The book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis (Click here to go to amazon for the book) describes how Oakland A’s GM and former major league ball player Billy Beane devised a successful strategy for competing as a small market team in MLB. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the idea that even in a statistics obsessed sport like baseball, major league teams and their scouts and general managers use the wrong statistics to measure player worth. For example, he claims that an at bat appearance where you make the starting pitcher throw a lot of pitches is important as getting to a middle reliever in baseball greatly improves your odds of winning.
If I was a GM for a NHL team, I would follow the advice of Moneyball and have my scouts and player development folks also re-examine the statistics we use to evaluate and develop talent. A quick one – anyone who knows the game appreciates the value to a team of a defenseman who can make a good first pass out of his own end of the rink. Can you name the best guy in the NHL who does it? We probably could quickly on this blog come to consensus on the top guys but none of us would have the stats to support our guy.
Now imagine if I asked you to name the guys in the CHL or NCAA who have the best percentage of first passes in their own zone. Or how about point shots that make it to the net? Or how about hits that result in turnovers in the neutral zone. Or how about plus/minus when my checking line is out against the other teams scoring line? Or how about the percent of my PIMS taken 180 feet from my net? Or how about passes that resulted in scoring chances. This last one is a real hot button for me as I think we overlook talented players who are great at setting up guys but play on a line with guys with bricks for hands.
In any event, I could go on and on about the statistics that I think we need to measure that would change how we look at evaluating talented players. What do you think we should be measuring?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment