As I thought through the implications of Stu's piece asking the NHL to start tracking various statistics, I couldn't help notice how nicely it dovetailed with what we talk about on this site. Namely:

1) There are numerous statistics that the NHL publishes but doesn't track - e.g. Penalties Drawn, Zone Starts, Time of Possession, Possession in the Offensive Zone, and Missed Shots (ie - including missed shots in shooting percentage). Behindthenet.ca provides this data to the public.

2) We do our best to avoid statistics that don't reflect a true talent or are swamped by arena bias (like giveaways, takeaways, hits and posts/crossbars hit). We favor long-term performance over short-term and we certainly avoid small sample size head-to-head matchups and the like.

3) We love the work that sites like NHL Numbers and Capgeek have done to reverse-engineer the NHL's cap situation, including the long-term injured reserve. There's clearly also a market for tracking which players missed shorter periods of time due to injuries or healthy scratches (and I remember a site doing it, but I can't for the life of me find a link to it.)

Anyways, I'm going to expand on each of Stu's requests over the next ten days or so from a statistical point of view. Stu admonished us to "learn read [sic]", so I'm going to call this a feud, much like my friend who was feuding with Dr. Dre in 2002 (Dre had no idea who he was.) Hopefully at the end of it all, Stu will rekognize.