Scrub*
Team Canada
- Dec 28, 2008
- 9,289
- 2
Nobody made up a fancy term for something simple. A guy named Jim Corsi who worked for the Sabres just started using it, and that's what the Sabres called it. When more people started looking at it, the name stuck, since that's the name the Sabres had originally used.
(On the other hand, fenwick is named after the blogger who first looked at it, and I agree that it's a really dumb name)
And the simplicity is why I get annoyed when people talk about "advanced" stats. Corsi and fenwick aren't advanced stats. They're the most simple stats in the game - shot attempts and unblocked shot attempts. But despite that simplicity, corsi's the best possession metric available in hockey, and fenwick is the best predictor of team success.
And generally, when people talk about corsi, they use it exactly like you just used it. If your team has a better shot attempt differential (adjusted for score effects), you obviously played better than the other team. That's all corsi is. When you have better shot attempt differentials over the course of the season, obviously you're generally playing better than the other team in most of the games when you play. Similarly, when a player or line has a very shot attempt differential, obviously they were carrying the play when they were on the ice. Why people get so mad about these stats is beyond me.
I think people don't like the Corsi term more or less because a term like that is not required for most people to judge a hockey player. We can see with our own eyes which players have the puck often and which don't or which ones take more shots than others and prevent them. We don't need Corsi to tell us Michalek is terrible right now or Turris is a stud we already know that.