doulos
Registered User
- Oct 4, 2007
- 7,725
- 1,235
How about doing a correlation of goals for/against and especially 5on5 goals for/against and seeing if that has a higher correlation to a team being a playoff team or not.
Corsi and Fenwick... (which are just a fancy way of adding in missed/blocked shots)... are yet another level of abstraction away from what actually counts... goals for and against.
Even goals for/against can be a slight abstraction... if a team wins 9 games by a goal each and then loses the 10th by 9 goals... they'll be even in goal differential yet have only 1 loss in 10 games. Obviously in that case battling hard and winning 9 games means more than the 1 blowout loss.
The point remains that goals are a better indicator of "goodness" than some fancy stat that takes into account blocked shots into someones skate and misses that end up in someones beer in the stands.
Better yet... actually watch the games and see what actually CAUSES every goal for & against... and then you'll know the strengths and weaknesses of the team much better than looking at how many shots were fired 20 feet high and wide of the opponents net.
Or better yet - use both!