Stars Pucks: Can't See Forest, Due to Trees

Discussing the discussions about the current state of the Dallas Stars stretch run.

Some of you follow me on social media, and some of you don’t. I suppose the ride-along with your resident sports nerd is a different experience each way. I sports a lot, and most of it is for public consumption. If you choose, you could probably read my stuff, listen to my stuff, and then even follow along as I watch a game in real-time on that dubious platform formerly known as Twitter.

It is too much me.

But I am writing today because of that social media experience over the last week or two of the Dallas Stars' experience.

I want to start with one of my favorite sports clichés, which has been on my hard drive for so long and recited by me so many times that I cannot remember where I stole it from:

“It is not how, it is how many.”

This is a variation, of course, of the golf cliche, “there are no pictures on the scorecard.”

And they both mean the same thing: our sporting objectives are to defeat our opponent tonight. The end. And we lose sight of this so much as we all try to get smarter in the sports we follow and watch. I am guilty of it, as I write at least three analysis pieces a week on every Dallas Cowboys game. In those pieces, we discuss whether the team should be pleased with the offense or defense, and the tone is often much different than the game result.

It would be much easier to save 2,000 words and simply write, “They won” or “They lost” and leave it at that. The “how” does matter when we are asking bigger questions about worthiness for a Super Bowl or a Stanley Cup. I get it. Of course, we don’t want to be outplayed and still throw a pizza party because we fluked a win. Of course.

But at the same time, we must never lose sight of the fact that our analytic models are useful only if we use them correctly. They are tools to explain and measure elements of the game, but they should never supersede the only analytic that actually matters: the score. How many times is that puck crossing that line? Because if we can do that more than the other guys, we get the two points. The other guys can celebrate that they won the Corsi matchup and take no points in the standings. And at the end of the season, they can have a longer vacation because they won’t be playing with all of their high-danger chances they created but did not convert.

So, I am not saying that anyone is wrong here. I have read excellent pieces from David Castillo and Robert Tiffin recently and they have had similar takeaways about the Stars play and just to be clear, they aren’t wrong. There are some very disconcerting issues at work with the Stars overall game right now. That is not a debate at all. It is certifiably true.

But, what we do with that information is what grinds my gears a bit and I believe my solution is either to just log-off social media or to write about it. Which do you think I am going to choose given that you are reading my response here this morning?