1. The short answer is life is too short, and would rather spend free doing something like watch the Leafs but not delve too deeply into all the stats available. Some sports fans love that, that's fine. Different strokes for different folks.
I guess my question is - why do you feel the need to point out how much you don't care about something? I know I don't go around telling people how uninterested I am in their interests.
2. Data, tends to have anomalies. When the stats seem off, any stat on anything, then probably best thing to do is not overact like other posters in this forum. Just give it time, another 5 to 20 games. Hockey is like Darwinism. You wind up where you belong. The stats tell the story. The stats are not the story, like other posters believe here. The stats can tell the story, but often not the whole story. The data anomaly. What's the story there? That's my theoretical answer why I do not wish to follow too much data.
That sounds nice, but here's the thing - you use hockey stats all the time. They are always part of your hockey story. You just choose to prefer the stats you have always known. That's all. You're not anti stats - you're just anti new stats. So while this romantic anti-data ideal sounds nice, you don't actually believe in it. You know goals, you know assists, you know plus minus, you know GAA, and you use them and have always used them.
3. My faith in advanced stats, is not the way I look at it. It is more utilitarian. Such as ... what am I going to use it for? I don't know. So, it goes nowhere fast.
You use stats to help analyze, evaluate, and compare hockey players and teams and systems and anything else you're interested in.
Importantly, it's not fans who do this, but hockey professionals - nhl organizations spend millions of dollars collecting and utilizing this data. The people with the most interest in and love of hockey use this data the most.
. Yes, I would like to become aware of any new stat that challenges conventional wisdom on the good ole hockey, stats that disagree with what I see.
That way we can explore whether the game is changing.
Currently, these advanced stats in use, do not really challenge conventional wisdom. It is just emphasizes certain aspects of the game over other aspects of the game.
These analytics have already vastly changed the game, and are a main reason why the game has moved away from grit and toughness and to speed and skill. They have challenged conventional wisdom, and won.
That in itself, is a hockey debate. What part of the game, and how to build a team, that is a hockey question since hockey was invented.
A few people criticizing Babcock's lineup decisions say you should do it this way. But that debate is ongoing for as long as I have been watching hockey. Back in the day, it was the same debate, and there was no advanced stats back then. From that angle, advanced stats is nothing radical.
Like it or not, analytics have improved our knowledge and the precision of our analysis in every aspect of life - whether that's sports or business or science or politics or anything else, really.
Maybe you find debate with only subjective opinions and no evidence on either side to be satisfying, but for me, that's a special kind of hell. Maybe you have the utmost confidence in your own hockey scouting skill that you can scout players and teams perfectly from limited viewings on TV, but I don't have quite that much confidence myself. Even better, I can use data to improve my own eye test - data that goes against what I see forces me to watch closer, and appreciate things that maybe I didn't before.
If you'd rather not bother with it, that's fine. But maybe ask yourself why you feel the need to share with everyone how much you aren't interested in what they are interested in?
For me it's simple - do these stats describe hockey well or don't they? I think they do, in a way that the stats i knew as a kid never came remotely close to. I find they describe hockey massively better than most "expert" opinions we are forced to listen to or read.
See, you may not be interested in these stats.....but let me tell you what i'm not interested in - i'm not interested in what passes for "expert analysis" in the media. I don't read sports sections any more. I don't listen to talk radio. I don't watch pre game or intermission talking heads. I gave up on them years and years ago. Because their description of what's happening out there on the ice is generally bad. Much of it awful and completely backwards. They're rarely right about anything and are never held to account when they're inevitably shown to be wrong.
So maybe you're interested in listening to don cherry rant or greg millen try to make us dumber with every word - but for me, listening to that stuff is the real waste of time. That stuff doesn't actually inform us. Often it does the opposite.
These stats here though? I guarantee you that they will actually inform you about what has actually happened out there on the ice. They aren't a waste of time like 95% of the talking head air filler is.
