Fancy Stat Summer School - Introduction
We've had our several weeks of a break from hockey. Players are begrudgingly heading back to the gym, GMs are down to tinkering after the rush of free agency, it's time for all of us to get back to work. That means it's time to go to summer school.
We have a lot of new readers on Eyes on the Prize this year, approximately four times more than we've ever had before. The rapid expansion of the site necessitates the occasional piece about the terms often used on the site, but I thought it made a whole lot more sense to do something thorough, something that would stay on the front page indefinitely.
After pondering this, I came up with the idea for Fancy Stat Summer School, where we'll go over every unfamiliar statistic we can think of; what they mean, what they tell us, why they're called what they are, their limitations, and criticisms of the statistics.
The main goal of this is for readers and commenters to understand how "advanced" statistics really aren't advanced. They're very simple concepts that can give you loads of information about the game when used properly. There are some great projects being worked on that are actually very advanced, but for now we'll stick to the beginner level stuff.
From now until presumably forever, you will be able to access this group of posts right from the front page by hovering your cursor over the "Sections" in the toolbar at the top of the page, where you will see the following:
This should allow everyone to access these articles easily for any explanation needed.
We'll be beginning the summer school tomorrow with a lesson on Corsi.
As this project continues, feel free to ask any sort of question you can think of. If we can't answer it, we'll find someone who can.