Talks to Goalposts
Registered User
The guy who said that was Gabe Desjardins.
He was referring to how wrapping your head around the PDO concept was very important and can help you a lot in your analysis.
What PDO is about is how a player's goal stats (essentially +/-) gets monkeyed around with over short periods due to swings of chance that are largely outside a player's control. Because plus minus itself is the heart of what hockey is but is so often made useless by the vagaries of circumstance. If plus minus corresponded mechanistically with level of play it would be the perfect stat, but it doesn't.
It does a lot to adjust for what a players teammates were doing, so you can see who got screwed with or helped by goaltending or teamates converting on their chances at a greater or less rate than normal.
Teams will have high PDO long term, but that is a predicatable result of goaltending talent. Keeping in mind PDO will tell you about players that are getting screwed in goals against because of bad goaltending.
Embracing PDO is about acknowledging that results don't necessarily follow quality of play in small sample sizes and that a player will return to their average ability in time. Its also a solid thing to look at when your trying to figure out if a player is actually getting better or worse with time or just having a run on good or bad circumstances. PDO is all about figuring out what kind of performance is sustainable and what was just happenstance.