivotal plays in Game 7 of the last World Series went the Giants' way specifically because of their use of defensive analytics.

Being so close to Silicon Valley, the Giants have built-in advantages that have helped -- they have happily served as a guinea pig for Sportvision, whose technology center is in Mountain View, California, and therefore had access to PITCHf/x and FIELDf/x data before any other team.

OK, the Giants aren't exactly the baseball embodiment of Google, but with three World Series titles in five years, who cares?"

[Dienasty]

http://insider.espn.go.com/blog/crai...e/post?id=5219

"If you look at the analytics, they will tell you we’re not a very good team with the puck,” Hartley said. “Obviously, we need to block shots if we want to win games. I’m looking at those analytics every day.”"

[Jason14h]

The biggest outlier I think is overlooked is how we somehow have the least penalties when never controlling to puck/play.

Usually less puck control = more penalties = more goals against = ####tier record.

[Red]

Originally Posted by Jason14h

The biggest outlier I think is overlooked is how we somehow have the least penalties when never controlling to puck/play.

Usually less puck control = more penalties = more goals against = ####tier record.

Flames are a very fast counter attack team. They play the stretch pass for odd man rushes which result in short possession and lots of hooks.

Montreal plays a similar game, another smaller, fast team that CORSI can't quite figure out.

[heep223]

Originally Posted by Jason14h

The biggest outlier I think is overlooked is how we somehow have the least penalties when never controlling to puck/play.

Usually less puck control = more penalties = more goals against = ####tier record.

I think this point is vastly underestimated as to their success, how few penalties the Flames take and how good the PK has been.

[Enoch Root]

Originally Posted by Dienasty

http://www.sportingcharts.com/articl...tatistics.aspx

Except that there is a correlation between using advanced stats and total team points, so your 50% hypothesis is incorrect. it is closer to 65%- 35% which if I was a betting man I would take the 65% odds.

Again there is room for error (hence the correlation is not 100%) but to say it is 50-50 is no true.

I think you missed the point of my post

[SuperMatt18]

Originally Posted by Dienasty

To say that advanced stats have nothing to do with success in Baseball is extremely ignorant. WOW.

If advanced stats meant nothing on a team level then guys like Epstein, Beane, Friedman, Luhnow would not get paid millions of dollars to run a franchise.

Also SF spits in the face of analytics?

"GM Brian Sabean and manager Bruce Bochy have reputations for being old-school baseball types, but it's not accurate to call them anti-"Moneyball."

San Francisco has a small, stable front office that doesn't talk much about analytics; that's to avoid taking credit from the players, CEO Larry Baer told the New York Times. But Sabean and others insist the Giants have always incorporated statistical information and resultant strategies.

For instance, Bochy utilized the stolen base and sacrifice bunt less than any other NL manager in 2014, saying, "I believe in going for the bigger inning." And one of the pivotal plays in Game 7 of the last World Series went the Giants' way specifically because of their use of defensive analytics.

Being so close to Silicon Valley, the Giants have built-in advantages that have helped -- they have happily served as a guinea pig for Sportvision, whose technology center is in Mountain View, California, and therefore had access to PITCHf/x and FIELDf/x data before any other team.

OK, the Giants aren't exactly the baseball embodiment of Google, but with three World Series titles in five years, who cares?"

The thing is all those guys use advanced analytics to evaluate individual talent and help build a team, which I mentioned was effective. They don't use it to predict future results or what teams will be good or bad next year based on last years advanced stats.

You use it to evaluate individual players, which in baseball can lead to success since the sport is more designed to single events.

But at the end of the day it doesn't mean that the teams with the best advanced stats or the best analytics department is the best team. It also doesn't mean that advanced stats will predict which team is good or which team is bad.

Also I meant "the spitting in the face comment" more in the way that their advanced stats as a team are not the greatest but they still win. Much like this year the Flames are spitting in the face of advanced stats as they continue to win. Doesn't mean they don't use advanced stats, just means that they are successful in spite of their poor rankings by advanced stats measures.

In the end the point was more that while advanced stats are a great tool in both sports, especially when evaluating individual talent, they still have a hard time predicting future team success at the team level.

They can help you be successful by providing you insights when building a team but using them in retrospect to predict the future success of a team is still unreliable since there are so many changing factors.

Personally I am a supporter of advanced stats, and think as much info as possible is great, but I do think that they have some limitations in their ability to predict future events. I view them more as a tool that helps you evaluate past results, they can help you identify weaknesses in your team but I don't think looking at a team's advanced stats and saying they are good or bad for that reason is not effective.

[Bandwagon In Flames]

Originally Posted by Jason14h

The biggest outlier I think is overlooked is how we somehow have the least penalties when never controlling to puck/play.

Usually less puck control = more penalties = more goals against = ####tier record.

This could be a result of Hartley's system. Instead of taking defensive zone penalties with hooks and cross checks, the Flames just stay in shooting lanes, block shots and keep everything to the outside.

[edslunch]

Originally Posted by Dienasty

http://www.sportingcharts.com/articl...tatistics.aspx



Except that there is a correlation between using advanced stats and total team points, so your 50% hypothesis is incorrect. it is closer to 65%- 35% which if I was a betting man I would take the 65% odds.



Again there is room for error (hence the correlation is not 100%) but to say it is 50-50 is no true.

The linked article is interesting. I applaud his attempt to predict this season's standings but the results are pretty...... Wrong

[Resolute 14]

He was wrong, but interestingly, also one of not many that predicted we would be improved this year.

Edit: but as a useless exercise I won't take up, it would be interesting to see him do that using the actual numbers from this year and seeing how well that correlated.

[Enoch Root]

The Flames have now played 100 games since 'Hartleygate'. Their record is:

55 - 39 - 6 / 116 pts / +31 / 0.580 W%

For 100 games, their winning percentage has stayed pretty consistent, and their goal differential has remained not only steady, but consistent with the winning percentage .

That being the case, instead of continually throwing out Corsi and saying their record is unsustainable, I would be asking why Corsi isn't applying to them.

But that's just me.

[Biff]

Originally Posted by Jay Random

It depends what you're after, doesn't it?

If you're satisfied with correlations, and don't give a damn about understanding how the correlations work or what the causative factors are, by all means content yourself with possession proxies.

If you want to figure out how hockey games are actually won and lost, and learn something from data analysis that coaches and managers don't already know, you need more than correlation. You need to do some actual science. To begin with, when there are significant exceptions to a correlation, you can't just classify them as exceptions and shrug them off – because the exceptions disprove your model. You need to look at the exceptions, study additional factors, and refine the model.

The next job for hockey stats people is to explain why there are exceptions that Corsi and Fenwick do not adequately predict. And no, writing it off as ‘luck’ or ‘unsustainable’ is not an explanation; it is a refusal to explain. These people are staring at a golden opportunity right here in Alberta, with two teams that consistently defy their expectations, one in each direction. Instead of studying these phenomena and trying to figure out what additional factors are involved, they screw their eyes shut and chant, ‘Corsi and Fenwick! Corsi and Fenwick! Everything is explained by Corsi and Fenwick!’

This. A thousand times this. I am tired of pseudo-intellectual navel-gazing and data-wonking masquerading itself as enlightenment when it's a classic Emperor's New Clothes-esque denial of a fundamental principle of good science. The Corsi / Fenwick model is broken. Refine it, or stfu. That's science!

[mikeecho]

Originally Posted by Biff

I am tired of pseudo-intellectual navel-gazing and data-wonking masquerading itself as enlightenment

This caught my eye. In a previous life, I used to do a lot of Six Sigma project work. Part of that was working with guys who had PhD's in all kinds of math related fields. Real smart people with decades of experience analyzing data and drawing conclusions from it.

Have any of the PhD types looked at hockey related data and done any sort of real analysis on it? All I'm really seeing is amateur type enthusiasts seemingly without any sort of related credentials working on this stuff.

If more of the smart types working on this, we might get past using luck as a means to describe things that don't fit a mold which seemingly only works 65% of the time.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by mikeecho

This caught my eye. In a previous life, I used to do a lot of Six Sigma project work. Part of that was working with guys who had PhD's in all kinds of math related fields. Real smart people with decades of experience analyzing data and drawing conclusions from it.

Have any of the PhD types looked at hockey related data and done any sort of real analysis on it? All I'm really seeing is amateur type enthusiasts seemingly without any sort of related credentials working on this stuff.

If more of the smart types working on this, we might get past using luck as a means to describe things that don't fit a mold which seemingly only works 65% of the time.

Yes. Micah McCurdy who's predictive graph everyone hates (BSc math Hon, BSc Physics Hon, PhD)

[trublmaker]

"please explain why you'd take that view. The statement "You're wrong, clearly X team is better than Y team because they're higher in the standings" barely deserves a response even if you don't believe in any "advanced" stat. It's clearly wrong, and we've just been talking about how obvious that is. "

It's not a single team (X) that's higher than them though, it's 3

"I'd again point to the above post by "trublmaker" as an extreme example of people coming to the conclusion that they're suddenly not any good anymore. Yeah, no, they still are."

Where do I say that LA is suddenly no good anymore, I said those 3 teams are ahead of the kings therefore at the moment all 3 teams are better and I think after 65 games that's not a bad sample size for the season.

[Rerun]

^^^ You should use the quote function. It will make your responses easier to decipher.

[Resolute 14]

If teams like Pittsburgh and Anaheim can't even manage more than one bloody goal against the likes of Vancouver and San Jose, then we might actually be screwed.

[blender]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

Yes. Micah McCurdy who's predictive graph everyone hates (BSc math Hon, BSc Physics Hon, PhD)

Yeah, but does he watch hockey?

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by blender

Yeah, but does he watch hockey?

Yes. Huge sens fan