it wasnt because you had an agenda, I'll be brutally honest here, I lost someone I looked up to, for as long as id been here I saw you as one of the elite posters on this site. Im not ashamed to admit it because, honestly you had earned the admiration, but what I saw in your post was a systematic tear down of a player you dont understand at all, He is not a typical forward, at what he does he is elite. Lee to be honest isnt even asked to do the things that your typical forwards do, he's not a playmaker or a sniper, he rarely digs in the corners or helps with zone entry. his one job is to finish and to distract the goalie and he does that very very well.
thats why your "all the way back to 1967 was so disingenuous because it had nothing to do with understanding the player, which you clearly do not.even hinting at shot percentages being unsustainable proves beyond any reasonable doubt that you didnt understand what you were talking about.
Lee will have a better Shot percentage than Tarasenko next year, its not because Lee is better, but because its a function of the STYLE OF GAME they play
you crafted an argument that showed no understanding of the player none. thats why I brought up Tim Kerr, to show you how his shooting percentages were also outside of the typical shot percentages for the typical forward, because he too played a specialty forward role
Im sorry you were uncomfortable. I was too. I dont much like losing a hero either
1) I didn't "systematically tear Lee down." I discussed the likelihood of him sustaining what he's accomplished the last couple of years. Those are not the same thing.
2) You seem to have a very basic misunderstanding of what I was trying to accomplish.
When you're looking to establish the likelihood of something happening based upon regression, you compare it to the biggest sample of players possible...not to a hand-picked sample size of one. That's basic stats.
The original post discussed
all players from 1967 on (including Tim Kerr), and separately
all currently active players, to make sure that every single comparable player to Lee in either group was included. There are far more players who have made their living that way than just Lee, and Kerr, and Tkachuk. We want
all of them to be included in this discussion to get the best idea of what's likely to happen, not just one or two cherry-picked cases, because if they're included and their shooting percentage was also very high relative to their peers, that will show up somehow in the resulting analysis. If, for example, the upper range of shooting percentages is dominated by net front guys, we'll be able to observe that. If it isn't, we'll be able to observe that as well.
Your chosen method excludes every single player like Lee
but Kerr. This is not better. Meaningful statistical analysis is done with big sample sizes, not cherry-picked small/singluar ones, and (in spite of you are implying), a lot of people in the NHL have made (and continue to make) their living primarily in front of the net.
Of the 1264 players since 1967 who have at least 70 career goals and 160 games played (which includes Kerr, Tkachuk, Lee, and anyone else over that span who has played like them), only 29 have a career shooting percentage at or above 18.5%...that's 2% of all those players. Here's the complete list: Warren Young, Craig Simpson, Charlie Simmer, Sergei Makarov, Paul MacLean, Mike Bossy, Yvon Lambert, Rick Middleton, Blake Stoughton, Rob Brown, Darryl Sutter, Mike Ridley, Steve Vickers, Tom McCarthy, Kent Nillson, John Bucyk, Jarri Kurri, Mark Pavelich, Marian Stastny, Mario Lemieux, Peter Stastny, Ray Ferraro, Mark Hunter, Stan Jonathan, Tim Kerr, Mikko Makela, Peter McNabb, Alex Tanguay, and Mats Naslund.
You'll notice that the list has its share of net front guys, but it is not dominated by that group. You'll also notice that a
lot of
really talented net front guys did not make that list. Being an outstanding net front guy may reasonably be expected to give you an inside track to an above average shooting percentage, perhaps even well above average, but there's a vast difference between that reasonable notion and believing it can propel him to heights not sustained by
any of his peers.
Of all the players meeting the inclusion criteria, including
all the net front guys, 97% had a career shooting percentage below 18%, 94% had a career shooting percentage below 17%, 90% had a shooting percentage below 16%, and 84% had a shooting percentage below 15%. (The upper shooting percentage ranges are not dominated by net front players.) Those are
descriptive statistics that clearly indicate how hard it is to sustain a high shooting percentage. They guarantee nothing. They only provide context, but the sample size is large and the context is pretty strong.
I knew that the high end of the list was disproportionally populated by historic players after reviewing it, so I included a listing of only active players as well. Of the 293 active players with 70+ goals and 160+ games played, zero have a career shooting percentage at or above 18.5%, and only 1 player (0.0035% of the group) is even above 17%...and 98% of the group is below 15%, including Lee himself.
Every single active net front player with any degree of longevity and scoring touch is included in that group, and Lee is most certainly not the only player in that group who excels at making his living in front of the net. Not one of them has set a precedent for being able to accomplish what you think Lee will accomplish.
It's clearly harder to sustain a high shooting percentage now than it has been historically. Lee sustaining an 18.5% shooting percentage would literally make him one of a kind among active players, regardless of what style of game they play, and it would place him in rarefied air even among a larger historical sample.
Once again, maybe he does it, but it does not seem like a good bet to take given the anticipated contractual stakes, for fairly obvious reasons (IMO).
This is not a disingenuous approach, in spite of your insistence to the contrary. This is a far less biased and more empirically reasonable approach to this question than trying to claim one hand-picked historical example that happens to "confirm" your belief as some sort of precedent setting case study, or as supporting evidence of significant weight...especially when there are a large number of easy counter-example case studies that contradict the claim, one of which I've already presented (and which you subsequently dismissed as irrelevant, in spite of sticking with your Kerr comparison as the foundation for your argument).
You continue to claim that I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'm fairly certain the misunderstanding is not mine.
