Corsi, who has an engineering degree, is big on numbers, but he warns of being a slave to them. For instance, if the team on a power play commits a penalty 20 seconds into it, the power play is over and they’ve gone 0 for one, even though it lasted just 20 seconds. Corsi prefers to look at percentages per two minutes of ice time. Or, he notes, centers who routinely take faceoffs in the defensive end will have their plus-minus and Corsi numbers impacted because of where they are on the ice.

“Statistics are like a lamp post for a drunk,” he said. “You can either use it to illuminate or to lean on. So buyer beware. … But without a doubt it lends me some more information. If you think with your heart, you end up with heart failure.”

Numbers like the basic Corsi aren’t overly technical – you can figure them yourself off the NHL’s play-by-play system if you’ve got some free time – and are readily available on websites such as www.behindthenet.ca and www.stats.hockeyanalysis.com.

How eye-opening are they to an experienced hand like Hitchcock? Two seasons ago, he put a line together that he thought would work. He won’t say who it was, but soon, the numbers were coming in: Stop!

“The players wanted the line together,” he said. “We put it together thinking it was going to work. The data after 10 games said, get away from this line. It doesn’t work. Get away from it quickly because it’s a disaster. Three games later I finally stopped putting the line together because the data was off the charts bad. But visually, I thought it works. It didn’t get backed up by data and the analytical information was right on the mark. And it was stuff, I guarantee if I mention the names, you’d say that’s a great line. It should work. We’ve seen it before and (the line) was a nightmare.”

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