Hockey Wilderness, advanced/fancy stats, and you

When Bryan and Nathan stepped down and passed the site over to Dan and I, we discussed some of the ways the site would be changing under the new management. One of the major changes was going to be the sites outlook on the topic everyone loves to hate: Advanced/Fancy stats.

Let's get some rumors and misconceptions out the way first though. Hockey Wilderness is not, and will never be, a site run by people who only look at stats. Or even primarily look at stats over actually watching the game. Some sites and people like to do things this way, but that isn't how things are going to be run here.

Stats certainly can be useful. They can open your eyes to things you might not have noticed before, help you predict possibly trends, help a team notice where they need improvement, as well as where they are excelling.

But stats don't always tell the whole story. And plenty of people watch hockey for the love of watching the game. The moves that players make, the shots they take, the way they pass the puck or even stop the puck. These are things that can't be expressed in statistics.

That's why we have decided to mix in a bit of statistical analysis with our overall coverage of the Wild. It will not be taking the place of any normal coverage we do, but will provide an option for those of you who have expressed an interest in learning and knowing more about advanced/fancy hockey stats to do so.

We'll be running a small summer series on the basics of the stats we'll be using in the next few weeks. This will allow people to understand what the stats are, what they look at, and how they can be useful.

Feel free to treat this series like any other series. Express you distaste for it. Ignore it. Rejoice in it. Ask questions. There seems to be a fair bit of interest in the topic, but if it turns out that everyone hates it we will certainly re-evaluate how we approach the topic during the season.

As it stands, we are looking at posting one article a week dedicated to discussing the stat numbers for that week. We may post the stat numbers for each game in the game wrap up. But that's all we are planning on at the moment. We certainly won't be turning into the site that everyone hates. So let's give it a try and see how it goes Wilderness.