Saturday, March 12, 2011

 

Face: red

So one of these days, I have a rant I need to post reminding the statzis that what they don't know could fill a warehouse, but the fact remains that if you just looked at Corsi numbers to predict a particular player's performance next month, you'd win a lot more than you lost.

I tweeted on December 24th (@FenwickMatt btw) the following:
How bad are the #Devils? The *best* of 1000 'simulations of remainder of season' gives them 70 points (worst = 34). http://bit.ly/5LHWmc

That projection/simulation is at Hockey-Reference.com, and with due congratulations to the man behind it for winning the TrueHoop Stat Geek Smackdown in both 2007 and 2008, it's useless. Ultra-useless. Somehow, a mathematical(?) model of an NHL team produced a result saying that the best of 1000 scenarios for the upcoming 48 games is that they would be 4 games over .500.

This shouldn't even pass the smell test for this year's post-apocalyptic version of the Oilers, let alone mine or anyone's smell test for the team that had the lowest SA/gm in the league. And yet it's on a really good hockey website. Puck Daddy is the most indispensable hockey blog, period, and yet they run an article every 2nd Thursday recommending someone who had a good +/- the last two weeks as the possible solution to your fantasy hockey +/- problems.

You can ignore the shot differential stuff if you like, but if you're actually interested in who's going to help your team tomorrow, ignore it at your peril. Unrelated, I hope Tambellini agrees with Jim Matheson that the Oilers need to find money for Ryan Jones, because this is totally different than Brule at the end of last year. Just because it's easy to like a player who's scoring goals doesn't mean that you won't like him when he's scoring fewer goals.

Comments:

Yup. At this point we know that possession is pretty damn important. Now we just have to figure what exactly moderates it and how to properly separate drivers from the passengers.
 


I loved your first paragraph. I'm constantly reminded of the stuff I don't know, but before I ever get the chance to be discouraged I see something so bloody stupid that I feel compelled to carry on.
 

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