Regardless the PGVT+ metric was developed well after the the 1994 and 1995 drafts with some of the contributing data generated after 1995 and by the players drafted in 1994 and 1995.
Apparently I should have used an example from a different season. I picked St. Louis because he's the most obvious example. Build the calculations on any season-set of data, and you'll get pretty similar results. You won't get one set telling you St. Louis is one of the very best players available, and another set telling you there are 520 players better than him.
Another straw man Iain. you don't need to watch every game, you just need to watch a decent sample against top level opponents. One of us is missing the point, its not me.
What is a "decent" sample? Is if the sample you want to gain a "decent" understanding of the player?
If you're interested in every single player, in several different leagues and want to compare their performances during the same or different seasons you really need to watch a lot of hockey.
Precisely. What do you do if you need to know about players in different leagues, or different continents even?
Or you could watch the player you are interested in evaluating with your own two eyes in some game situations
I'm interested in evaluating
every player. How do I do that, and avoid gaining only a superficial understanding, or even a mistaken understanding because they few games I watch happen to be among the player's worst of the season?
EDIT: Using both would be preferable. The stats available and what you can get from them give only a rough picture of what happened. Only watching games isn't nearly a perfect way either since most people are really bad at estimating rates at which specific events occur.
Exactly. Use both. I'd never claim that numbers are all you need. But I was responding instead to a claim that eyes are all you need.
EDIT: I wrote up a huge response but decided to not incinerate the board due to how infuriated this post made me.
How so? The scientific method doesn't absolutely require experimentation, I don't think, but it is generally seen as an important part. I mean, this isn't a philosophy of science messageboard here, it's about hockey.
Scouting is scientific method, testing hypotheses with repeatable experiments.
No, it's not. A repeatable experiment is something that someone else can repeat at a later time in another place to duplicate your results. In the lab you isolate what you're trying to study, in an effort to exclude outside factors as much as possible. There is no excluding outside factors in a hockey game.