I don’t understand Scott Cullen’s work sometimes. His player rankings seem as arbitrary as Skate Canada. He’s pretty long winded which is only good if you’re trying to hit a word count or get click-throughs for the ad beside your column. He also tends to forget that visual highlight packs and/or boxscores are readily accessible thanks to the internet which is the only explanation I can think of for why someone would write something as redundant as this.
But I’m not here to criticize. I give credit where it’s due. Cullen has written about the volatility of shooting percentage before, something we fervently believe in and promote here. And today he did this, -- link, a fair and well-researched post-mortem on the Edmonton Oilers but more importantly, an analysis based on tangible things like shot differential while limiting the use of empty terms like big body presence and tenacity.
Not only that, but he promotes the website, www.behindthenet.ca, that stats guys like us find indispensible. See, all that balderdash of PDO, Fenwick, points per 60, and zonestarts can be found here and is a creation of Gabriel Desjardins who is 49 years old, obese, wears bifocals, lives only on a diet of cheetos, resides in his mother’s basement, and has never watched a hockey game before in his life. No really, he doesn’t even know what icing is he’s such a nerd.
When he’s not looking at a spreadsheet to try and figure out the formula for how many beach babes Drew Doughty drills per month*, Desjardins has a master’s degree from Cal Berkley in electrical engineering and is an analytics consultant in the professional sports industry – I presume in sports that are… you know… progressive in stat based analysis like baseball and soccer. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, among other publications.
*right now the working formula is his corsi number/Savardian spinorammas per 60 minutes * compete level – truculence quotient. It works out to 11.
Sorry for the deviation. Back to Cullen now.
All this that Cullen’s doing is a very good thing. We can logically deduce he has been exposed to the work of Desjardins and sees the merit in it. Which means finally…… FINALLY…. we perhaps have an ally in the mainstream media who can reach the masses when it comes to faulty narratives and the mind-numbing stupidity that usually comes from those like Don Cherry*.
*If you're going to click on any link from this post, click on the last one. Honestly, when is Don Cherry going to retire? Even he must get tired of his own schtick. Ron MacLean is a better man than I am for not taking that old man out behind the shed and shooting him.
No comments:
Post a Comment