Why All This Shot Quality Stuff Is A Waste Of Time

Tim Thomas: Just slightly worse than Brian Elliott

In some circles, it is regarded as the holy grail: an advanced statistic that tracks not just shot quantity, but also shot quality.

Back in March, Michael Shuckers presented a paper to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference entitled, “DIGR: A Defense Independent Rating of NHL Goaltenders using Spatially Smoothed Save Percentage Maps.”  As the title suggests, Shuckers followed in the