Colorado Avalanche head coach Patrick Roy watches from the bench during the first period of an NHL hockey game against the Dallas Stars Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2015, in Dallas. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

There used to be a college hockey coach who would talk about the importance of getting more scoring chances than your opposition, and cite stats that showed his team was really good at doing so.

But when pressed for definitions as to how he and his coaching staff defined scoring chances, he would explain that these only represented shots on goal from between and below the circles. So, if his team gave up a 2-on-0 that, after a bit of passing interchange between the two opponents, ended up with a guy misfiring on the shot and putting the puck wide while looking at a wide open net at the top of the crease, then by this definition, it was not a scoring chance. This coach would say something along the lines of, “If you missed the net, you really didn't have a chance to score.”

Now, there's a twisted logic to that definition of a scoring chance — if a guy hits the post on a breakaway, that's somehow also not a scoring chance in the strictest sense of the word — but what it does is give the team which at that time wasn't all that good a little wiggle room to say, “Well, at least we out-chanced the opponents and we have to do just a little bit more to bury our chances and win some more games.”

It also highlights just how liberally and broadly the term “scoring chance” can be applied in this sport in a number of different ways.

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But I think most coaches would generally agree that regardless of how they actually define what is or is not a scoring chance, giving up shot attempts between and below the circles — this is sometimes referred to as the “home plate” area of the ice — is a pretty bad idea because it's generally going to lead to more goals against. These are areas where shots on goal indisputably have a much better chance at going in, regardless of whether you buy into any number of metrics that are used to describe goaltending performance, including that “Royal Road” nonsense. That's also regardless of a team's ability to collapse around its own net, block shots, and so on. If you're letting guys get that deep into your zone, it's a problem.

Patrick Roy understands this fundamentally. As his team gets off to a poor start this season, the same old song and dance about what's wrong with the Avalanche gets trotted out. They get outshot and out-possessed quite badly, and as a consequence they lose more often than they win, and have for the last year-plus. You can look it up for yourself on any dang stats website: Colorado's 5-on-5 differentials in its first six games are minus-116 shot attempts (30th in the league through Wednesday's games), minus-45 shots (30th in the league), and minus-4 goals (tied for 24th in the league).

But what's worse is that the attempts differential is more than double 29th-place Edmonton's minus-54. It highlights a very real problem that Roy has not at any point in his career found a way to address.

Now let's take a second to guess what Patrick Roy's reaction when he hears those statistics will be (skip to 2:02 of the video):

For the video-impaired here:

“We've been looking at all the games, and obviously if you're looking at our corsi or fenwick, our numbers are not very good,” Roy said after being pummeled by the Kings on Sunday night. “I don’t think it’s because of the numbers of shots we’ve been giving, it’s more of the shots that we’re not taking. For instance, if you're looking at corsi, the part I don’t like about corsi is you could shoot from the red line or you could shoot from a terrible angle and your corsi will look good.

“Puck possession has nothing to do [with corsi]. Fenwick, there's a bit of puck possession in there, but same principle. I mean, it's more like shot attempts. If a guy shoots from the red line and it's blocked, it's still a shot attempt. That's something we don't do very well, or we don't think about doing a lot.”

He goes on to say that the Avs trying to get too cute on their zone entries and therefore not getting the puck into shooting areas, which doesn't help. And he's right about that. But hey what do you know, that would be reflected in your............ corsi.

Obviously, this disdain for or indifference toward these so-called “advanced stats” has long been demonstrated by the Roy-coached Avs, and numerous articles on the subject were penned in his first season when they won all those games behind a ludicrous PDO before eventually getting shelled in the playoffs and never again being all that good. They finished seventh in the division last season and don't look all that well-positioned to do anything beyond that again this year.

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