Hockey Confidential by Bob Mckenzie Page B

standard currencies by which individual players were evaluated. Wins and losses, meanwhile, were always the norms by which teams are judged.
    But if advanced stats in hockey aren’t really all that advanced, they are most certainly new to the game—at least, relatively speaking.
    Many proponents of #fancystats point to the advent of Corsi, the puck-possession metric, as perhaps the dawn, or at least the big breakthrough, of modern-day hockey analytics. There was no specific date when Corsi was born, though Dellow recalled the concept might have come up on message board chatter (on sites like the HF Boards at hfboards.hockeysfuture.com) amongst the number-crunching community as early as the NHL lockout of 2004.
    Perhaps the first documented evidence of the actual statistic now known as Corsi—arguably
the
seminal moment in #fancystats history—appeared in 2006. Legend has it that Edmonton Oiler fan and blogger Vic Ferrari—the man, the myth, the legend— heard Buffalo Sabre goalie coach Jim Corsi explain in a radio interview how he counted shot
attempts
(totalling shots on goal, missed shots and blocked shots) instead of the conventional (and official) measurement of shots on goal. The story goes that Ferrari took that notion, worked with it and
voil
à
: Corsi—the concept, not the man—was born. It’s believed Ferrari first wrote about it in any length on March 5, 2006, on his
Irreverent Oiler Fans
blog.
    Gabe Desjardins, a native Winnipegger, lifelong Jets fan and electrical engineer who graduated from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, but moved to California’s Silicon Valley to work in high tech, believes the #fancystats movement had much deeper roots, starting in almost prehistoric hockey times. As in the 1950s. Desjardins would know: he is, for all intents and purposes, one of the godfathers of hockey analytics, the individual (along with Corsi creator Ferrari) who has done the most groundbreaking work to pioneer the cause. He started writing about hockey analytics in 2003. In 2006, as Ferrari was writing about Corsi, Desjardins established
Behind the Net
(www.behindthenet.ca), the hardcore hockey analytics website. There isn’t anyone today within the advanced stats community who doesn’t pay homage to Desjardins as a master.
    â€œWe know the Montreal Canadiens of the 1950s were tracking plus-minus as a statistic long before it came into existence [in the NHL],” Desjardins said. “Some scorecards from the 1972 Summit Series have been found that showed [Team Canada coach] Harry Sinden was having someone [Ron Andrews, then the NHL’s statistician] count shots in a ‘Corsi way.’ We know Roger Neilson was scoring his players using shots for and shots against, so it’s been going on for a long time.”
    Incredibly, it appears at least one man, a true visionary, was looking at hockey in a complex, analytical, statistical way as far back as the early 1950s. Lloyd Percival—the man who pioneered everything from cutting-edge athletic training to injury treatment, to nutrition, to coaching methods, and the author of
The Hockey Handbook
, which Anatoly Tarasov, the godfather of Soviet hockey, credited as the blueprint for the development of Russian hockey—was doing work for the Detroit Red Wings in the early 1950s, but also for the St. Michael’s Majors Junior A hockey club. In Gary Mossman’s fine biography
Lloyd Percival: Coach and Visionary
, there is evidence that Percival was breaking down hockey games in a truly advanced analytical way. Not relatively advanced for the 1950s; advanced by even today’s standards.
    Of Percival’s work with St. Mike’s, Mossman wrote:
    Percival was able to do things for [St. Mike’s] that he was denied in Detroit. For example, he produced a seven-page “Hockey Survey Analysis” of a playoff game between St. Michael’s and St. Catharines on March 19, 1952, in