While anyone can recite traditional stats like goals, assists, and plus/minus, these days many fans are turning to more advanced statistics that can help shed even more light on player performance. Some of these stats are even starting to turn up in mainstream media reports or broadcasts, and there are rumors that some front offices may be using them to help with roster decisions.
Unfortunately, while advanced stat proponents do an excellent job of using data to analyze the action on the ice, they're often not quite so good at explaining things in layman's terms. It's fairly common to see a reference to an advanced stat with no explanation of what it means or why it's important, which can be frustrating to a casual fan.
So while I can't exactly claim to be an expert, I want to help. I want to help so badly that I was willing to spend a few seconds googling terms in an attempt to figure out what they mean. So if you'd like to get on board the advanced stats bandwagon, here are ten of the most important terms you may encounter:
QualComp: This stat, short for “Quality of Competition,” measures the strength of the opposition a player typically faces. A player with a very high QualComp probably plays against the other team's top lines. A player with a low QualComp score probably plays against below-average competition. A player with an extremely low QualComp score probably plays in the Northwest Division and gets to face Edmonton and Calgary a lot.
Corsi: Corsi is similar to the traditional plus/minus stat, except that it counts all shots directed at the net rather than just goals. This results in a more reliable measure due to larger sample size, because the number of shots taken will always be higher than the number of goals scored. Unless the opposition is starting Steve Mason in net, in which case the numbers will be equal.
Relative Corsi: This stat is a player's Corsi number when he's on the ice with his twin brother.
Fenwick: Essentially the same as Corsi, except it excludes blocked shots from the calculation. If you are caught wearing Corsi colors in a Fenwick neighborhood, you will be stabbed.
Zone Starts: You can learn a lot about players based on which zone they typically start in. For example, a player who starts most of his game in the Eastern time zone plays for a team that is important and will be on television a lot, while a player who starts most of his games in a Western time zone can safely be ignored.
TOI/60: This is an abbreviation for “time on ice per 60 minutes,” and measures how much ice time a player receives over the course of an average game. You can learn a lot about a team from checking this stat. For example, if a team has five players who all have a 60.0 in this category, it means the team has forgotten to go into the game settings menu and turn line changes on.
ESSV%: This stands for “even strength save percentage” and measures a goalie's ability to stop the puck when teams are playing five-on-five, with .920 being average and anything over .930 being excellent. It is not to be confused with ENSV% or “empty net save percentage,” which measures a goalie's ability to stop the puck when his team has pulled him for an extra attacker, with .000 being average and anything over .000 being excellent and, come to think of it, we probably don't really need this stat.
Regression to the mean: This mathematical concept means that anything going well in your life will inevitably start getting worse again and make you sad. Statisticians are incredibly depressing to hang out with.
PDO: This stat adds up a team's shooting percentage and save percentage while a specific player is on the ice. Since this tends to regress to 1000 over a large enough sample size, it can be used to measure whether or not a player is benefitting from unsustainably good luck. Used in a sentence: “On the day he was introduced to Carrie Underwood, Mike Fisher's PDO was off the charts.”
Wins: This stat measures the number of times a goaltender has been credited with a win. It's extremely useful for determining if the person you are talking to is a fan of advanced statistical analysis, since casually mentioning goaltender wins during the course of a conversation will immediately cause a blood vessel in their forehead to explode.