crazyperfectdevil said:
maybe things seem extra defensive right now because this stuff is relatively new.. (and i'd say both sides are seemingly a little on edge about it) but over the long run i see this being the same deal.
But I think the problem, from my perspective anyway, is that while this stuff is relatively new in a hockey sense the idea of using stats to look at sports in a fresh way isn't. The people advocating Corsi aren't Bill James in 1983, we live in a post-Moneyball world. Hell we live in a post Moneyball: The Movie world. The idea that people are inherently resistant to that kind of analysis doesn't really ring true.
And for someone like me, the problem I have with it isn't that it's new or that I don't understand it or I don't like numbers, it's that because I know about the ongoing development in using numbers to analyze sports it seems like the people who are going in whole hog in this one area are essentially ignoring lessons learned in other sports on the matter. Things like Corsi has the exact same flaws that a lot of the early basketball metrics had where they tried to baseball-ize analysis and come to pretty specific conclusions from the raw data in spreadsheets which doesn't really work for a sport where five people are constantly involved in the play on both offense and defense. It's only when analysis in that sport moved away from that and towards the study of tape and grading plays and accounting for each individual action on the court that things really began to take hold.
That revolution happened already. What I'm seeing in hockey stats doesn't seem problematic because it's so new, it's because it seems like a regression.