No. It doesn't. If I have the puck for 55 minutes a game but the entire time is spent circling in my own zone it gets me nothing at all (except maybe a 1-0 loss)
If this ridiculous strawman hypothetical ever happens, then you wouldn't need any statistics at all to tell you what's wrong with your team. So sure, in an alternate universe where every game is like the first minute of that Flyers - Lightning game, you're right. We don't live in that universe, though.
3. The stat itself isn't what you should care about, but rather actually being a better hockey club which will generally raise possession and thus corsi.
The stat is not the goal, it is the byproduct of the goal (being a better team).
Nobody said the stat is the goal, so here we are attacking more straw men. Not to mention you are once again ignoring his statement that possession is meaningless. I gave you a comprehensive list of 2 options that could explain every possible interpretation of Nonis' possession.
If Nonis genuinely thinks possession is important, then he wouldn't have said it's meaningless. He claims that he'd love to have the puck more, sure, but in the same breath adds that he thinks it's meaningless to measure how often his team actually has the puck. That's at best disingenuous and at worst a sign of wilful ignorance.
Incidentally, I would say that my *gut feeling* tells me that scoring chances (roughly what Fenwick/Corsi measure) are more meaningful than just pure possession/puck time. But my gut feeling is not useful without any actual evidence to back this up. I am tired of millionaire hockey executives having anti-fact attitudes while running their teams into the ground. They may as well hire astrologers to help them along.
Corsi does not reveal professionally useful information about what behaviors and skills drive puck possession and lead to winning hockey. It simply provides accurate detail about the outcome of a competition, and provides some predictive value for future outcomes. That's the point Nonis is trying to make.
Ok, so taking more shots is correlated with scoring more goals and winning more games. That's great, and nobody seems to disagree, but it's not a revelation beyond what common sense would tell us. And it doesn't comment at all on what behaviors lead to taking more shots. It simply gives us superficial conclusions along the lines of "carrying the puck is better than dumping it in".
I'm getting pretty tired of hearing this claim that Corsi doesn't tell you anything useful or novel. It absolutely does. Before people actually started trying to measure possession and/or scoring chances, you could have easily made the argument that only the number of great scoring chances matters, or the quality of the shooter vs the goaltender.
In fact, Nonis has made this exact same argument before. He repeatedly claims that his staff's tracking of great scoring chances shows that the Leafs don't give up as many good scoring chances as their high shots against would indicate, and that they get more good scoring chances than their own low shot totals would indicate. Unfortunately, all of the available evidence suggests that this is nonsense.
It is an absolutely non-trivial conclusion that
Corsi/possession correlates more strongly with scoring/wins than any other non-goal statistic you care to measure. Now people have started revising history to say that this was a completely trivial result and barely worth measuring. It didn't have to be this way. It could easily have been the case that special teams performance is more reliable, or that PDO is more important. There is no way of knowing for sure without actually doing the work to measure these things, and having measured them, you do get useful information out of it.
What you actually do with the data certainly is a matter of interpretation, but dismissing it out of hand as meaningless is not a rational response.
The crazy thing here is that Nonis actually affirmed the potential value for advanced analysis to have a role in his life as a GM. He's being criticized not for being a Luddite, but for suggesting that the current data sets simply don't get the job done.
Please don't wilfully misinterpret his statements. He said he had analytics people come in and present data and they had pretty little charts to look at... and that they were meaningless. That's utterly dismissive of advanced analysis, not affirming their potential, and more accurately describe as being a Luddite's reaction.
