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-po se sion stats that have borne their name for the last Ruslan Iskhakov Jersey several years, are going in a different, more descriptive direction. MORE: | | When 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. first reported the decision; we can say that the debate within the league was only settled in the last few days. Its easy, in some ways, to see why longtime statheads are annoyed by all of this; theres an element of unfairne s 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 didnt properly appreciate them in the first place. Thats not totally right, though; its close to a completely different group of musicians getting rich of the first bands songs. Still, though, this was a nece sary move. If you think the point of the last few years worth of arguments, obnoxious as theyve been, has been to better inform people, its 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 nece sary. (Really, to a large extent, its understandable that stats-centric folks are pi sed. And a fair amount of them are. This has been a battle, as stupid as it sounds. Counting shot attempts isnt on par with, say, research into thermodynamics, though. Were not renaming the joule.) Because of all that, Corsi and Fenwick are loaded terms. The concept of a rebrand is mockable and loathsome, but its also applicable. Sucks, but its true if youre trying to make stuff palatable to more casual, still plugged-in fans, swapping out names that theyve seen mocked for the last seven-ish years is a good way to start. I wish Id kept track of the times, in conversation with friends whod self-identify as avid fans, that I countered scoffs at Corsi with, right, but its just shot attempts. And, if youre going after even-more-casual fans, you may as well make the new names descriptive. This is anecdotal, but I use po se sion-based stats literally every single day and make a point to use both forms; Ive prefaced Fenwick with unblocked 5-on-5 shot attempts while a player is on the ice literally hundreds of times, because its nece sary. Itd be presumptive to a sume that every reader is immediately familiar with it, and adding a clauses worth of explanation solves the problem. This all shouldve happened a year or two or three ago; its understandable that stats didnt make the jump from to NHL.com, but there was probably an opportunity in between then and tomorrow that couldve made sense. Now, Corsi, Fenwick, et al are incorporated into team broadcasts and all sorts of writing acro s major outlets. Lots of work good, important using that shorthand is part of the world now. That should be a consideration. Still, this isnt about writers whove used this stuff in the past, or about comment sections, or about an endle s series of Twitter arguments (those, undoubtedly, arent going anywhere). At this point, its 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. Its about exposing all those eyeballs to this stuff in an immediately acce sible way. Call it what it is. Isaiah George Jersey