Remembering Dellow: A few graphs to convince you on Corsi

From Wikipedia Commons

Over the past year, I based a lot of research off of  former work by Tyler Dellow. It is a bit funny because I actually never read any of Dellow’s work until well after I started writing about underlying metrics in hockey. I knew of him, but mostly was brought up on Gabriel Desjardins, Eric Tulsky, Ben Wendorf (yes, Hockey-Graphs’ own Wendorff), and a few others. It is also a bit difficult now because Dellow’s website has gone dark with his hiring, which removed the work I quoted or built upon.

One Dellow article that will be severely missed is Two Graphs and 480 words will convince you on Corsi.

Dellow presented analytical data in simple and effective ways. It made understanding of complex concepts -such as regression in goal differentials- easy.

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More on “Corsi & Context”, with some added predictive modelling

Corsi

INTRODUCTION

I have always been of the opinion that Corsi is part of the larger puzzle in trying to gain greater understanding of the game and how a player can affect their team’s chance to win.  Like all statistics though, it needs appropriate sample size and context, and will never tell you everything. Teammates, opponents, luck, system, strategy and what moments a coach deploys a player will always effect results… although, there can also be times where context is overly stressed. While Corsi does tend to need less context than many other hockey statistics, there are some things that need to be kept in mind in how two players with the same Corsi% are not always created equally.

Tyler Dellow wrote a piece on context that is definitely worth a read. In the article Dellow used two tables showing how Corsi changes dependent on ice time for the 2011-12 season.

We will revisit this article using a larger sample and look at both forwards and defensemen.
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