Its one more voice in the organization that will be against signing Tanner Glass and players like him.
Advanced stats may portray some players as being better than they are, but they do give you a baseline for if a player is useful at all.
Its not like people running this league are not in need of second opinions.
Or it's another voice that will advocate signing Tanner Glasses because of flawed metrics and interpretation, given how humans operate and process data they don't quite understand. Forgive me for taking a more realistic tack here.
Stats are stats. They're not great at modeling future behavior (especially when the metrics are questionable to begin with), and they get messy when multiple variables are thrown into the mix and are best suited for some situations and not others-- which is something most honest-to-god stats geeks own up to as long as they're not trying to sell you something. The recent Grantland article about the genesis of the advanced stat revolution in baseball is really eye-opening:
http://grantland.com/features/2015-...iello-jack-armbruster-moneyball-Sabremetrics/
One of the main points is that advanced stats are so successful in baseball, not because they help us model data or predict performance better than the trained eye, but that baseball is a sport that's ideal for statistical observation by its very nature. Sports like football (and hockey) are more limited in their application.
Both business partners believed that baseball’s nature as a series of discrete matchups made it the sport best suited to their style of analysis, so while they bemoaned the inaccuracy of quarterback ratings, they did so in their spare time. “In football, you’ve got 22 guys [moving] in a five-second span,” Mauriello says. “They’re all doing something, and then it’s over. Good luck.”
Secondly, another ancillary point is that these sorts of decisions are also often used as cover for business decisions or vice versa. The stats or bringing in a stats guy might very well have absolutely no impact on anything because, guess what? Hockey is a business, first and foremost. And businesses are all about the long con, sustaining interest, and spin.
“We had one meeting with a guy and we were waiting on the GM because he was in a press conference talking about the young team that he had, and saying, ‘We just love the talent we have, and we’re so encouraged and think this could be a breakthrough year,’ just very upbeat,” Armbruster recounts. “We got into the meeting and talked for a while and looked at his club and were telling him stuff. Then we went out on this deck overlooking the spring training facility and he just shook his head and said, ‘We have such a **** team.’ … It was just funny to see the dichotomy of what they have to represent sometimes versus what was really going on behind the scenes.”
I think the viability of advanced stats in hockey is still decades away, and while I'm okay with the organization hiring someone to look into number crunching in ways that other teams aren't, I really think most of the hype over this signing is people buying into snakeoil stats salesmen without thinking about what the data is, what it's analyzing, and how viable are the outcomes it draws.