"I believe that this software can be a useful tool to support the evaluation of prospects, in fact, I would even go as far as to say that it has the potential to give better results than the standard way of evaluating players. When I started doing the exercise of creating my own rankings of draft eligible players I quickly realize how complex of a mental process it is considering all the variables of evaluation that have to be taken into account when evaluating a player (speed, skill, shot, defensive game, compete level, age, offensive production, quality of teammates, league difficulty, ice time, height, weight, tournament play, etc, etc, while assessing to each criteria their degree of importance), inevitably some criteria of evaluation become overvalued or undervalued. Once you start comparing two players the mental process increase in complexity, recalling every relevant information about each player, gaging each gap between the players and assessing which accumulation of gaps outweigh the other, the increase in complexity inevitably creates more room for misjudgment. At that point, if two scouts are arguing about two prospects a fight of will must take over to a certain extent since the analysis of the objective subtleties that differentiate the players can't be addressed in his totality. As a matter of fact, we face ourselves against the limitation of our brain even when isolating simple variables easy to grasp, even the ones who are already objectively defined for us can lead to misevaluation, let’s take the age of player for example, the brain can't associate a precise value for each day of the year, instead, for the sake of simplification, the brain will tend to reduce the number of values by regrouping to a single value weeks or entire month or possibly closer months with one another. This can be seen as a marginal difference that might not have a considerable impact, but those marginal differences can be found everywhere, they add up and their sum can make noticeable differences, even more so if you have a bias towards a specific player your brain will unconsciously selectively favored the regrouping of values in a manner that will confirm your bias opinion. But most importantly, this software eases the process of evaluation by isolating each variable of evaluation in order to come to a final value, the brain performs much better at assessing the most precise value possible to one single variable at the time than taking everything into account at once in order to come to a final value. For those reasons, I believe that if the exercise of assessing the most exact value possible to each isolated variable is done properly with the help of a software it will give results of greater accuracy."



"The human brain has limitation in regards to his precision (exact value attributed to a prospect playing in a certain league at a certain point in time considering his specific date of birth), consistency in evaluation (I give the exact same value to that player as for each other player in that same context, if it is a slightly different context the value is slightly altered proportionally) and processing power (quantity of variables factored in to precision at the same time, looking at all that data at once), those are three major limitations which software does not have, I believe that there is potential there to be exploited in the scouting hockey world."

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