ADVANCED STATS PROPHET Tyler Dellow appeared on TSN 1050 Toronto’s Macko and Cauz program Wednesday for what began as a seemingly routine segment on the NHL off-season, with respect to the ever-bumbling Maple Leafs front office. The interview, which largely dealt with Leafs free agent Dave Bolland, leapt off its rails upon mention of Mikhail Grabovski. While Dellow felt the Leafs mishandled the 30-year-old Belarusian center, Toronto Sun columnist Steve Simmons took strong exception to the notion that Grabovski could be anything more than a “lone wolf” who disappeared in Toronto’s first-round collapse facing the Boston Bruins in 2013.

Dellow’s rebuttal was simple: the Leafs scored more goals when Grabovski was on the ice than when he was not. The same stats that led Dellow to this conclusion also seem to suggest that Bolland is a strikingly average player who one team — whoever it may be — will likely overvalue and subsequently overpay at some point this summer, solely because of a single goal he scored last June. While this goal happened to clinch a Stanley Cup for the Chicago Blackhawks, there were few preceding it and even fewer to follow. Blackhawks general manager Stan Bowman realized this last summer, and away Bolland went.

At the heart of Steve Simmons’ pig-headed blathering was this: Chicago coach Joel Quenneville, in all his wisdom, trusted in Bolland’s abilities to such a degree that he iced him in the final moments of a tied Game 6 with the Stanley Cup on the line — i.e., intangibles. When Simmons told Dellow to “throw your stats out the window,” all hope of rational discourse was thusly lost.

This interview was a microcosm of the battle of ideologies consuming hockey — one that should be far more lopsided than it is.

Hockey’s advanced stats movement is several years behind baseball’s. Paradoxically, teams in the NHL that have bought into so-called “fancy stats” have already shown more success than Major League Baseball’s early adopters.

The Billy Beane-managed Oakland Athletics, poster children of baseball’s sabermetrics movement, have yet to win a championship, much less a pennant, in just over a decade since the institution of their new philosophy. For example, the A’s pitching staff has placed among the top five in the league in team ERA the last several years, yet Oakland still daydreams of ‘89. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Kings have appeared to quietly, yet fervently embrace advanced stats, albeit in their infancy. The result? Two improbable Stanley Cup runs and a reputation for being postseason cockroaches.

(The A’s and Kings may be a flawed comparison, as salary cap constraints are drastically different in the NHL than MLB. But baseball teams with cash to spend who take advanced statistics into heavy consideration, like the Boston Red Sox, have performed exceedingly well.)

The success of Dean Lombardi’s possession-gobbling Kings should prompt further appreciation for the growing quantification of a sport previously believed to be, by nature, unquantifiable. Instead, the old guard of intangibles explain it away as “getting hot at the right time.” This, in turn, has created a phenomenon previously undiscovered elsewhere, and will henceforth be called the Clauss Curve:

Never mind that both in 2012 and 2014, the Los Angeles Kings defeated two scrappy Eastern Conference Cinderellas who had advanced only once the stronger teams were upset from contention; the Kings have built their modern success upon puck possession. In 2012, goaltender Jonathan Quick was brilliant, backstopping his eighth-seeded team to the Stanley Cup Finals. This gave way to the refrain, “See? All you need is a hot goaltender. Just look at the Kings and Quick in 2012.”

In 2014, Quick was anything but hot. After a thoroughly lackluster regular season, Quick never quite played his best hockey throughout the playoffs. So what was the constant between these two teams? Puck possession.

What appears to unnerve the anti-stats camp is the objectification of the sport.

They take a folksy, “the only stat I need is two: my eyes” tone, striking fear in the casual fan and afternoon drive listener. The nerds are coming to sterilize the sport. What happened to good ol’ fashioned watching-the-game? What these talking heads are hiding, however, is a fear of objectivity. These nattering nabobs make a living off their opinions, and the prospect of room for subjectivity receding from the sport is deeply troubling. After all, how is one supposed to fill a four-hour time slot or a 500-word column on the offense effectiveness of a player implicated in trade rumors when a quick glance at a handful of metrics yields a quicker, more comprehensive, less bloviated answer. You could say he has no heart, plays “lone wolf hockey,” isn’t a competitor. But does his team score when he’s on the ice? Does the other team?

David Grabiner, in his seminal 1994 work The Sabermetric Manifesto, wrote:

Bill James defined sabermetrics as ‘the search for objective knowledge about baseball.’ Thus, sabermetrics attempts to answer objective questions about baseball, such as ‘which player on the Red Sox contributed the most to the team’s offense?’ or ‘How many home runs will Ken Griffey hit next year?’ It cannot deal with the subjective judgments which are also important to the game, such as ‘Who is your favorite player?’ or ‘That was a great game.’

This is an important distinction that critics of the advanced stats movement fail to understand, whether willfully or otherwise. Advanced statistics allow for the quantification of what we see on the ice. No metric materializes out of thin air to mystically deliver a Roman emperor’s thumbs-up or thumbs-down for a player. Critics seem to fear a ideology-collapsing discrepancy that has yet to happen, in which a sterling player passes the eye-test fabulously, shows heart and hockey IQ and scores a handful of goals, and yet his Fenwick and Corsi ratings reside in the gutter.

Good players have good stats. It really is that simple.

In his 1984 classic The Game, Ken Dryden wrote of his teammate, “It is not easy to say what Réjean Houle does for a team,” then described him as a “good skater and forechecker, capable of playing any of the forward positions, a better-than-average playmaker and penalty-killer; on the other, he is not big, not strong, not tough, often injured, a worse-than-average shooter, and has surprisingly little goal-scoring touch.”

A few pages later, Dryden said of Canadiens forward Bob Gainey, who captured the first four Selke Trophies ever awarded:

He is a consummate team player. An often misunderstood phrase, it does not mean that Gainey is without the selfish interest the rest of us have . . . For Gainey’s skills are a team’s skills, ones that work best and show best when a team does well; ones that seem less important when it doesn’t.

Dryden foreshadows the questions solved by advanced statistics and the player who, under the microscope of goals-assists-plus/minus seem unimpressive. He depicts Bob Gainey as someone who would fit wonderfully on Darryl Sutter’s Kings, who placed a strong emphasis on possession even before the former gritty Blackhawks winger took the reins. And if the data were available, we could quantify Houle’s possession numbers in various situations and give a fairly good answer as to what he did for the Montreal Canadiens.