The A word is such a trigger in sports. Anything the Avalanche do right will from now on get credited to Dawson who has been here since October and any missteps will get ascribed to management not listening to him.
Witness the Chyka apologists or people covering for Sachi Brown in the football thread. Or experiment yourself and disparage Corsi on a board here and see how quickly you become a though criminal. Or just take in the fact Mark Kiszla loves them.
Switching gears: looking at the Sakic thread on the main board, I forgot what an obnoxious idiot one of the posters at the end is.
There needs to be a delineation between the people who like stats, and the ones who actually compile them. Draglikepull is a pretty respected analytics guy on Twitter and he never has been a fan of Chayka. He's pointed out that many in the stats community were optimistic, but also wary of him. He publicly champions stats regularly, says a lot of the things that stat-whackers say, but no one really knows his statistical aptitude.
One very telling thing either DLP or Burtch (can't remember which guy it was) said on Twitter not long after the Duclair deal, is that analytics doesn't help a team get the star players. Anyone can tank and draft a star, or a sign a big-name free agent, it's on the fringes that you can gain some insight as to who might be worth a gamble and who might not be. Chayka's never really done anything to add that fringe talent. I mean, FFS, this so-called stats expert employs ZAC RINALDO. If that's not an indictment I don't know what is.
I think you make a good point though. Stats are not infallible, and NO ONE should be treating them as such. But what they can do when incorporated properly is narrow the margin of error. I think the fallacy by both those who like and hate stats is in labeling this team or that the "analytics" team and using said team as a litmus test. Truth is, we'll probably never really know the degree by which stats guide a team's decisions because they don't make their work public. And that's probably a good thing. I personally enjoy seeing the stats but can admit I don't have a thorough understanding of them, and in the past have drawn some erroneous conclusions.
I don't see the downside really of the Avs incorporating analytics. We know they work. But that's just one piece of a much larger puzzle. So far a lot of it *seems* to be falling into place, but only time will tell if they are finally, truly, on the right path.
