from Tyler Dello at Sportsnet,

People who follow hockey intuitively understand that there’s an element of chance in winning or losing.

If you sit down and watch the highlights from a busy night around the NHL, you’ll generally notice that there are a lot of close games; 68 per cent of last season’s contests were decided by two goals or fewer. Moreover, there are a lot of plays in which a fortunate bounce or a puck hitting a skate an inch to the left or right, results in a goal being scored — or not.

Scoring is a product of two things: the rate at which shots are taken and the rate at which they actually go in. People with an interest in hockey stats tend to measure this by looking at shot-attempts for (goals, shots on goal, missed shots and blocked shots) divided by total shot attempts.

This produces the oft-mocked but little understood Corsi stat.

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