The Day the Stats Stood Still -OR- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Sham

Brought to you by a "Former Blogger"...


TIME FOR ONE MORE RANT! WAHOOOO!!!! (Brett, eat your heart out!)


The "career" stats page is a joke. Or should I say "carrer"??
http://thehomeoftherecap.blogspot.com/2008/12/carrer-stats.html


There's no consistency and so many stats are so way off. And before you start saying that I think only MY stats are off - no, EVERYONE's Stats are off.


Consider this:


Dave Riley supposedly has the best GAA for goalies, with a 2.84 GAA. However, isn't 142 divided by 43 = 3.302 GAA?? Sooooo, your computer did that bad math, did it John?
I know, maybe he did it backwards: 43 / 142 = oops, nope. That comes out to .302 so that can't be it...Hmmmmmm.
Was that just a copy and paste mistake? Oh, ok. How about your GAA, then, John? 185 divided by 56 is 3.30357, NOT 3.032 as you posted it. Actually, it looks like for many of them they may have been done backwards (e.g. you divided #games by #goals instead of the other way around) because John's 56 games divided by 185 goals = .303, which is only one decimal place off from what he posted. So multiply by 10 and there you go.


      ....I Think I know what he will say. The total games are off because he counts PARTS of games, and that throws everything off, right? Ok. I guess we have to buy that since no one but you can see the secret formula for computing these stats. Yup, that make sense. I mean, John seized control of the stat kingdom back in 2006 like the Nazis invading Poland. All because he claimed that the current maintainer wasn't doing a good enough job and the stats were somehow wrong. Even though everything was out there in the open plain to see. And it was updated regularly. But all that had to change so he could make the stats look more like what he wanted them to look like. Did you know that he only counted HALF of our 2006-2007 season because he didn't like the stats for the first half of the year? Go ahead and look at how many games are counted from that season. For those of us there, you know we played way more than that. It's not like that first part of 2006 didn't happen. Good thing I kept all those stats for posterity. Maybe someday we can get them reinstated. Or maybe we should just let him use his database for his own personal use (as is the custom these days), and instead we can start fresh with some legit stats. Moving on...


Personally, I don't care about vague and unrelatable stats such as "highest scoring teammates" or "team strength". I'm sure Cindy ranks pretty high on that last one, so that makes for good stats, doesn't it? How about you start tracking a USEFUL stat, like plus/minus?? I'm sure Cindy would end up as a negative one hundred and something. Now THAT is a stat comparison that we can all agree is RELEVANT.


Enough about calculation mistakes and useless categories; perhaps we should take a look at the Wins and Win % table. Does the number of total games played match with any other games total, including the number of games in the points table? Go ahead and compare. I guess John decided to update everything except that table for several years, huh? Isn't all this supposed to be generated at once by his database output? I'm sure he has a reasonable excuse for that too. After all, no one knows what's going on behind the scenes anyway so we'll just eat up any old excuse that he hand-feeds us that sounds remotely plausible.


This is too negative. Let's focus on some things that I love about this page.
I love the way all sorts of players with only a handful of points show up on lists that are ordered by a percentage. So Joel's goal percentage is about 19% huh? But he only has 11 goals in his illustrious "career"? Yeah, that's a huge sample size. I'm glad you included Danno's 8 goals on that list. That's relevant. No, don't bother filtering the lists to say, a minimum of 20 or 30 games played for a better sample size. No, that wouldn't make sense.


I like how there's no rank # column next to any table list so I can't see where I rank among it. At least I know I'm somewhere near the "middle" of most lists, and that's pretty good, I guess. No need to quantify that.


I like how some new players who have played with us for two seasons now already have surpassed EIGHT people on the bottom of this version of the points list. That's two years, now and no update. Wait, sorry, I forgot to read the update on the page: "updated 5/8/11" ... Ok, that's THREE years then. Well, at least that means everything older than 3 years is up-to-date, right? Wait...Dale is listed as playing only 56 games since 2006...Hmmm... according to the 06-07 page, Dale played 34 games. He then played 7 more in 07-08. He then played...uh oh..56 games in 08-09! Looks like John arbitrarily decided to start counting certain people's career stats at a certain year. Okkkkayyy...and yes, it's different for other people too. Ok, I'm sure he has a valid reason for that...


I can't do this anymore. All this bad math is making my brain explode! Or is it IMPLODE?! AHHH! John, do us all a favor: don't fix the stats. Don't do any more updates. Fix them for your own personal use if you feel like it, but please save us the trouble of having to digest any more nonsense. It's been a joke for years. Mildly entertaining. Somewhat interesting. Completely innaccurate. Personally, I keep my own stat "database" in a simple spreadsheet, because, well, pretty much everyone has Excel and it can be shared quite easily. No it can't do your fancy scoring-combination tracking or team strength percentages....But I'm pretty sure 87.94% of all bloggers didn't really care about that anyway.


Yes, I keep the stats, but no, I don't want to replace John as stat-keeper for the blog. I don't blog anymore anyway. This was all written by a ghost writer. :)  Maybe someone else will step up to the plate and give us a nice presentation of how he plans to do a better job than John with the stats by 1) being accurate 2) updating in a timely fashion and 3) making the process transparent so there is no "hidden" formulas for calculating things.


Lastly, I hope none of you think you can figure out who I am. I'm a mystery, like WPR and BigBoard -- no one really knows who I am, and any claims will be denied. Because I made it really hard to guess who I am and this entire page is shrouded in mystery. So don't even bother. Thanks Nick for posting this for all to see, and until I have something else to complain about through Nick, I bid you all farewell for now!

P.S. If anyone wants to see some REAL stats from the past 8 years or so....I do have them up on a different blog site...but I'm sure you won't ask for access to that blog since I am so terrible at keeping track of stats....... :) lol :-P roflamo :-)))))) rabble rabble rabble!!!!!!!!!!