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What's Your Most Controversial Hockey Opinion?

x Tame Impala said:
Counter point:

Loving and frequently using analytics is mainly so that people who never played and don't watch a lot of hockey can go around saying "I know what I'm talking about, this player is better than that player, this team is better than that team".

In my experience, talking about teams/players from even the late 2000's-mid 2010's it's easy to see who actually watched these guys play and who is just checking out the stat-line. The stat-line has gotten more detailed but it's still the same concept. Analytics give you an idea of what happened but nothing replaces watching the games. I posted this opinion a few pages back but I'd bet over 90% of us on HF aren't watching enough hockey to have substantial opinions on the players/teams across the league. If you're not watching you can't fully know and hockey is too contextualized to pull substantial conclusions from the data.

I find anything/60 to be next to useless and many goalie stats to still not be as useful as a simple SV% and GAA metric. I'd go as far as to say the "standard" stats on NHL.com are more than enough.
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I can't speak for everyone, but I can tell you that my friends and colleagues who do this work professionally got into this because they watched a lot of hockey and wanted to apply their knowledge to better understanding. The people I've worked with typically have games on from 7pm ET until 1am ET and then watch the highlight shows on repeat while they're working. Caveat that I haven't been involved in hockey analytics professionally since the pandemic began because I had a second kid (and now have three) and my skills have eroded to the point where I'm not useful, but people do not choose these low-paying jobs unless they have a strong interest in the sport they'll be working in. About a decade ago, a recruiter reached out to me with an offer from a major professional team to be half of the analytics team. The pay being offered was about what we were paying an entry-level actuarial student with one or two exams passed.

One of the biggest problems with sports analytics these days is that a lot of the key voices are. Not. Good. Communicators. They don't know how to frame a value proposition, they don't know how to view material from an audience's perspective, and they don't understand the point of concise persuasive writing. I still read Bill James books multiple times per year, not because of the math, but because he reminds me just how much entertaining writing pulls in an audience and makes the point more understandable.

The other big perception problem with sports analytics is that the stuff in the public domain is of two types: (1) people trying to get hired by publishing what they can do with public domain data, and (2) things teams allow to enter the public domain because they've developed better proprietary things. When you say that sports analytics have no value, remember that the professional teams agree with you - and that's why it's in the public domain. I'm exaggerating for effect - some of it has some use - but the best stuff is locked down until it's no longer the best stuff.

Anyhow, this is more than you wanted to read but you've already read it so now you're stuck, I guess.
 
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MNRube said:
Hockey is the only sport where I prefer to watch live.
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For me, just about every sport where I've ever attended an event in person is better live than on television, although how much better it is live varies based on the sport. For the ones where I have, hockey is incredibly better live than on TV. So is baseball. The rest, other than football, I don't really have a strong opinion about, other than that the live experience is generally improvement over watching it on TV, and there's the fact that even if it's a sport I don't particularly care for a great deal, if you take me to a game, it's very likely that I'll manage to have a good time (basketball and soccer are two good examples).

As for football, it's probably better to watch on TV than it is to attend the game in person, in my opinion. I do like to go to football games every now and then anyway, but the bulk of my enjoyment of the total experience is actually from the tailgate party beforehand, not necessarily the game itself. I'm going to an NFL game in November, and I'm not actually sure if we're going to bother trying to get a tailgate party going. That'll be interesting.
 
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I think one of the major critiques I've heard about stats is, there's nothing wrong with stats, it's how they are applied. And more specifically, what sport.

I've heard baseball & stats go hand in hand. If you know the batting order, then you can imagine watching an entire game just from reading stats in a newspaper. And then there's the whole Billy Beane hype train ramping up Jonas character as some kind of savant. Again, may work in baseball....

But Baseball is unique though, it's the only team sport where there's only 1 offensive player and the defensive team puts the ball in play.
 
Maybe this is just from watching the Florida game last night but I couldn't help but think they should put the meshing all the way around the rink like a dome. The flipping the puck out of the D zone is getting out of hand and is terrible to watch over and over. Unfortunately it is so effective and the D have perfected it so well that it will only get worse. Turns the game into a never ending cycle of dump the puck in, flip it out the neutral zone and hope for a good bounce, over and over.
 
OT shouldn't exist during the regular season. Not a fan of 3 on 3 followed by shootout at all. It's entertaining but it doesn't seem right to use a skills competition to determine points. Points shouldn't be decided by anything other than 5 on 5 hockey. The best way to do this would be to run points like European soccer - 3 points for a win, 1 for a tie, 0 for a loss. Games can end in ties obviously. 3 for a win and 1 each for a tie encourages teams to stay aggressive and seek out wins.
 
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paulmm3 said:
OT shouldn't exist during the regular season. Not a fan of 3 on 3 followed by shootout at all. It's entertaining but it doesn't seem right to use a skills competition to determine points. Points shouldn't be decided by anything other than 5 on 5 hockey. The best way to do this would be to run points like European soccer - 3 points for a win, 1 for a tie, 0 for a loss. Games can end in ties obviously. 3 for a win and 1 each for a tie encourages teams to stay aggressive and seek out wins.
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I don't mind 3v3, but get rid of shootout; just play until a winner is decided

I despise ties- specifically points for a tie. The objective of any sport is to win, not to tie or to not lose.

So either have ties, but award no points or have OT and play until a winner is decided.

This way there's no incentive for both teams to shit it down and play for the draw

It's absurd that a quarter of the games will end in ties (which they did when ties were allowed)
 
novisor said:
Idk if this is controversial, but a team should never get 3 points for a win. It would really mess with records and past comparisons. That alone is enough for me to not want it.
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That is way past thr point of consideration.

There was no OT for over 40 years; then they brought in an OTL...then the SO....

Team records are impossible to compare. Likewise goalie win records
 
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PistolPete said:
I'm not seeing a problem.

Or are you talking about the discrepancy?

Not going to solve any issues in terms of parity.
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Yeah a team shouldn't be able to have 5x the payroll of another team. And I know teams like the Pirates could easily spend more, but that fact that this is allowed to happen in the first place is a major problem.
 
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An all time late round draft pick superstar team would beat the living hell out of an all time 1st round pick team in a 7 game series

Also the league should add way more rounds in the draft.
 
Beauner said:
Yeah a team shouldn't be able to have 5x the payroll of another team. And I know teams like the Pirates could easily spend more, but that fact that this is allowed to happen in the first place is a major problem.
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Even if they all spent the same budget, still not going to bring parity
 
BrokenFace said:
The eye test, traditional stats, and advanced stats all do the same thing. They tell you what happened. How you use that information is 100% on you.
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To the extent that the data are recorded accurately, yes.

It's easier to see the issue with statistics being recorded inconsistently, but our brains also capture information poorly, both based on how we are fed information and how we process what we're fed. Humans are terribly biased.

I used to give a talk on fuzzy logic and I would usually start with some variant of "we build these perfectly predictive models to accurately predict human behavior to eight decimal places, and then imperfect humans come along and screw it up".
 
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Bear of Bad News said:
To the extent that the data are recorded accurately, yes.

It's easier to see the issue with statistics being recorded inconsistently, but our brains also capture information poorly, both based on how we are fed information and how we process what we're fed. Humans are terribly biased.

I used to give a talk on fuzzy logic and I would usually start with some variant of "we build these perfectly predictive models to accurately predict human behavior to eight decimal places, and then imperfect humans come along and screw it up".
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Reminds me of a meme I saw the other day, which was a pie chart titled "Why I get problems on my math tests wrong." The biggest slice of the pie was "because I screwed up basic arithmetic" and the second-biggest was "I forgot a negative sign somewhere."

Sounds about right. I messed up problems in my math tests mostly because somewhere along the way I screwed up basic arithmetic (such as double checking my work and finding out that somewhere along the way I concluded that 5+9=12). I otherwise usually solved it correctly and would have gotten the correct solution if not for making such an elementary error along the way.
 
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Summer Rose said:
For me, just about every sport where I've ever attended an event in person is better live than on television, although how much better it is live varies based on the sport. For the ones where I have, hockey is incredibly better live than on TV. So is baseball. The rest, other than football, I don't really have a strong opinion about, other than that the live experience is generally improvement over watching it on TV, and there's the fact that even if it's a sport I don't particularly care for a great deal, if you take me to a game, it's very likely that I'll manage to have a good time (basketball and soccer are two good examples).

As for football, it's probably better to watch on TV than it is to attend the game in person, in my opinion. I do like to go to football games every now and then anyway, but the bulk of my enjoyment of the total experience is actually from the tailgate party beforehand, not necessarily the game itself. I'm going to an NFL game in November, and I'm not actually sure if we're going to bother trying to get a tailgate party going. That'll be interesting.
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Don't try and watch surfing live. Hands down worst sport to watch live as a spectator
 
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