Eh, that's a bit unfair. Whether (and whichever) advanced statistics ends up proving valid or not, the vast VAST majority of people who use them, only parrot what they have been told about them, and have neither the will nor the means to do any validating or constructive criticism of their own.
This seems like a difficult claim to evidence. Have any?
In the Oilers case, they hired a firm to do analytics for this past offseason. They used them to help identify target players, one of which was Benoit Pouliot.
Intense knowledge of the stats, or pioneering new stats, is irrelevant. It's gotten to the point where people with more credentials than us are taking them very seriously, spending many millions of dollars and risking their careers on decisions made at least partially with the help of advanced stats.
Their currently rising popularity is irrelevant to their true worth and indicates nothing about the intelligence level of either supporters or detractors.
What's interesting about the "detractors" is the general idea that they're unproven.
It's true that we can't say "this team is a winning team because they've used advanced stats", but what we can say is that the stats are the factual representation of the results a player has had. You can mock Corsi, but you can't change the reality that a player with a good Corsi has seen his team outshoot his opponents team while on the ice. That much is a fact.
They're tools to be used, and whether or not you think they're refined or usable to craft winning teams, they suggest something and that's the reason so many are taking them seriously.
If your grand retort to all of that is "well, they're all idiots", I have a hard time taking that completely seriously.
) we have room for both Arco and one of the other two. Hopefully Draisitl or Yakimov can turn in a worthy season.
