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urn · 07-30-2012, 12:34 PM

That's an egregious misquotation of Jack Nicholson.

I've never been McBain's biggest fan, but I don't trust myself to evaluate defensemen fairly. Last season, there were a few times that I noticed him make pretty big mistakes in a row, and once that happened, I found myself trying to fit that idea--the idea that McBain screws up a lot--to every game I watched. But that's not fair obviously, and a lot of people I know insist that Pitkanen is really terrible and turns it over way too much, but dear God that is so not true. So maybe I'm also wrong about McBain. I think everyone on this board needs to take their own opinions with a grain of salt, because it's so easy to decide that a player has a certain tendency and then look for it whenever they're on the ice.

Any given player is going to touch the puck or do something important away from the puck tens of times every game for 82 games in a season. Our brains aren't designed to reasonably analyze all that data, so instead we pick and choose what we want to see to fit the trends we perceive, because perceiving trends is fun and makes us feel smart. I'm interested to see what various statistically rigorous metrics say about McBain's play.

07-30-2012, 12:34 PM	#84
urn Registered User Join Date: Jul 2012 Posts: 55 vCash: 500	That's an egregious misquotation of Jack Nicholson. I've never been McBain's biggest fan, but I don't trust myself to evaluate defensemen fairly. Last season, there were a few times that I noticed him make pretty big mistakes in a row, and once that happened, I found myself trying to fit that idea--the idea that McBain screws up a lot--to every game I watched. But that's not fair obviously, and a lot of people I know insist that Pitkanen is really terrible and turns it over way too much, but dear God that is so not true. So maybe I'm also wrong about McBain. I think everyone on this board needs to take their own opinions with a grain of salt, because it's so easy to decide that a player has a certain tendency and then look for it whenever they're on the ice. Any given player is going to touch the puck or do something important away from the puck tens of times every game for 82 games in a season. Our brains aren't designed to reasonably analyze all that data, so instead we pick and choose what we want to see to fit the trends we perceive, because perceiving trends is fun and makes us feel smart. I'm interested to see what various statistically rigorous metrics say about McBain's play.