Many of you know I am not into the advanced stats part of the game which continues to grow these days.

I just don't have the time and am probably a little old school on the topic, but I know many of you are and Rob Vollman has come out with his 2014 edition of Hockey Abstract.

One of the great reviews of the book is here...

from Dimitri Filipovicat The Sporting News,

... There'll surely be some noise in the form of Snake Oil salesmen that attempt to sneak in on a burgeoning product, but as long as you're looking in the right areas there should be plenty of reliable conduits of hockey analysis around. One of those is Rob Vollman , one of the first pioneers to mull all of these ideas over online back in the day, paving the way for those such as myself to dive headfirst into it.

For the second straight summer, he has released his version of the ' Hockey Abstract ' (playing off of Bill James' Baseball versions), which attempts to continue and bolster the intelligent discussion being had as opposed to claiming to provide any sort of dubiously earth-shattering revelations. He says it best in the introduction of this year's book, describing it as " a book that's not about what we know about hockey, but what we don't know. Most topics begin with a question, which is then explored without any preconception of what the answer should be. Virtually everything I have ever done in this field began with the words 'I don't know' .”

I've already parsed through the text with great pleasure this past weekend, and decided to share some of my favourite segments entrenched in the 300+ pages of work with the hopes that I don't spoil anything overly central to your own personal future enjoyment of it.

read on