People get worked up about CORSI and advanced stats, and that's strange. It is simply a different way and an attempt to look at a player's value in a more objective sense. It isn't the holy grail. It is a tool. That's it.
This isn't an unprecedented situation. As you cited, look at Bill James and baseball. The use of sabermetrics was derided for years as nerd culture and baseball speak for those that couldn't throw a ball more than 10 feet. But now it is widely accepted as a more useful metric in gauging player importance.
Same way with hockey. It will take time for it to have wide acceptance. That being said, any hockey GM and development staff that doesn't take into account advanced statistics should be considered derelict.
Nice win for the Kings yesterday. Poor fish.
- Only_A_Ladd
It's not exactly the same. Baseball is uniquely suited to in-depth statistical analysis. Hockey is too fluid of a game. Shots are neither as uniform in quality or in value as a stepping stone to scoring as bases are in baseball. Every base is 90 feet closer to home and advance the team's cause (with the exception of a walk with a RISP); shots on the other hand can actually kill momentum.
Also, those teams that are anomalous in those lists prove, to me, how a style of play can stack the PDO deck. Tortorella-coached teams notoriously fight a defensive war of attrition that the New Jersey Devils franchise practically invented, while the Avs are loaded with skilled forwards whose scoring chances tend to be more glorious than most. The same could go for the Penguins and Ducks, two other high-skill teams whose PDO is lower than its record might suggest.