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HNIC GDT : Leafs vs Habs, special game for sleeper agent

ME, Good point about NHL not really changing. Maybe the money wasn't there. Hockey is still a niche sport (ice and skates will do that) but has gotten a boost as broadcasters need as much live content as possible.
 
CH1 said:
ME, Good point about NHL not really changing. Maybe the money wasn't there. Hockey is still a niche sport (ice and skates will do that) but has gotten a boost as broadcasters need as much live content as possible.
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We spent decades...not years, decades believing that goals against average was the way to judge goalies, that +/- was the ultimate measure of a defensive player, that "hits" were important, etc, etc, etc. Almost everything most of us were taught about the game growing up has turned out to be at best questionable and at worst dead wrong. It seems like every new improvement in anaylzing the game comes when one of the old sacred cows is finally slaughtered.

As for why it improved. I think the old guard could only stay resistent for so long in the face of change in all the major sports. The first GM to figure out that GAA is worthless and the often panned SV% (even in it's raw form, which was all we had 10-15 years ago) was the best way to determine the quality of a goalie, held a huge competitive advantage over his contemporaries. You had two choices, follow his lead or slowly get competed out of your job.
 
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Boy did Jamie Benn ever get the looks and talent in the gene pool in that family .

Ya, that was really bad form from my boy Gardiner, even I can laugh at that one. For being hideous.
 
leaffan2005 said:
Pretty bad period for the Leafs.

I'm sure zeke will come up with some qualcompCFhighdangerBlob stat to show that we played well, though.
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pretty dominant game from the leafs. I'm sure some will say it was all our goalie tho.
 
MapleLeafBlueJayBoy said:
Gardiner is such an idiot.
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It's amazing how a guy who can so consistently produce moments of brilliance can produce the equal amount of abject stupidity on the ice. Usually when you get guys who can do what Gardiner does on the upside, the hockey IQ is so high that it eliminates most of the bone headed shit.

Not our Jake though.
 
Iknowenuff said:
Was it ever. Just got in here. How much time is Johnsson getting? How is he looking?
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Johnsson has gotten decent amount of ice on Willy's wing. Been strong tonight. Quicker than he is fast, good hands, good vision, not afraid to shoot the puck. Looks a lot like a good middle 6 winger. Does most of the work away from the puck that will have Babcock loving him.
 
Honestly McBackup has been an unreal asset to this team. One of the best waiver wire pickups ever for the Leafs?
 
MindzEye said:
What? So until the stats are absolutely perfect they're useless? Unless you have F1 brakes in your car, what's the point in using the brake pedal at all? The irony in using the word logic in your statement and then puking this out isn't lost on me.

Here's the thing we have about the statistics we have. They're facts. If 2 teams play a game and team A out chances team B 20-10, that's a fact. You can then attempt to work to provide context if you disagree with what that fact is saying, but no amount of eye test is going to change that fact. Those facts might not tell the entire story but they tell an entirely unbiased story that can be easily compared with every other story played by every other team for the sake of unbiased comparison.

They tell a vastly superior story than any eye test method ever has. It should be extremely instructive to you that all of the top teams in the NHL have well developed analytics departments, and the guys working in those departments right now are the same guys who developed the tools we use here when discussing the game. What teams have proprietary would absolutely be more detailed and better than we have publicly, but this isn't 2012 anymore, publicly available analytics are extremely good now.



To be blunt, the vast majority of hockey fans don't know what is and isn't important on the ice, nor are they unbiased enough to take any knowledge they've actually developed and apply it in comparison to other teams. There's a reason that the game has changed so much in the last 7 years and it's because teams that have adopted analytic based approaches have dominated the league and have changed the way GM's team build.

Hockey thought literally did not advanced between the 50's and the 00's. The same things that were important to GM's and coaches in the 50's, were important to coaches and GM's 15 years ago. That's the biggest indictment of the "eye test" I think we could possibly point out, that aside from equipment advancements and a few rudimentary changes in playing style (the butterfly for example was a monstrously obvious improvement), what made a winning hockey team in 1950 was thought to be timeless knowledge that was still used in 2005. barely more than 10 years later and teams utilizing better methods of analysis eat that old timey shit for lunch.
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So are you saying that watching hockey games no longer holds any value?

I never said stats were useless, nor did I say we have not come a long way with regards to evaluating hockey players and teams as a whole.

I just don't think that they tell the whole story. You yourself mentioned context and how important it can be when evaluating raw numbers. Take this example: say a team hems their opponent in with possession for an extended period of time but doesn't get a "high danger chance". This typically leads to an icing which keeps tired players on the ice, a penalty, or a goal. Aside from the puck going into the net, there aren't any advanced stats that really account for the advantage teams get with this kind of possession. Now you may say that the corsi stats do account for this if shots are targeted at the net. But even if they aren't, these types of shifts by teams can go a long way in gaining a competitive advantage in a game.

There are many other examples of this. Hockey is uniquely different from other sports where the fluidity and general chaos of ongoing action makes it difficult to fully evaluate a game with stats alone. They are a valuable tool, but not the only tool.
 
As I chirp him regularly, I will gladly point out that was a lovely play by Hyman to set up Johnsson
 
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