An open letter to the stats heads who dismissed Montreal's performance as luck.
So Pavelski scoring 8 goals over a 4 game series is OK but Halak playing great is not?
There seems to be, almost as an article of faith, that winning with Great Goaltending is luck.
This, to be blunt, is a side effect of the statistical analysis you are so desperately fond of.
So before I go into my tirade, let me observe, that sabermetrics, and the analytical study of baseball is a hobby of mine. The 1986 baseball abstract opened my eyes to how you can use numbers to analyse how players performed. It served as a starting point for my own personal investigation into how existing numbers could be used to understand hockey. The last several years I have continued to be impressed with how we've acquired a deeper understanding of how the sport works.
But.
The problem with the current form of crude statistical analysis (Corsi et al) is that they do not account for the goaltender. If the goaltender was equalized then Corsi et al is a valid measure of who will win and who will lose. The problem with Corsi obsessed analytics (and all of their derivatives) is that they assert a goaltender who stops more than his fair share of shots is lucky. For Corsi obsessed analysts, a goalie who outperforms norms is by definition lucky. And any team that relies on such a goalie is doomed to failure.
And thus we have this year's final with two teams where the goalies were vying for the title of biggest goat.
Halak's record when being outshot over two seasons is surreal. His record this year was phenomenal. And because it can not be explained it must be luck. And the reason Corsi et al hate goaltending is that they view relying on extraordinary athletic performances as a poor way to guarantee wins. Because Corsi says over the whole season everyone will play well and badly at times so on aggregate things will balance out. So if you have a good Corsi team then, guess what, you are more likely to win because your reliance on any one player goes down.
And relying on goaltending seems to be the exact opposite. It says screw the aggregate, I am going to rely on the particular. And guess what all of the analytical models in the world won't help you figure out why X did Y at time T. Which is why I love sports. Because guess what, the analytics don't allow you to know what will happen.
And that's why Corsi fans don't get the playoffs. They believe that the playoffs are luck because statistical anomalies can happen. And so they dismiss the term playoff performer. Because the sample set is too small etc.
But this was about JM's coaching. The theory goes that the Habs should have played X or Y or Z style of hockey because it would have produced better results.
Better than what? That's the part that drives me nuts. Better statistical results? Or better than an ECF performance? Seriously? Did you actually believe they could make it as far as they did playing some other system? I didn't.
You don't like his passive system? Neither do I. But I'm not sure I care about Corsi. What I care about is whether players are performing to their expected norms. And the reality is that they were.
This fan base will not tolerate the kind of team we created. But the kind of team we created relies on excellent goaltending opportunistic forwards, tough-as-nails dman and a smattering of transition cable d-men. Which is ironic because our choice of Price over Kopitar more or less sealed our strategy. Look at the end of the day the goal is to score more goals than the other guy. If you do it by stopping more shots or by getting more shots than the other guy is irrelevant. What's relevant is the number that go in.
But what drives me, especially, nuts is that everyone must have forgotten JM's teams in Ottawa. They weren't passive. They were exactly the kind of Corsi optimized teams you love. So it's not his style. Maybe it's his team... It is easier to win if you don't have to rely on a single player ... but relying on a single player, especially if he's your goaltender isn't that bad.
Now as for the left-wing lock and Philadelphia. The team was wiped. And Philly was not. Yes the left-wing-lock was hard to break through, but it's especially hard to break through if you're tired. There is a reason no team has won the cup after playing two straight seven game series. There is only so much gas in the tank. If you want to blame coaching that's fine. But until we have an energy bar metric, we'll just have to agree to disagree. Montreal was wiped. The effort necessary to beat Pittsburgh and Washington was too much. Maybe it's because I've seen way too much cycling. Watch it enough, and you can see when an athlete cracks. It's not pretty.
In short, Corsi and Chances discount goaltending, the team was tired and got beat by a team that wasn't, and finally JM was exploiting Halak's incredible performance, and that maybe given how everyone else was playing that wasn't a bad thing.
cheers,
kostadis
