Ken Campbell Is IN THESE STREETS, We Wish He Wasn’t
As senior writer for The Hockey News, Ken Campbell makes a living by channeling Skip Bayless, King of the Bridge Trolls, which is a good way to get page views and make a lot of people dislike you, so there’s a two-birds-one-stone thing going on in a lot of the columns Campbell mails in writes.
I won’t link to his latest one—ever-so-trollingly titled “The death of Corsi? It’s only a matter of time now”—because traffic is the currency of the Internet and it's better for a lot of us if Ken Campbell goes broke.
If you’ve happened across his latest work, then you have a good idea of why things like numbers and graphs and calculators are the things that haunt Ken Campbell’s nightmares. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid having the column retweeted into your timeline, you probably still know about this nightmare fuel because “common knowledge” is, by definition, knowledge known by nearly everyone.
Still: I blog, therefore I am. Or something like that. Which is why I thought I’d blog the ever-loving heck out of this Ken Campbell gem. Because an assault on logic of this scale is well worth unpacking.
The death of Corsi? It’s only a matter of time
OK let’s stop right there. That title is…interesting. Why not “NHL to implement player tracking technology” or “NHL to partner with Sportvision by 2015 season” or something a little less incendiary? Because that would be a cold take, which is not at all Ken Campbell, that’s why.
Remember: this is Ken Campbell’s world and we’re all just nerding in it. (And even if it was actually an editor who wrote the title, you know Ken Campbell was all “YEAH! TAKE THAT, PENCIL PUSHERS! BOOM! ROASTED!” when he saw it.)
Yup, we certainly know what we’re getting in today’s column. Yessir.
COLUMBUS – The pocket protector crowd may be dismayed to learn this, but the Death of Corsi is on the horizon. Push up your spectacles and deal with it, people.
Ken Campbell is pulling no punches, as is his wont. Today’s target? The hordes of bloggers who always wear glasses, choose to carry slide rules in pants pockets usually reserved for GRIT, and have the type of hockey knowledge I’d venture to guess is intimidating to columnists like Ken Campbell.
Also: Ken Campbell is [incorrectly] predicting the future here, which makes for a strong opening. A STRONG opening.
That much has become crystal clear this weekend when the NHL, in conjunction with a company called Sportvision, rolled out technology that will track puck possession, zone time and a host of other data far more accurately and easier to digest than what is currently available.
Things that are guaranteed: that there will be a host of data compiled by the NHL as a result of the Sportvision partnership.
Things that are not guaranteed: that the data will be pristine, free, or easier to digest than what’s currently available on NHL.com.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that googling “fancy stats primer” if you’re still hazy on Corsi, Fenwick, score effects, PDO, or zone starts is a pretty simple exercise. Then again, why google stuff when you can hot-take it to death?
Exactly. Now where were we…?
And really, isn’t that what Corsi is doing right now? The game is all about puck possession and Corsi is a proxy way of measuring it. And while it has helped, this technology will allow the league to track it far more accurately. And once the league and Sportvision perfect this system, you don’t really need Corsi anymore.
After summarizing how the Sportvision technology would work, Ken Campbell straight up deads Corsi. WORLDDDDD STARRRRR.
Right, because that’s a logical conclusion to draw based on the fact that Sportvision’s data will actually enhance Corsi, not render it obsolete. Corsi by another name, as it were.
What Ken Campbell is overlooking—or possibly not understanding?—is that Corsi is a metric based on the raw data currently collected by the NHL: shots on goal, blocked shots, and missed shots. With the advent of Sportvision, the amount of similar multifaceted stats will only increase as bloggers get their hands on the raw data.
Kind of like what they’ve done since 2008 (or earlier).
Fact is, the metrics aren’t going away; they’re being improved. But Ken Campbell isn’t interested in things like “facts” because “facts” are the kind of cold water you don’t want thrown on your nuclear-weapons-grade fire-flames takes.
With the implementation of Sportvision, there will still be numbers, percentages, and graphics involved in hockey.
So now instead of wading through a matrix of numbers, percentages and hard-to-decipher (for older white guys, anyway) graphics, you’ll now be able to know exactly how long a guy like Alexander Ovechkin played, how much time he had the puck on his stick, how much time his team possessed the puck when he was on the ice and how many shots were directed from where while he was on the ice.
I’ll acquiesce here. Time of possession at the individual-, team-, and zone-level is an incredibly important stat that Sportvision will hopefully provide. These will be super cool to (hopefully) see on the league’s website one day soon.
Still, that Ken Campbell is assuming every graph is out to get him is pretty revealing. As a supposed authoritative voice on all things hockey, isn’t it Ken Campbell’s job to, you know, learn about hockey stuff?
And it will all be done without any guesswork.
To clarify: there isn’t any guesswork in counting Corsi events. It’s literally counting. You can do it on your fingers, if that helps.
[In the next 267 words of the column, Ken Campbell gives context and quotes surrounding Sportvision and how the NHL hopes to leverage its technology]
Pretty standard reporting by Ken Campbell in this section of his column, which is surprising, given Ken Campbell’s apparent lack of interest in understanding what Corsi is, how it came to be, or why it’s an important metric, even though it’s routinely mentioned on hockey broadcasts nowadays.
Unimportant details, I guess?
Unfortunately, some of the more subjective statistics such as hits, takeaways and giveaways, which can vary wildly from building to building and often favor the home team, will not change.
This subjectivity isn’t worth worrying about, for Ken Campbell cares only about standardizing—or killing off—the type of witchcraft responsible for Corsi, again conveniently forgetting that it’s a compilation of real, actual, quantifiable, not-at-all-subjective numbers gathered by the NHL.
And while Corsi appears to be on its last legs, this new technology will almost certainly open opportunities for all kinds of new statistics, some we may not even know exist yet.
Just so I’m clear: Corsi is a waste of time and effort and graph paper because it’s something developed by bloggers based on the data collected by the league, but the prospect of “all kinds of new statistics, some we may not even know exist yet” based on Sportvision’s data collection services is cause for celebration?
OK, got it. Please continue.
“You can’t have a math lesson on the screen,” [Hank] Adams said. “But there will be enormously deep data that sabermatricians [sic] are going to dig into and come up with all sorts of great insights.”
Oh, so just like Corsi? (And Fenwick? And PDO? And zone starts?) Basically, what we clarified above? Cool.
Speaking of money, the technology is not cheap. It costs “several hundred dollars,” according to Adams to insert the chip into each puck. And if that puck goes out of play, nobody can expect it back. “At this point, it will be a very expensive souvenir,” Adams said.
Ken Campbell drops the hammer here, but does it ever so subtly.
Maybe he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. Maybe it’s actually his hot-take reflexes bringing this one home. (A “Jesus, take the wheel” moment if ever there was one.)
Still: the clinching quote about how a Sportvision chip-embedded puck will be an expensive souvenir is one final shot at how useless Corsi is. You can’t catch a Corsi after it goes out of play. There is no Corsi souvenir to be had. That’s just a Corsi fact.
