Eventually, “Corsi” is going to have to take on a different name. “Corsi” had a good run, but in the end, it’s difficult to carve widespread acceptance of statistical concepts named for the person that created it. Often, I’ll see somebody write out CORSI as if it were an acronym for something.
“Corsi” isn’t really particularly complicated. It’s the number of shot attempts for, minus the number of shot attempts against. It can be used for both a team or an individual. For the team, “Corsi” would count up all the shot attempts a team took in even strength situations and subtract them by the ones their opponent fired against their net. For an individual, you just look at the time he was on the ice.
It’s not a real difficult concept, nor is it difficult to understand what it means. “Corsi” doesn’t assume that every single shot taken on goal is of equal value. All “Corsi” does is approximate zone time. If Pittsburgh takes 5 shots at the New York Islanders’ net and the Islanders take 1 shot at the Penguins net, the logical assumption is that the puck spent more time in Pittsburgh’s offensive end. It doesn’t mean anything more than that. Heck, the one Islander shot could be a breakaway from Michael Grabner or Frans Nielsen. It doesn’t change that the majority of the game was spent with the puck on the stick of a Penguin player.
There’s no substitute for real good puck possession.. In the first half of 2011, the Minnesota Wild drew glowing reviews for their ability to win games despite being outshot. Like the 2013 Toronto Maple Leafs, a lot of proponents of defensive coaching systems are suggesting that Randy Carlyle is creating a style of play that makes the shots given up by Toronto easy on the goalies.
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