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
As usual, so much is just plain wrong here.
Starting with the very first sentence.
