You seem to question it because you can't quantify due to the NHL not have a consistent way of tracking it. Is this accurate?
not at all. i question it on semantic grounds, all shots being savable by definition as i said earlier. it's not really an important point, it was never central to any of my arguments, i just don't personally like that way of describing it (especially when it's being used to distract from a point that is quite irrelevant to whether or not crawford should have made the save or not).
as far as i am concerned, quantification and qualification are both important parts of analysis. when done well, quality analysis can tell you infinitely more about the actual mechanics of what is going on at the micro-level. little movements and decisions here and there that give you a clue as to why something happened the way it did. that said, i have three problems with this kind of analysis as it is done in hockey forums like this:
a) typically "eye test" arguments are more convincing when someone provides actual visual evidence (a highlight, a picture, anything) to back up what they are saying. this is almost never done, and in fact most "eye test" arguments take the form of psychoanalysis and vaguery that can't even be backed up by visual evidence, which i find absolutely trite and unacceptable.
b) the person making the "eye test" claim almost never stops to consider whether or not what they saw, being entirely subjective, disagrees with their interlocutor's "eye test", and what implication that has for their argument. this is one of the primary reasons why quantitative evidence is so important; it provides one with the capacity to back up one's claim in a way that unambiguously favors one subjective assessment over the other.
c) people that always talk about "watching the games" and decry "stat watching" fail to understand that quantitative statistical analysis is just an outgrowth of the very qualitative data they hold steadfast to. every statistical category is a qualitative category (for instance, a "shot" or a "save" is a quality of an action in the game which adheres to a certain definition and is tracked by the scorekeeper). this is where you get the common line "the statistics lie" or "they don't tell the whole story". what the statistic tells you is precisely what it is defined to tell you. if someone gets the puck in the net twice in a game, that means he has two goals. once again, note how there is both a qualitative aspect and a quantitative aspect to the statistic. i think this is seldom appreciated by people on either side of the quality vs quantity debate.
apologies for my rambling about how i see this issue. feel free to ignore all of that, i just spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff.
@Hawsse you made some good points earlier in the thread but don’t get your insistence on or the relevance of the idea that every shot is theoretically saveable. They actually aren’t. Like, a human being cannot run a 5.0 second 100M. A goalie only has two legs, two hands, etc.
it's a purely analytic point, and as i said it wasn't central to any substantive argument i was making. i insist on it because i think it is trivially true by the very nature of what a save is. to me, an unsavable implies the complete negation of any possibility of its being saved. so ignoring a situation in which the goaltender is pulled, i think it is one hundred percent true that any shot on net is eligible for a save, and is therefore "savable".