Whoever comes up with the key to finding that advantage is going to be a very sought-after (and very well-compensated) person. IMO it'll still never replace watching a player at a handful of games to make sure the results are going to be correct, but it can narrow the field of players a team wants to consider up front.
article said:Vitriolic debates on the merits of traditional scouting versus performance scouting (as quantitative analysis is often called) ensued, boiling over after the release of Michael Lewis' "Moneyball" in 2003. The controversial book examined how the Athletics bucked convention to subvert their economic shortcomings and win. It rubbed many the wrong way for implying that the traditional methods used by most teams were flawed.
Yes, I am saying the latter. And I'll agree with another point you raised - there are some that think there can be a statistical analysis that will be the end-all, be-all answer ... and if no one has come up with something to accurately predict lottery numbers, you can bet there's not going to be a model that's 100% accurate.I'm not sure if you're saying that looking at stats will never replace watching with your own eyes or that both should be taken hand in hand, I think it's the latter, in which case I totally agree with you. IMO, you can't have one without the other.
I've had discussions on this with a few people - certainly with goalies it's difficult if not impossible to predict through statistics alone who is going to be great. (See: Roy, Patrick - who had miserable stats in the Q.) It might be possible to do something with the skaters, but the number of variables to consider is just incredible when you start writing them down, not to mention the volume of data one would need to conclusively rule it in or out. And that's just the start of it.Actually it stated that it was flawed.
Factors such as the team he was on and what the scoring tendency of the Q were in those years have to be taken into account. Even when normalized though, they'd probably still look pretty bad.See: Roy, Patrick - who had miserable stats in the Q
I think the 'fluidness' of hockey vs. basketball are very different. I have been one to argue that basketball would be easier to apply sabremetrics to than football despite the 'fluid' action. Basketball can still be broken down by possession and even further by who has the ball and what they did while they had it - based off of newer play-by-play charts. Plus there are 5 players to track with a common goal - even though the have 5 separate responsibilities.*CUT*
It's true that hockey's a fluid sport, but so is basketball and they're way ahead of hockey in terms of statistical analysis. Just the thing you need to find undervalued players (there's a reason why despite the low payroll - effectively a cap - Oakland keeps on getting into the playoffs every year on strong 2nd halves, the playoffs in baseball are too much of a crapshoot dependent largely on starting pitching and luck, hockey's just as reliant on hot goalies but less luck dependent than baseball, when comparing best of 7 series for both sports).
I think that GAA can be very misleading. Someone needs to find a way to find stats that really show a goalie's true play. Most of their stats are really team stats.So, there's a good chance that G-A-P-+/- and W-L-GAA-Sv% can be sometimes misleading.
Here's a fundamental problem:
In baseball, you can find out how a batter performs when the pitch count is 2-2, if the bases are loaded, if his team was trailing by fewer than 3 runs in the 7th, 8th, and 9th innings, or when a left-handed pitcher throws a pitch that crosses the inside part of the lower 3rd of the strike zone.
Someone tell me what Roberto Luongo's save percentage was when his team was shorthanded, in the 3rd period of games, or when guys shoot stick side high. You can't - because any data on those stats either doesn't exist (especially in the last example), or has to be painstakingly culled from game summaries because it's not immediately available anywhere.
Among other reasons, that is why statistical analysis in hockey is so much more difficult than in baseball or even basketball or football.
Using conventional stats and play-by-play sheets in hockey, it would be nearly impossible to apply the Bill James approach to valuing players. You'd have factors like digging the puck out of the corners, which players were in the corner at the time and who eventually 'won' the battle in the corner. Scrums in front of the net are another example.
As someone who's been a big fan of Alan's work over the past several years, I just wanted to say that it's good to see him finally get some recognition for his hard work.
If anyone can take the ball and run with this under the public eye, it's him.
One of the ultimate benefits of sabermetrics is that one actually can determine what is useful to track and what is not.
For example, common baseball wisdom held that the sacrifice bunt was a good play. It has been proven to be relatively useless.
The factors that you list above come with the embedded assumption that those things help teams win games. I would be interested in finding out which traditional hockey notions would go out the window once the game is rigourously analyzed. I for one would be willing to consider the possibility that all of the emphasis of fans on a player's "physical play" or rugged qualities (as typified by "scrums" in front of the net) is overvalued in winning hockey games.
The article in teh first post doesn't actually mention Alan Ryder (who I assume you mean) but this is probably the article you're talking about :
http://www.globesports.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061003.wryder03/GSStory/GlobeSports/home
Here's the difference though: one could go through the game data and find most of that stuff out. Even going back to the 60s, we can see what Sandy Koufax did in the 7th inning with runners on base and a 1-run lead because the official scorebooks were preserved. We could go back to the 20s and before and find this stuff out on whoever we want.Before the development of sabermetrics in MLB, you could make the exact same observation about baseball. It seems foreign now, but once upon a time peope did not know all the things that they all track in baseball. Games were not tracked pitch-by-pitch.
The potential is there to track shots, saves, and so forth, but whether or not it's being done (my bet: if it is, the NHL isn't officially part of it) is another story. IIRC, the NHL can't even say that it has complete game sheets from about 1955 on back.
The game data on the NHL is so incomplete in that regards, it's difficult if not impossible to find something as "simple" as how many PP shots a team had in a game up until the last 7 years or so. The potential is there to track shots, saves, and so forth, but whether or not it's being done (my bet: if it is, the NHL isn't officially part of it) is another story. IIRC, the NHL can't even say that it has complete game sheets from about 1955 on back.
First of all, serious baseball analysts don't really pay much attention to the situational aspect of hitting - it's been impossible to show that the situation matters.
Yes, they do. There is Win Probability for batters and Leverage Index for pitchers.