Kukla's Korner Hockey

Kukla's Korner Hockey

Advanced stats and 'eyeball tests' can live together

07/23/2016 at 11:22pm EDT

Among the Toronto Sun's Steve Simmons' notes:

This has not been the summer of analytics in hockey: This has been the summer of an escalating tug of war between old school thinkers and the numbers zealots.

There were high-profile numbers firings in the analytics departments in Edmonton and Montreal, but one NHL executive views the ongoing numbers vs eyeballs debate through his progressive ways: “If someone tells me it’s all about analytics, and some do, I have no time for that person and that view. And if an eye-ball guy tells me it’s all about what you see, I have no time for that person’s opinion either.

“The game is changing, evolving. The more information you have, the better prepared you will be. This isn’t baseball where there are closer to absolutes. This is a game with moving parts. We have to take the information we have, use it in context, trust your coaches and scouts for what they see. It has to be a collaborative effort.

“There’s no one way of doing things anymore. The principles of success remain the same as they’ve always been. There are just more ways of looking at things now.”

Continued

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About Kukla's Korner Hockey

Paul Kukla founded Kukla’s Korner in 2005 and the site has since become the must-read site on the ‘net for all the latest happenings around the NHL.

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