Corsi and Fenwick are dead.
Not the people — Jim Corsi and Matt Fenwick, thankfully, are very much alive. The NHL, after co-opting the puck-possession stats that have borne their name for the last several years, are going in a different, more descriptive direction.
When the league’s expanded stats package roles out in a couple days, Corsi will be “shot attempts,” and Fenwick “unblocked shot attempts.” PDO, named after the internet commenter that came up with it, will be something like “shooting percentage + save percentage.” Sportsnet’s Chris Johnston first reported the decision; we can say that the debate within the league was only settled in the last few days.
It’s easy, in some ways, to see why longtime statheads are annoyed by all of this; there’s an element of unfairness to it all. Our first reaction was to compare it to watching band you saw in VFWs tweak their sound and wind up in amphitheaters, playing to people who didn’t properly appreciate them in the first place. That’s not totally right, though; it’s close to a completely different group of musicians getting rich of the first band’s songs.
Still, though, this was a necessary move. If you think the point of the last few years’ worth of arguments, obnoxious as they’ve been, has been to better inform people, it’s a no-brainer. Maybe ironically, the tenor of those arguments — fueled largely by threatened, ignorant mainstream media members — is a big reason the change is so necessary.
(Really, to a large extent, it’s understandable that stats-centric folks are pissed. And a fair amount of them are. This has been a battle, as stupid as it sounds. Counting shot attempts isn’t on par with, say, research into thermodynamics, though. We’re not renaming the joule.)
Because of all that, Corsi and Fenwick are loaded terms. The concept of a “rebrand” is mockable and loathsome, but it’s also applicable. Sucks, but it’s true — if you’re trying to make stuff palatable to more casual, still plugged-in fans, swapping out names that they’ve seen mocked for the last seven-ish years is a good way to start. I wish I’d kept track of the times, in conversation with friends who’d self-identify as avid fans, that I countered scoffs at Corsi with, “right, but it’s just shot attempts.”
And, if you’re going after even-more-casual fans, you may as well make the new names descriptive. This is anecdotal, but I use possession-based stats literally every single day and make a point to use both forms; I’ve prefaced “Fenwick” with “unblocked 5-on-5 shot attempts while a player is on the ice” literally hundreds of times, because it’s necessary. It’d be presumptive to assume that every reader is immediately familiar with it, and adding a clause’s worth of explanation solves the problem.
This all should’ve happened a year or two or three ago; it’s understandable that stats didn’t make the jump from the Irreverent Oilers fans comment section to NHL.com, but there was probably an opportunity in between then and tomorrow that could’ve made sense. Now, Corsi, Fenwick, et al are incorporated into team broadcasts and all sorts of writing across major outlets. Lots of work — good, important — using that shorthand is part of the world now. That should be a consideration.
Still, this isn’t about writers who’ve used this stuff in the past, or about comment sections, or about an endless series of Twitter arguments (those, undoubtedly, aren’t going anywhere). At this point, it’s not about Corsi or Fenwick.
It's a lot bigger than all that. NHL.com is the 45th most-visited website in Canada and 445th most-visited in the U.S. It’s about exposing all those eyeballs to this stuff in an immediately accessible way. Call it what it is.