Quote Originally Posted by plague View Post
cheers, and my following smart ass response is not directed at you.


but



so what youre saying is that someone watches a game and determines whether a team is essentially 'lucky' or 'unlucky' in front of goal. they then write that answer down in a fancy numeric term for someone else to decipher that number back out to mean 'lucky' or 'unlucky'.

so who benefits from knowing this stat? fans who cant be assed watching the game? to be honest they are better just saying 'lucky' or 'unlucky' to the average fan as it would make more sense.

opposition coaches only reading stats deserve to get the ass whopping that would follow not actually watching the other team play.

maybe gamblers? i could see it being a quick way to gloss over games to get a better idea on who to include in a fruitless 5 leg multi.




but man, it just continually amazes me the effort and trust people place in these type of stats as some way to seem more 'sockah woke' than the next guy.

and yeah im talking about americans, they love this shit. but they are mostly overweight and stupid people.
Some of it is luck yeah, some of it can be patterns and actual team or player traits. As I mentioned with Kane for example, you look at his goals scored compared to xG over the course of a season (which generally over that time frame a striker is not lucky for the whole thing) and see he is markedly overperforming - its somewhat of a measure of how clinical a finisher he is and is able to score goals more often than he should be.

As for whether quantifying it is worthwhile - I guess that's personal opinion to some degree, but to me its definitely yes, and I suspect the problem most people have is lack of understanding, not it being a number.
When discussing who won a game, you could say team A scored more than team B. Or you could say the score was 4-1.
You could say team A took more shots than team B, or say it was 11 shots to 2.

Putting a value to it is way more informative (as long as the stat is relevant and accurately determined) than dealing in the binary of yes/no.

I agree that any coach relying on stats alone is asking for trouble. But using them in conjunction with your eyes is useful, and can help to highlight things you may wish to examine more closely.
I think too many people look at stats and think "Its either got to be a 100% complete and accurate reflection of the game or its useless" when really most of them are useful if you just regard them as a different way to look at it.