Malkin4Top6Wingerz
Can you like, shutup
- Mar 14, 2009
- 5,032
- 9
Heck, take CORSI. If you're a team that runs a counter-attack system and does not mind getting outshot 35-20 every game, you won't stack up favorably with teams that really limit the shots against. But your team might be winning 60 percent of its games while their team wins 40 percent. Who is the better player? CORSI would probably say the player on the losing team. It's limited because it places a value on a stat that is not necessarily predictive.
Anybody who is familliar with evaluating advanced statistics in hockey wouldn't put that much weight into raw Corsi numbers, as they are often very team dependant and can be greatly impacted by other things such as zone starts and quality of teammates / opposition.
And there's a huge danger of assuming there will never be outliers. For instance, there was a terrible post on an SBNation Oilers blog recently basically saying the Dallas Stars were lucky to be at their current points totals because they had won a lot against the East and because they won a lot of one-goal games. He had all sorts of numbers to back this up.
But both points were fairly ludicrous. For one, all Western Conference teams have basically equal opportunity to rack up points against the East (and vice versa). That the Stars are more effective than most tells you nothing than.... the Stars are more effective at that than most. Nothing further. The second point was even dumber. The Stars do win a disproportionate number of one-goal games, but that doesn't mean it will equalize or that they're "lucky." Being an outlier sometimes just means you're an outlier.
I recall that article, and while I didn't think it was particularly great, it raised some interesting questions about how much of Dallas's success can be attributed to luck. You're right that there's always the possibility of an outlier, but it's usually not wise to assume that it is without a reliable sample. It's not as if Dallas has an excellent defense or past success that would indicate they are a team that would thrive in close games. Time will tell if Dallas was simply a beneficiary of favorable percentages or not, but I wouldn't write the article off that quickly. I do think the part about beating up on the East was a little bogus though, as it seemed there was no difference in their underlying numbers against either conference.
If a team has a 38 percent power play, at this point of the year, I'd say chances are greater than not that it will stay much, much higher than the statistics will tell you it should because we're well more than halfway through the sample set. True numbers nerds, however, will try to make an argument that their PP numbers say that team's power play will drop dramatically over the last half of the season because no team has ever had an average that high or whatever. Outliers will always exist, no matter how much the numbers might say things will equalize.
Regression to the mean is a pretty basic statistical concept that almost always holds true when the percentages are out of the ordinary. There are some instances of outliers, like goaltending performance under Jacques Lemaire, but these are relatively easy to spot and disect. Not many of them exist, either, as evidenced by you doing a lot of handwaving instead of illustrating real examples of current outliers.