Lou is God said:
http://hfboards.com/showthread.php?t=135639&highlight=parise
This is it?? This is what you guys have been crowing about all day? I was expecting somekind of super formula that only a M.I.T student could crack, any of you guys could have wrote this and been just as wrong.
I suggest you go and take a look at some of Igor's threads... then come bak and comment on who is wrong.
Obviously the idea of hockey is to score more goals than the other team? That's basically what it boils down to.
Ideally, you want your best players to out-score the oppositions best players, your mid-range players to out-score their mid-range players, and your plugs to out-score their plugs. That's pretty much a guaranteed win. Sometimes you can't match your best against their best (because maybe your best aren't good enough), so you might throw a checking line out against the oppositions top line. You hope that by not playing your best against their best, your best players will outscore their checking line by more than their best players will outscore your checking line.
That's essentially hockey matchups in a nutshell.
When focusing on "tough minutes", you are talking about facing the players on the other team who can outscore the best players on other teams. We are talking guys like Forsberg, Palffy (when healthy), etc... When the focus is on "soft minutes", it's focusing on playing against the oppositions weaker outscorers.
Obviously analyzing +/- alone isn't a good indicator of anything. However, when you apply it in context, it's a much more revealing stat. I mean, there has been comparisons of Parise's +/- numbers to other guys on his team. The defense being that it's not bad, compared to some of the other players. Now, the question becomes, who is he playing with, and who is he playing against. If he's playing with good players, and agaisnt weak opposition, his +/- numbers aren't as flattering as say a guy at -13 who plays with weak players against tougher opposition. Obvious rule of thumb is that the better your linemates are, and the weaker the opposition, the better your +/- should be.
No one can possibly look at just Parise's +/- and his teammates +/- and determine how good a player (or outscorer) he is... anyone trying to do that has no clue about what hockey is.
However, if you can look at the context of Parise's +/- numbers as well as his teammates numbers (i.e. the quality of their linemates, and the quality of their opposition), that is a far better indicator of how he is as a hockey player. No one can deny his offensive numbers... they were solid. And he's only 20, so he's got lots of time to develop. But as of right now, he isn't a shutdown centre... not at the AHL level. It's time to take off the rose-coloured glasses and realize that we aren't the hockey evaluators we think we are by watching a game live, or on TV. When we watch, we tend to fall in love with the things we like, while ignoring the things we don't like (and in some cases the absolute opposite occurs... we don't like how the player looks on the ice so we ignore everything positive about him). Humans are too easily fooled by visuals.