That Memphis looks amazing.
- Mr.Bobby

Right now I'd just like to have a New York... Jesus, I'm going to have to go make one now, I know it.

That Memphis looks amazing.
- Mr.Bobby

The Amsterdam, Vietnam and Chile look good too, but that could be due to my affinity for low cost prostitutes.

The Amsterdam, Vietnam and Chile look good too, but that could be due to my affinity for low cost prostitutes.
- Vanoxy

The Amsterdam, Vietnam and Chile look good too, but that could be due to my affinity for low cost prostitutes.
- Vanoxy

You could go for the "Hope Solo" instead....

You could go for the "Hope Solo" instead....


- lumlums

I'd have that sandwich screaming my name in no time.

You could go for the "Hope Solo" instead....


- lumlums

Is that a 'winners' sandwich, or for Rick Nash?

I'd have that sandwich screaming my name in no time.
- laughs2907

Then punching your nephew

Agreed.

When a conversation like the one surrounding hockey players- one deeply dependent upon preference and situation- is degraded to a simple binary like has been done lately, it really hurts the game.

Proponents of 'enhanced stats' had long been in the minority so they've gotten used to vehemently defending every nuanced facet of their belief system to people who largely responded with a simple (and infuriating) "just watch the game, you (frank)in nerd". What we're seeing now seems to be a 'Revenge of the Nerds'-style market correction that will hopefully die down in a year or two. I don't agree with the approach as it does little to further the movement, but I don't get to decide how others handle themselves.

Then punching your nephew
- lumlums

Wait, what?

Good post.

Well written and balanced.

That said, Nash and Kovalchuk were possibly the two worst examples to use. Both are as big of failures in the perspective of the eye test as they are from the perspective of advanced stats.

With those two, one evaluation method simply validates the other.

Good post.

Well written and balanced.

That said, Nash and Kovalchuk were possibly the two worst examples to use. Both are as big of failures in the perspective of the eye test as they are from the perspective of advanced stats.

With those two, one evaluation method simply validates the other.
- Charliebox

Thank you.

This was very well written. I would have liked to see some examples of certain players just to strengthen the point, but aided from that, I thought it was very solid.

I myself have learned that for certain players advanced stats can be useful....there are players that I though passed the eye test, but when I have seen their advanced stats (and how bad they were) they forced me to take a second look (and I did).

I think Kris Russel would be a good example here. I have also started to look deeper into things that may indicate a player will break out and this has helped me in my keeper pool, for sure.

As a billion people have said a billion times....everything in moderation, and once again it applies perfectly here.

People have to realize that Moneyball applies to baseball and in baseball it is a much more perfect science (nothing's is ever perfect). On base percentages, strike out percentages, etc. Align better and are more close to 'true indicators' of what a player is actually doing out there. Hockey advanced stats are an imperfect science. Players can be protected, players can adapt, frankly there are probably players out there playing to build their advanced stats as much as they are trying to score....and yes I mean that. If you are in a contract year, in today's NHL, would you not trying to be keeping your advanced stats as clean as possible? Because then, even if your production falls, you and your age net can claim it was a statistical anomaly....I mean just look at his advanced stats!!

I will liken the use of advanced stats to the trend where everyone tried to copy he playing style of the Cup winner. When a new 'style' of team wins the Cup everyone tried to become that team. 'Fast and young', 'big and tough', 'defensive and well coached in their own end'....it will never end. The funny thing is that every year the team that wins, does so because they were the hottest at the right time. Many styles can win.

Hopefully people will realize one day that advanced stats can be a piece of the puzzle....but only a piece.

D2D, out
- Dollars2Donuts

I think advanced stats as we've come to know them work much better for baseball because most of the numbers are generated through the actions of two opposing players facing off in a vacuum, more or less. There is very little need to account for team dynamics, there are no "goals off shinpads," and very few lucky bounces, compared to hockey. Not to write off advanced stats, but I'm definitely in agreement with the blog, and the use of hero charts as a total proof of point is tired and loathsome.

I agree with you Frenchy about how certain individuals will show 'a' stat to 'prove' their point. It creates so many arguments that it actually discredits the whole advanced stats conversation. Stats guys mostly always say in any conversation when challenged that they are there as a tool to go with other tools, & that unless you take a stat in context with all corresponding information it may be unreliable. So when someone throws a hero chart up to 'discuss' an opinion, how is that meant to be taken within the whole advanced metrics & other 'corresponding' information that isn't shown?

1 of the biggest questions I have about any data that contains information from different games (so basically every advanced stat), is how can it be formulated when every game is different in so many ways? Formulating the same type of data from different games with different variables is corrupt data in my mind - or an average of the data & should be taken as such. Also whenever you have math formulae thrown in to calculate actual factual data as a 'filler' of such, then that data is not accurate.

It's like calculating the success rate of a guy at a bar talking to women. 1 night he drank water spoke to 8 woman, had 6 positive responses & 2 get (frank)eds & no luck. The next night different bar, had a million beers & spoke to every woman in the place (52) & got zero positive responses due to being poop faced, then outside the bar got lucky with a woman who was as bad as he was with no conscience. Keep going & changing the environment & the amount of alcohol the guy consumes & his results will differ every time he goes out. Depending on the types of women he speaks with & the circumstances will depend on his ability to score. So is this guy a ladies man, a Neville nobody with no chance or just a lucky Richard every now & again. I hope you get my drift, but if this were hockey & formulae would be created to calculate time spent in a bar - a formulae that isn't actually real, it's there to make up a difference so a result can be found. How can that be trusted??? How can any data from this guy be correlated to be made into anything other than an average if everything is different? Different women he speaks to, different bars, different people he goes out with, different amounts of alcohol consumed different days etc etc etc??? His hero chart will support the consumption of alcohol because he spoke to many more women!!!

People are using this formulated data as support for their livelihood, so defending it with their lives![url]

Good post.

Well written and balanced.

That said, Nash and Kovalchuk were possibly the two worst examples to use. Both are as big of failures in the perspective of the eye test as they are from the perspective of advanced stats.

With those two, one evaluation method simply validates the other.
- Charliebox

I suppose you're right. I had Kovalchuk winning the Gagarin Cup on my mind and how in Russia people view him as one of the "consummate captains."

How about Eric Staal as an example?

He's a part of the rare "Triple Gold Club" of Olympic, World Championship and Stanley Cup victories. Something very few players ever do. Yet in 7 years of being Captain of the Hurricanes they never reached the playoffs.

Wait, what?
- laughs2907

Search "hope solo nephew"

In the NHL EA Sports and things announcers on TV say shape how almost all people see things. The real dumbing down of discourse occurs when people repeat what they hear on TV as fact. The idea that there is two equally valid ways to evaluate players is ridiculous. That each tells "part of the story" is wrong.

Maybe you could make a case between professional scouts vs stats but if we're just talking the average persons hockey watching experience vs stats then it's a nonstarter.

You can watch hockey all you want, but your mind is going to be warped by high-impact plays and highlights + things people say.

No one, whether they're using stats or not, is really "objective". But at least when you use stats you're measuring something - no matter how great of an eye you have, this is always going to have more weight. The idea that it might not is preposterous to a degree it's hard to talk about while still being nice.

We have irrefutable data from every single field of study that says that humans are terrible at drawing conclusions from things they watch. (Observing something in order to write down data points is not the same as watching something and drawing a conclusion).

In nearly every case, measuring something brings out radically different (or at least counter-intuitive) results than what you thought from your experience.


In hockey, you don't have to watch a player and look at his stats and come to a conclusion. It is not about balance. As a fan, when you watch hockey, you should just have fun because nearly all the conclusions you draw from your eye test will be either obvious or so biased as to be scientifically useless. There is simply too much data in a single game to organize with your eyes and mind - and that's before including all the biases (recency, confirmation etc).

It is psychically impossible to watch enough hockey that you could be informed just through what you watch. When people talk about "the eye test" they are really just repeating back some combination of games they've watched, highlights they've seen and things they've heard about the player.

But mostly what authoritative media members have said.

Further bringing the ability of the eye test into question is the idea that, at the professional level, most players have such marginally different skill levels that what we usually argue about is preposterous.

Example: it's pretty clear who the top 3-5 defenseman are, but after that, the next 15-20 guys are practically interchangeable. Anyone who tells you that they can use their eye only to authoritatively say who is better between Pieterangelo and Vlasic is lying or wrong.

Anyways, this idea that there are two equally valid ways to evaluate players is preposterous. The way to evaluate players is with statistics. Traditional scouting is also helpful, but people who watch TV aren't professional scouts.

If a players reputation is different from what his stats say, everything we know about every topic in the history of the world says that the stats should be given priority.

The idea that hockey is the once exception to the entire universe is very dumb.

Oh, and further complicating the idea is that hockey is a game were 98% of the time there are no goals. Tiny little imperceptible plays add up to huge dividends over the course of a season. For every screwup Jake Gardiner makes that results in a goal - he may be skating the puck out his zone 2/10s of a second faster than the league average. Over the course of the year, this is going to be a major fact - but it's not something you can ever really see.

This is why stats are sometimes wildly different from what people observe. Little things make a huge difference in the aggregate, where as you only remember high impact plays like a give away or a goal.

I just like to watch and garner my opinions from that perspective. I agree with you Frenchie—the analytics are a nice complimentary aspect of player evaluation, but like the movie version of a book, they do not tell the whole story.

In the NHL EA Sports and things announcers on TV say shape how almost all people see things. The real dumbing down of discourse occurs when people repeat what they hear on TV as fact. The idea that there is two equally valid ways to evaluate players is ridiculous. That each tells "part of the story" is wrong.

Maybe you could make a case between professional scouts vs stats but if we're just talking the average persons hockey watching experience vs stats then it's a nonstarter.

You can watch hockey all you want, but your mind is going to be warped by high-impact plays and highlights + things people say.

No one, whether they're using stats or not, is really "objective". But at least when you use stats you're measuring something - no matter how great of an eye you have, this is always going to have more weight. The idea that it might not is preposterous to a degree it's hard to talk about while still being nice.

We have irrefutable data from every single field of study that says that humans are terrible at drawing conclusions from things they watch. (Observing something in order to write down data points is not the same as watching something and drawing a conclusion).

In nearly every case, measuring something brings out radically different (or at least counter-intuitive) results than what you thought from your experience.


In hockey, you don't have to watch a player and look at his stats and come to a conclusion. It is not about balance. As a fan, when you watch hockey, you should just have fun because nearly all the conclusions you draw from your eye test will be either obvious or so biased as to be scientifically useless. There is simply too much data in a single game to organize with your eyes and mind - and that's before including all the biases (recency, confirmation etc).

It is psychically impossible to watch enough hockey that you could be informed just through what you watch. When people talk about "the eye test" they are really just repeating back some combination of games they've watched, highlights they've seen and things they've heard about the player.

But mostly what authoritative media members have said.

Further bringing the ability of the eye test into question is the idea that, at the professional level, most players have such marginally different skill levels that what we usually argue about is preposterous.

Example: it's pretty clear who the top 3-5 defenseman are, but after that, the next 15-20 guys are practically interchangeable. Anyone who tells you that they can use their eye only to authoritatively say who is better between Pieterangelo and Vlasic is lying or wrong.

Anyways, this idea that there are two equally valid ways to evaluate players is preposterous. The way to evaluate players is with statistics. Traditional scouting is also helpful, but people who watch TV aren't professional scouts.

If a players reputation is different from what his stats say, everything we know about every topic in the history of the world says that the stats should be given priority.

The idea that hockey is the once exception to the entire universe is very dumb.

Oh, and further complicating the idea is that hockey is a game were 98% of the time there are no goals. Tiny little imperceptible plays add up to huge dividends over the course of a season. For every screwup Jake Gardiner makes that results in a goal - he may be skating the puck out his zone 2/10s of a second faster than the league average. Over the course of the year, this is going to be a major fact - but it's not something you can ever really see.

This is why stats are sometimes wildly different from what people observe. Little things make a huge difference in the aggregate, where as you only remember high impact plays like a give away or a goal.
- James_Tanner

Tanner, everybody know that you have drunken the Analytics Kool-aid long ago. Explain to us all how analytics measures clutch plays, just for an example, or plays made during "meaningful" moments as opposed to a player, for instance who is great when the pressure is low but crumbles when the pressure is high. Basically, how is context measured when evaluating players, or comparing them?

Jake Gardiner,...so in hockey when Jake skates wide and fires a harmless shot on net 4 times lets say...but gets caught twice out of position for good scoring chances against ( 2 on 1's )...this shows Jake as a positive player when it's actually the exact opposite. I like when Jake skates 2/10s of second faster than his teammates and leaves them at the blue line (because he held onto it too long ) while he circles the net to try and get back and stop the 2 on 1 he created going the other way...that's my fav of his. You wouldn't see this in a chart and is 1 of the reasons he was benched and the reason he hasn't seen the 1st pair yet.

Look at what I found...


- laughs2907

That one in Norway is DELICIOUS

You can make a variation of it using a soft wrap (not corn) and put potato salad and dried onions in the wrap with mustard topping. Sounds crazy... but it's delicious.

You hit the key point right at the very end.

Remain skeptical.

I find that the people who are proponents of these stats tend to believe that they are absolutely indicative of reality. They are unwilling to even acknowledge the possibility that the stats may not actually support the conclusions. Any time the stats don't agree with reality it is all about Luck. It is NEVER about whether we are drawing the wrong conclusions or assigning way too much meaning to the numbers.

A few months ago, I proposed an equation to describe the phenomenon of trying to debate with these people.

Advanced stats - reality = luck + "you don't understand"

I was able to take the following from his first paragraph alone...



It clearly reads, "Vote Hillary for president"

Have you no shame, Adam? You make me sick!!!
- laughs2907

Advanced stats > the average fans eye test.

Advanced stats > the average fans eye test.
- daeth

There's no average fan on these boards....so I guess he's talking to people who don't read these blogs????

Example: it's pretty clear who the top 3-5 defenseman are, but after that, the next 15-20 guys are practically interchangeable. Anyone who tells you that they can use their eye only to authoritatively say who is better between Pieterangelo and Vlasic is lying or wrong.


- James_Tanner

Maybe they are so close that there is no meaningful way to quantify the difference statistically, right now.

And THAT is the point. You can argue all day that stats are the only valid way to assess the differences. That's great, when you have the correct stats.

Nobody does, not yet, and they won't so long as they refuse to question their current theories and conclusions.