Well, the statistics that you see as gospel are the only realistic way you want to judge talent. And that's fine.
And even putting aside the fact that those same statistics need caveats and to be into proper perspective. Not everyone agrees that your analysis is realistic as you say.
In fact, I think many people feel judging a players impact in the nhl on paper alone is extremely unrealistic and has so many flaws. And I can only guess that the guys picking the team feel the same way. And them feeling Duncan Keith is far and away the superior choice to muzzin has nothing to do with sentimentality, but flat out because he's the better nhl'er.
I'm sure this didn't come off as clearly as intended, but it made sense in my head . Feels like we're getting into existential territory here...
- HB77
Before I start, I am a great fan of your hockeybuzz commenting, and if this comes across as jerky, my apologies.
But, you are acting like this is a debate that has a subjective answer. It does not.
Forget hockey for a second, in the history of the world - doesn't matter the topic - there are the things that people though, and then there were people who collected data and used it to test their hypotheses.
The answers they got (we are destroying the earth with pollution, the earth spins around the sun etc) didn't always match up to conventional wisdom (rarely ever) and people often called them idiots, burned them at stakes, had them crucified, exiled or in most cases, just mocked.
However, as time went on, people began to accept science and the results of provable experiments became accepted as facts (until the early the 2000s when republicans decided it was inconvenient).
Hockey is the exact same thing. You can watch it - and you should - and your eyes can tell you useful things like "that guy is fast compared to other players on the ice" or whatever. In general, watching the game can be helpful - not to mention fun - but it sucks for analyzing players.
This is because
1) As a human you are subject to biases. Confirmation bias means that you will use information that confirms what you already believe and discount what doesn't. This is unavoidable and every single person is affected.
2) Recency bias. This is where you put more weight on things you've recently seen.
3) Lack of ability to watch all players. You can only watch so many games on any given night. Even if your job was to watch hockey you would be hard pressed to watch every single player and every single team.
4) Highlight bias. Not sure what the real name for this would be, but if you watch a game you remember big plays, yet the reason some no-name players are more effective on paper than their popular counterparts is because they do subtle things like skate the puck out of danger or make a slightly more crisp pass that add up over time and in reality count more than the one huge play you remember.
5) Human memory sucks. It is a fact that you fill in your memories with BS. If ten people witness an event, you're likely to get ten wildly different stories, no one is lying, human memory just fills in the blanks.
6) Patterns. The only way to deal with the world is to put information into useful patterns. While this is generally helpful for dealing with life, it makes you prone to seeing things that don't exist and didn't happen. You make inferences that are incorrect and credit them as facts.
7) Authority Bias. This means that if a guy is on TV and says something, you're likely to believe it and pass it on as fact. If some low life blogger says something that seems weird, it's really easy to say "Well the GM disagrees." But this is not smart because even professionals are bad at their jobs or make mistakes. In fact, a professional is way less likely to be open to new information or ideas because he himself thinks he got where he is because of skill. In reality, most GMs are ex-jocks who've had multiple concussions and have their jobs through connections in the game.
For all these reasons, and probably a dozen more, it is very hard to watch hockey and make accurate assessments. For this reason, it is not subjectively, but OBJECTIVELY true that stats based analysis is superior.
You don't have to agree, but your agreement isn't the deciding factor in whether something is true or not.
It is beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you use stats (and there is an objective answer to which ones are best to use as well) you will be able to make better projections with your analysis.
Yes, perspective and context are important in this, but those things are important in everything. There is flaws in all analysis - and interpretation of numbers is subjective and subject to bias as well - but whether we are talking hockey, poker, space or mechanics, a math-based approach is always the superior one.
I mean, if you want to think about it, do you really think hockey is the one exception in the entire world where just looking at it provides better analysis than a data based approach?
