... And along the way some stats are indeed completely exposed as having been virtually useless. Take the case of shooting percentage, always bogus in the mind of anyone with any kind of think-through math skills, but often touted in various media reports when a player had a high number. Now people are looking at much longer periods of time and finding that with a few exceptions, shooting percentages are so radically different from year to year that the stat is really nothing more than a chart of random luck. A guy with a great percentage one season is dreadful the next and vice versa, meaning that in terms of using such a stat to assess a player in the future is a waste of time.

As some of the other more advanced stats come under the same longer term scrutiny, they also are being found wanting and the people that do this for a living are sent back to the drawing boards looking for even more convoluted stat combinations to find ways of predicting the likelihood of successful performance in the future.

As the cliché has gone for years, hockey is proving to be a slippery game all right, but in far more ways than originally thought.

Tony Gallagher of the Vancouver Province where you can read more on this topic.