Comments on Five Hole Fanatics: Harbingers

ST: then you need to visit "cox Bloc", listed in m...

2008-07-03T11:39:00.000-06:00

ST: then you need to visit "cox Bloc", listed in my sidebar there. They beat up on that guy mercilessly.

As a side note, I just love how Damien Cox bashes ...

2008-07-03T11:30:00.000-06:00

As a side note, I just love how Damien Cox bashes the Leafs and their fans repeatedly, while working for a Toronto paper... its one of the small things that make living in the 'heart' of Leaf 'nation' all that much sweeter... but yeah, he is pretty brutal...

I wouldn't write it off too quickly. I have some ...

2008-07-03T05:59:00.000-06:00

I wouldn't write it off too quickly. I have some questions about how the numbers actually work, but those questions arise because I haven't read all the supplementary material yet.

I don't know anything about the author, but his numbers seem to match my impressions of players, at least the ones I know fairly well. Aucoin is probably a bad player to focus on. Remember that Desjardins ranks him highly for +/- as well. I think this thing deserves a closer look, whether that supports the conclusions or not.

Perhaps I should have given this more than a cu...

2008-07-02T23:59:00.000-06:00
Perhaps I should have given this more than a cursory glance?

No, I think it's a good thing you didn't...

Looks like he came up with what he thought were reasonable heuristics, then didn't use (or was too lazy to use) a large enough sample set to cross-validate what he came up with. So his results march right along, up until the data stops fitting the curve (by, like, data point #4. Sigh.)

Well, that's 3 "nays". Ryders getting beaten up he...

2008-07-02T23:16:00.000-06:00
Well, that's 3 "nays". Ryders getting beaten up here. Perhaps I should have given this more than a cursory glance?

Alan Ryder competes with Damien Cox every year for...

2008-07-02T23:02:00.000-06:00
Alan Ryder competes with Damien Cox every year for my annual "Worst Hockey Journalist EVAR" award. He wins every year.

He's really outdone himself with this latest report. From the classy touches like misspelling Iginla's name to the absurd metrics and ranking of players, to his rant about how Nabokov didn't deserve to be named to the all-star team (and he tops that off with a supreme arrogance and disdain for 'hockey writers').

Do you read his NHL statistics columns on the Globe and Mail website? They're hilariously bad, I'm not sure this guy understands the very basics of the games. He's blinded by numbers such that he can't see the forest through the trees.

I'm all for intelligent analysis of hockey and advanced statistical models, but this guy is just so far off the mark that it's pure comedy.

I just finished a quick read through, mostly to se...

2008-07-02T22:11:00.000-06:00
I just finished a quick read through, mostly to see where Calgary players looked good.

The biggest surprise was seeing where our defence popped up. Phaneuf showed up for just the reasons we would expect: a strong player based on his ability to score goals and draw penalties, held back mostly by his habit of taking penalties.

Aucoin shows up because of a solid all around contribution. And Regehr and Sarich both show up as successful penalty killers.

There are a few reasons where I'm hesitant to support these findings. From what I can tell, quality of competition is not factored in at all. Since we know that this varies significantly, this is the biggest weakness in the numbers. I'm also not sure whether improved performances would scale as we would expect them to. If Kipper played better last season, would it improve the team's performance enough that the defence's performance would stay the same? Should that be the case? And finally, this gives a measure of performance over the whole season. But we know that performance changes over time. Kipprusoff is a great example of this. He was a much better goalie by the end of the season. Did the whole team improve as a result? Did the defence get progressively worse? We need some kind of trend to know for sure.

I noticed his high esteem for Aucoin too...I dont ...

2008-07-02T19:28:00.000-06:00
I noticed his high esteem for Aucoin too...I dont know how much he takes into account quality of competition or team SH% (for and against) in that section of his analysis (obviously, not a lot).

I'll probably go through it in more depth later. His stuff on goaltending agreed closely with my own observations of Kipper, which is why I foregrounded it. It may or may not stand up under further scrutiny.

As for Aucoin...he was on the 3rd pair even before Vandermeer got here (thus the constantly horrible Eriksson/Phaneuf pairing).

He has Adrian Aucoin as the 9th best defenceman in...

2008-07-02T19:19:00.000-06:00
He has Adrian Aucoin as the 9th best defenceman in the league last year. Very impressive for a guy that was on Calgary's third pair after the Vandermeer trade.

/sarcasm.