Advanced stats complement, rather than replace, traditional stats

[doniceage]

Colton Orr, as it turns out, had himself a fine game. Orr was on the ice for nine of his own team’s shot attempts and only one (one!) of the Penguins’, for a 90 CF% (corsi for percentage). Nobody in the fancy stats community is suggesting Orr is a better hockey player than Phil Kessel, Evgeni Malkin or Sidney Crosby. It’s silly to think any stat will display a player’s true talent level in any one-game sample size. But let’s not forget something: Orr was on the ice for nine shots for and one against. That’s amazing. It’s not something he (or any other player) can replicate consistently, but that shouldn’t take away from his performance.

It should make intuitive sense to all hockey fans, geeks or not, that being (partly) responsible for such a large difference in his team’s shot differential (the Leafs were out corsi’d that night by a score of 39 to 28), is undoubtedly a positive. But I think performances like this should be viewed with the same good-heartedness of an unlikely goal scorer producing for his team, not as evidence the statistic is flawed. Corsi though, unfortunately for O’Neill’s argument, does in fact correlate rather well with what we perceive as quality hockey players in larger sample sizes, just like goals and points.


http://www.thehockeynews.com/blog/ad...daily_20131030

[centrehice]

Most advanced stats are just stupidity. We can thank Americans and Baseball for this nonsense.


Oh this player so and so, gets on base safely every 3 times out of 15 at bats, when Norm the pretzel guy wears his blue shirt, and the wind is less than 5 Mph out of the West.

Power Rankings in Hockey is the newest stupid craze. Only Stanley Cups carry any weight with me.

[30ranfordfan]

For the most part, I agree with you.... I've done a bit of reading on some advanced stats - and I think for the most part they are a bunch of nonsense.

Having said that, just looking at pure stats doesn't always paint a fair picture of a player (or team) which is why people have moved towards these 'advanced stats'.

If your goalie makes 40 saves on the night.... but 35 were easy to see, from somewhere between the blueline & the top of the circles... while the other 5 were actually pretty good scoring changes - and you compare that to your opponent's goalie who stoped 32 shots, but half of which were in close: Who was the more impressive goalie?

Same thing with skaters. If there's a 2-on-1, a pass is made, and the recipient of the pass misses his shot (just wide) of the net..... and we compare that to someone taking a wrist shot from the top of the cirlce that the goalie is looking at, with no traffic in front (that he easily saves): Which one was the better chance? Which one, if repeated, has the better chance of turning into a goal? Clearly the 2-on-1 would.... despite the fact it is not a shot on goal, and the other one is.


Finding a way to add the circumstance of the statistic, a better way to quantify things - not a bad idea. I just don't think Corsi does a very good job of it.

Most advanced stats are just stupidity. We can thank Americans and Baseball for this nonsense.


Oh this player so and so, gets on base safely every 3 times out of 15 at bats, when Norm the pretzel guy wears his blue shirt, and the wind is less than 5 Mph out of the West.

Power Rankings in Hockey is the newest stupid craze. Only Stanley Cups carry any weight with me.

[centrehice]

Hockey asks only one Question, and it should invoke one of two responses, with a proper 2 comment retort following the answer of that said question:


Q: Did Your Team Win The Stanley Cup ?


A1: If Yes - Congratulations to you and them

A2: If No - Why Not?



This is the only thing in Pro Hockey that ever needs to be asked. ……….. Statistics/Schmatistics

[Craig2]

Most advanced stats are just stupidity. We can thank Americans and Baseball for this nonsense.

I think advanced statistics in hockey are mostly nonsense, but I don't think the same is true of baseball.

I'm not going to argue that Mike Trout is more valuable than Miguel Cabrera based on WAR, since like any advanced metric it has its own biases, but I do think that it's nice to look beyond BA/HR/RBI. There's no doubt that for too long defensive value was underrated due to poor measures like fielding percentage, so zone ratings have helped. Same goes for the idea that OBP is more important than average, and that a strikeout isn't the end of the world.

With hockey, I think the eye test is more important many times than a stat sheet.