How the Numbers can Predict the Future of a Team

There comes a time in the season when a brief refresher on stats is important. What better time than now, with some people throwing out some questions about why we use advanced stats? For those of you starting to try and understand the hows and whys of the numbers, I hope this is helpful.

Let me introduce some of the stats that I will be using in this article:

CF% = Corsi For Percentage, the percentage of the total shot attempts in the game taken by a team.

xGF% = Expected Goals For Percentage, the percentage of goals in the game a team should have scored. By factoring in shot type and location and comparing it to a the rest of the league’s historical results of those shots, we can figure out…