Sunday, July 19, 2009

Magnus Paajarvi-Svensson's Shooting Percentage

In the comments of a recent Lowetide post, looking for a comparable for recent first round draft pick Paajarvi-Svensson, commenter PunjabiOil posted the following:

There are concerns about MPS:

1. He fell down to 10th because scouts questioned his ability to translate offence to the professionals. The rebuttal to this would be Kopitar, Anze
2. His shooting % numbers were low in comparison to SEL peers.


The shooting % comment is pretty interesting to me.

There are two trains of thought I'm having here:

(1) His shooting percentage numbers are low because he's a "true talent" finisher at about that level. He might generate more shots than some guys, but he's not going to be shooting at 20%.

(2) He had an "unlucky" year in terms of shooting percentage, and perhaps that led some to think he's a questionable finisher. In that case, perhaps EDM got a steal at 10 OV?

Naturally I'm hoping for (2), not that I have any basis to think it more likely than (1).

1 comment:

Vic Ferrari said...

Very cool. And just to meander off topic, terrific to see you talking more on the web lately, speeds.

On the shooting% thing, it's an interesting angle.

Human nature being what it is , people's natural sense of the effect of randomness over the short term (say a month of league hockey) is reasonably accurate.

The human mind (certainly mine) will naturally want to shrink that down over a season at a rate that simply isn't there to be had. A season is nowhere near enough.

If you plot out the confidence interval (the mind thinks in pictures, for most of us) f shooting percentage we'll see that. After a few weeks the randomness is heavily in play, but that feels right to us, so no arguing anywhere. 12 more weeks only cuts have way through the big chunk of random lard, it's the way the universe is, but it never feels right. It feels like it should have settled out by then. But it hasn't. And it won't next year either, or the year after, or any year after that until we're dead. Presumably after that as well, but we won't give a shit, because we'll be dead :)

As you say, he either doesn't have finish or he was rolling snakee eyes. Let's hope that the scouts are sharp, and/or that they watched a lot of tape. It would warm heart to learn that this player hit a record number of goalposts last year.