bustaheims
Well-known member
CarltonTheBear said:So why not track that information and make it easily accessible? Zone starts and zone entries fall under these analytic stat categories. Is Nonis saying that he doesn't think it's valuable to know which players are more successful at entering the zone than others? Or if a players point totals are somewhat effected by how a coach is deploying him on face-offs?
No. What I think he's saying is that it's not worth hiring additional staff to track these things, nor is it necessarily important to give them a specific name or to measure them to a high degree of accuracy. If you observe players long enough with your pro and amateur scouts and make rough approximations of how they fare in these areas, you're going to come to the same basic conclusion as you would having additional staff tracking them and getting specific numbers on each player.
CarltonTheBear said:But nobody is suggesting that corsi should be looked at in a vacuum. And neither should +/-/. I think +/- can be a pretty useful stat if you take into consideration what type of ice-time a player is getting and who he's playing against. I'm sure many in the NHL community would agree with that. It's not perfect, but there is some value there. I would say the exact same thing about corsi.
The problem is that a lot of people do look at in a vacuum - or, at the very least, they're expressing conclusions based on Corsi without acknowledging the obvious flaw in the measurement while compounding the issue by using Corsi to come up with a bunch of other statistics. Like +/-, Corsi might have some value when looked at over multiple seasons and seeing if there's a trend, but, even then, as far as I'm concerned, the value is pretty limited.
CarltonTheBear said:And I think this is my biggest problem with how Nonis views corsi. It seems like he thinks the idea about corsi is that team with a high rating will win and a team with a low rating will lose. He said today that "we've had teams in the past where we were outshooting teams on a nightly basis. Our so-called Corsi stat was probably pretty good." It's like he's pretending that the team didn't have the worst goaltending in the league those years.
I don't think he's pretending that the goaltending was awful over those years. He was part of the management team that repeatedly looked to improve the situation, so, I'm sure he's well aware of the situation there. What's he doing is pointing out a flaw in how some people perceive and present Corsi and showing just how limited having a strong Corsi number can be.
CarltonTheBear said:Nonis and co. seem to be in the minority here though. In fact I honestly can't name a single other GM that has spoken out against advanced stats like he has. Maybe you can point out a few. But earlier this season somebody compiled a list of all the NHL teams that are using advanced stats or analytics one way or another. 17 teams seem to say that analytics are a valuable resource. That's including all the recent Stanley Cup champions. Winnipeg wasn't on that list but after what Cheveldayoff said today you can add him too.
I'm not sure I agree with you here. What I see in that article is a lot of teams using their own proprietary set of advanced stats and a small handful openly using things like Corsi. No one, including Nonis, is saying there's no value in finding advanced stats or analytics - just that they felt the companies that have presented to them don't provide enough to justify spending money on them. If they didn't feel there was any value in these things, why would they have met with a dozen different analytics people (according to Mirtle)? Clearly, they see a potential value in the area, just not in what's out there right now.