A "Prospectus" on the Upcoming NHL Season.

I’ve been convinced to go have a look by Neil over at Russian Machine Never Breaks. I’d been hesitant to buy the book because even though I’m clearly smack dab in the target audience, I’m worried about overreliance on GVT in areas where it’s not suited — GVT is a metric that’s good for what it does but specifically ignores context and the incidence of luck vs. skill, making it iffy as a measure of overall player ability IMO. But it seems clear that there’s a lot more than that, enough for me to sink my teeth into!

We make no bones about the fact that “VUKOTA” is a player projection system that doesn’t use inputs regarding team context or injury context (other than how many games a player played). I think it actually makes your analysis of a player as a reader or my analysis as an analyst that much clearer. We’ve got VUKOTA to tell us what the player would be expected to do “in a bubble” and you or I can tweak that prediction up or down by our own assessment of those factors. If they’d be built into VUKOTA already, we wouldn’t know how much to weight was on the player himself and how much was given to the context.

Kevin – Thanks for the review and the nice words.