I think there’s a tension between what you’re describing and what I -personally- think a stats system should do.
In the scenarios from you and @NLM , I’m reading a direction where we’re trying to evaluate decision making in pool by looking at context.
EX:
1. Shot location in the pool
2. Shot targeting on the goal
3. Proximity of defenders
5. Strength of GK
And then you’d need to do something like compare that to potential other opportunities that a player’s teammates have. For example, a shot from the weak side on a counter attack is pretty good but if there’s an open shot across the pool that the shooter missed, it’s a bad shot.
I don’t know if we have enough data to control for all of the variables to mathematically prove if a decision was good or bad.
To be very clear, I think that it’s super useful to discuss and analyze a player’s decision without math (aka robots are not coming for coaching job’s yet!) but I just don’t know if there’s a way to build stat system to capture all of the nuances that go into playmaking and good decisions.
On the other hand, I think stats are very useful to describe player productivity.
In the near future, I don’t think a stats system would be able to independently and accurately conclude “Player X is a great water polo play maker” but we can compare individual player actions and results.
EX:
If Player X shoots 10 times, we can reasonably expect that:
3 are a goal
3 are tipped by the GK
2 are blocked and controlled by the GK
1 is field blocked
1 misses
I think a coach would be able to find areas for improvement if they compare this type of data between players over a season, a single game performance of a player against their season norms, etc
