The Hockey PDOcast - Episode 122: Chiarelli's Razor

Episode Date: December 14, 2016

Jonathan Willis joins the show to discuss the staggering differences between Edmonton's numbers when Connor McDavid is on the ice vs. on the bench, why Kris Russell is generating so much discussion and angst amongst people, and whether Peter Chiarelli is purchasing too much snake oil. Here’s a quick rundown of the topics covered: 0:30 Connor McDavid vs. Sidney Crosby 10:45 Descriptive stats vs. Predictive stats 22:20 False Parity 24:15 Misrepresentation of microstats 35:40 David Poile, Jim Benning, and Peter Chiarelli Every episode of the podcast is available on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher. All past episodes can be found here. Make sure to subscribe to the show so that you don’t miss out on any new episodes as they’re released. All ratings and reviews of the show are also greatly appreciated. Thanks for listening! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices If you'd like to gain access to the two extra shows we're doing each week this season, you can subscribe to our Patreon page here: www.patreon.com/thehockeypdocast/membership If you'd like to participate in the conversation and join the community we're building over on Discord, you can do so by signing up for the Hockey PDOcast's server here: https://discord.gg/a2QGRpJc84 The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate.

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Filipovich. Welcome to the Hockey PEDEOCast. My name is Demetri Filipovich. and joining me is a fan favorite, or at least a favorite of mine. I'm sure everyone out there listening is also a big fan as well. It's Jonathan, what's going on, man? Hey, Dimitri, it's always good to be on the show. It's one of my favorites, too, so that works out well.

Well, and another one of our favorites, and this is why I'm one of the best in the business is is Connor McDavid, who just, I mean, you've obviously been following him closely as someone who writes about the Oilers quite a bit. It's just like, it's funny because I remember before the season, everyone was just sort of anointing him as being just the best player in the league right away. And that was the natural kind of pushback in reservation to be like, well, hold on a second. We've only seen a limited number of games from him. And I know it's like the shiny new toy syndrome where everyone just constantly wants to, you know,

gets excited by the new thing. But it's like, I feel like it's impossible to overstate how insanely dominant he's been so far. Yeah, I'd agree with that entirely. He's basically, I kind of shudder when I think about. where Edmonton would be if they didn't have Connor McDavid. And unlike a lot of the other guys at the top of the scoring list, he's a guy who hasn't really gotten a lot of support from his teammates. And that to me is kind of what sets him apart.

I mean, it's, you know, having a seven-point lead on the scoring race in mid-December is pretty impressive. But then when you realize that he doesn't have the kind of support that a Crosby has or even a Tarrasenko has, that makes it even more impressive. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, right? like Crosby, for example, I mean, it's flying under the radar a little bit just because Crosby's pretty much scoring every single game he's playing in. But like, like, Eugenie Malkin and Phil Kessler are both above a point of game. And I feel like, you know,

what we saw early in the season, obviously when Crosby was out of the lineup, the Penguins were like a shell of the team that can be when everything's going together. But they still have enough impact players there where they can at least kind of stay afloat. Without McDavid, the Oilers, I mean, the on-off stats without him are just insane. I was looking at them earlier when, when doing some prep for the show. And I mean, he has a goal or a primary assist on, like, a third of every single five-on-five goal they've scored this year, which is just an insane rate. I mean, with him on the ice, they're like basically a 60% goals for chances and a 55% shots team. And without him, they're sub-50 and all of those.

So it's pretty much like, I made the kind of comparison. Like with him on the ice, they're like the mid to late 2000s Red Wings. And without him on the ice, they're, well, they're the Edmonton Oilers. and five on five plays is one of the things I think you have to look at to really appreciate him and not just the numbers you mentioned because when you kind of look at the regular points race you see you know it's all jumbled together it's your power play it's your you're even strength and if if you've got a first unit power play that's any good and in edmonton's case it's good because they have mac david you're going to have a couple of other guys who can kind of hang out

the scoring race with him so in edmonton's case it's it's uh beyond dry sidel but if you if you if you break it down to just like the five-on-five scoring. I mean, I know you were mentioning two-way metrics, but if you flip over to Pittsburgh's, five-on-five scoring right now, you'll see they've got seven forwards scoring more than two points per hour. Scott Wilson is their seventh best score. He's scoring 2.1, 3 points per hour. Well, that's more than anybody on Edmonton other than McDavid. McDavid is scoring a whole point per hour more at even strength than anybody else on the team. And when you talk about those kind of numbers, it just, it's mind-blowing, really. Yeah, I mean, if there's a positive statistic out there, he's probably leading the league in it.

I mean, we haven't even mentioned it yet because obviously the points are sort of the most important thing. But like even like something like penalty differential, for example, his speed is just causing so many problems. And other teams are just being forced essentially to either like, you know, hook him or take him down just to just to try and slow him down a little bit. And that's also another advantage, especially when it's doubly devastating because he's also really effective on the powerplay. So it's like he's drawing it. and then he's actually scoring on the power play as well. So he's basically like, he's basically having his cake and eating it too,

is what I'm trying to say. Penalty differential is one of those stats that you can overrate, but McDavid's so good at it. And I actually, it's interesting, when I've looked at defensemen over the years, one of the things that kind of is telling to me when a guy is eroding as a defenseman

is he starts taking more penalties. And, you know, not because he's getting more physical, but because he's getting beat more. And he has to take penalties to make up for that. And McDavid's a guy who, he just makes every defenseman look like he's eroding because he's so fast and because you know his brain matches his speed it's uh it's an incredible thing to watch yeah there's very

there's very few guys like that that can put it all together right i mean you watch you know there's various speedsters out there whether it's like a carl hagglin or who have you and and they're insanely fast and it's pretty clear they can get from point a to point B faster than any other defensemen out there but it's like either their minds or their hands just can't keep up with it like they get there and then they just either don't know what to do with it or they just just like weekly missed the net with a puck or just shoot it right into all these pads, whereas McDavid has like absolutely elite finishing ability with that speed. So it's like a cheat code.

It's funny. In Edmonton, the shorthand for this is, I remember we've had prospects over the years in Edmonton and people call them Todd Marchant, but with hands because, you know, Todd Marchant was so famously fast, but he'd get all these breakaways. And I don't know what his success rate was, but it was something like, probably something like one in five, like just not good numbers. And inevitably, these Todd Marchant with hands just turn out to be Todd Marchant. And, yeah, it's a very rare combination.

Yeah, Yanukh Hansen's like that in Vancouver, where he draws the higher of Canucks fans because his speed and ability creates so many breakaways for himself. But then it just feels like he flubs him on such a high percentage of them, and people get upset about it. But the thing that's really neat to me is that, you know, we mentioned Crosby earlier. I mean, we should point out that he has 21 goals and 32 points and 23 games the season, which is just pretty good. I don't think you need to crunch too many numbers to know that those are impressive rates. But what's neat to me is that just the difference in the way he's sort of doing it at this stage of his career

versus the way McDavid's succeeding, whereas, I don't know, it's certainly just anecdotally just from kind of occasionally watching. It certainly looks like Crosby's production is really coming around the net, and he's sort of doing it in these kind of wily veteran ways where he's like at the right place at the right time, and he's just cerebrally picking teams apart in the offensive zone. whereas McDavid's just been this overwhelming physical force that's pretty much just like taking it from one end to the other and just kind of doing it all himself. So I think that's been kind of neat because obviously, you know, Crosby's sort of been the best player in the league for a long time now. And McDavid's kind of coming to take it from him.

But Crosby's not going to give it away without a fight. Well, and I don't want to take anything away from Crosby's. He's obviously having a good season. And like you've pointed out, you know, a lot of his success is coming from close to the net. But he's also got a 27% shooting percentage. Like he was under 15% last year. The highest he's ever had over a full season is 17%. And that's more than five years ago now.

At some point, and I know you can improve your shooting percentage somewhat if you, you stand close to the net. But in almost all of these cases, we see a guy eventually sort of regress back to what he's done over his whole career. And in Crosby's case, if his goal scoring cools off even a little bit, like he's, you know, he's kind of keeping pace with McDavid, maybe a little bit better in terms of. points per game. I'm not sure. But if, you know, if that cools down at all, then he can't keep up anymore. Yeah. I mean, that's obviously, it's, he's not going to keep shooting 27% and, and even though he's been sort of like around, around 15% for his career, which is still really, really good. Like, if that drops off, where, you know, he's at his kind of career rate right now, we're talking about him having 11 or 12 goals in 23 games, which is still really good. That's like

a 40-ish pace, but it's not nearly a goal of game. So that's obviously a sort of context that you need to provide. But it's funny. It's just how human, the human mind works where it's like, I'm aware of that, but at the same time, like, I don't want to be the person that's betting against Sidney Crosby. If this was a different player, I'd be like, oh, come on. Like, of course he's not going to shoot 27%. But I'm just like, yeah, but it's Sydney Crosby. So I don't want to, like, you know, be vocal about it? Like, I think he's going to shoot, come back down to 15%, but what if he doesn't? Well, and the other thing I think is you kind of run into the sort of a recurring problem in analytics, which is the descriptive versus the predictive. And, you know, you don't want to take

away anything that a guy has done because, you know, Crosby has legitimately scored those goals. You know, maybe there's an element of chance involved, but, you know, he's doing the thing, like he put the puck in the net at the end of the day. He deserves credit for scoring the goals. And in a lot of cases, what you find, and this comes up a lot in sort of the scoring chances versus regular shot metrics debate a lot is you end up looking at the two stats and you kind of wonder which one is going to predict what's going forward and which one just describes what has already happened but won't be indicative of future results. And, you know, who might as say Crosby isn't shooting 27% on merit right now? I don't think he's going to keep doing it.

But, yeah. Well, I mean, he's all, and it's also along that same line, like, he's banked 20 plus games of this production, right? So it's like, it's not, we can't necessarily be like, okay, in the final 50 games, he's going to shoot such a low percentage that it's going to even out and kind of, and his overall total is going to come back to his career average. Like, that's not necessarily how regression works, right? They could, like, he's, there's probably going to be a stretch where he goes, like,

five or six games without a goal and, and, you know, has, like, 20 shots during that time. and, you know, it slows down a little bit. That's just how the 82 game, that's the nature of an 82 game grind, but it's remarkable what he's doing right now, and it's just kind of a testament to sort of the different, exciting talent we have in this league at this point of time. Absolutely. And that's a thing always to keep in mind about regression.

Like, it doesn't, you know, if you're on a hot streak, it doesn't mean that later in the year you're going to have a cold streak and balance it out. We see this all the time with teams that, you know, ride these bubbles early in the year. year. And then at the end of the season, they're still in the playoff race. And people go, well, ha, you got it wrong. Yes, but they went eight and two to start. So, you know, there are three games under 500. The rest of the way, they still have a better than 500 record. It doesn't mean

they're a good team. Yeah, yeah, that's a good segue there between descriptive and predictive. And I think that ties in perfectly to the discussion that I want to have about Chris Russell with you. Let's get out of the way because we've already got everyone's clicks and downloads. I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that are like just rolling their eyes like oh not this again and just maybe even completely tuning out but uh i think there is a lot to unpack here and i think it's an interesting discussion because we just keep coming back to this it's it's insane we were discussing this uh privately over messages or when it was kind of blowing up last week and it's like has a fourth fifth defenseman ever generated this much angst amongst like both parties like

it's just insane oh it's nuts i do think i do think i've got a couple of I'm working on a piece on Chris Russell right now, and when I really dug into him, I found some things I didn't expect to find. So I hopefully can contribute something new to the conversation here. But you look at Chris Russell and over his career, and Tyler Delo's the guy who actually pointed this out to me first. But he's basically a 50% guy by Fenwick. Like you have to allow that he's a legitimate shot blocker. So of course he is, you know, going to underrate him as a hockey player. But he's basically a 50% Fenwick guy and he's basically a 50% goal differential guy. The difference between those two numbers is almost nothing. And if it weren't for the fact of, you know, he's had these wild swings in PDO over the years, and he's, we wouldn't even be arguing this. We would say, okay, this guy's an averageish, even strength defenseman who has a special team's component to his game. And we would all say, okay, you know, I'm not saying he shouldn't be in the NHL or anything. This is a perfectly serviceable NHL defenseman.

But when he gets on these wild swings, you have guys going, oh, that's the best defenseman the Edmonton Oilers have. And I think that's where a lot of the pushback came this year was, well, I know for me personally, I had four guys, like I hadn't even said anything particularly negative about him. Like I'd kind of described him as a four or five defenseman. And I had guys in his first game coming after me going,

oh, look at Chris Russell, block that shot and pick up that assist. You said Chris Russell was garbage. Chris Russell's awesome. And I'm like, okay. You know, we're one game into the year. Like, let's cool it down a little bit. Yeah, yeah. And I think where people particularly lost the plot and started a lot of this pushback

was when I started seeing all these, like, stats being thrown out about their win-loss record with crossovers without them. And it was like, well, okay. That's, uh, if you don't hear so much, you don't hear so much of that now that they've gone three and seven in their last 10 with him or whatever it was. Yeah. It's such a, and it happens every, not every year, but the last guy I remember it happening to was Cam Barker was where he was in the lineup. The team was riding the percentages

early. He got hurt just as the team lost, started losing ground in the percentages. And people will go, well, look, he drives save percentage. And really all it is is it's a matter of timing. And when it happened to Cam Barker, you know, he came back and then for three months the Edmonton Oilers were terrible and nobody was talking about Cam Barker driving wins with his puck-moving ability anymore. And we're going to see the same thing with Chris Russell. Yeah, yeah, I would, if I were a betting man, I would, I put my money on that. But it's like, okay, there's a few different ways to approach it. Like, one, I don't really understand where this idea that, I mean, he is a very good shot blocker. Even if you, even if you remove sort of the raw shot blocking totals and you look at, at the efficiency rate in terms of like the total number of shots that are happening when he's on the ice and then kind of pro rating it to the amount he's blocking. Like, he's still one of the best in the league of that. But it's like, there's this idea that his shot. blocking is somehow boosting his goalie safe percentage. And I feel like people haven't even bothered to look into it because if you had,

you'd notice that over his career, he's actually weirdly had higher on ice shooting percentages. Yeah. Rather than, and he's sort of been like middling, if not even like a bit below average safe percentage. Like I just don't understand where that's even coming from. It seems like, you know, I kind of understand sort of just intuitively. I guess it would make a little bit of sense. Like, oh, this guy's helping his goalie out.

he's stopping all these shots for him before they even get to him. But it's like we know that defensemen generally don't have these sorts of pronounced impacts on their goalies and team save percentages. And that's especially true for Russell if you just took five seconds to look at his career stats. Yeah, he is, I looked at this after a discussion with David Johnson, who's sort of famously or infamously, depending on your perspective, a believer that guys, can drive shooting percentage. And when you look at Russell's career, like his teams do have a slightly better save percentage when he's on the ice than when he's off the ice.

But it's such a small number that it's, you know, like everybody else, it's such a small variation that even if it's 100% skill-based, and I would argue, you know, it probably isn't. Like some guys are just going to have a slightly higher or a slightly lower number for no real reason. But even if it's a little bit of the same, But even if it's 100% skill-based, he's basically going to regress to almost exactly his shot metrics.

Like a guy with a 100.2 PDO is, you know, like he, if his true talent level is 100.2 rather than 100 even, it's not going to make a big difference in the long run. Yeah. But the one thing about Russell, I wanted to get into this, I've got a piece coming in the next day or two. I'm not sure where it's going to run yet, is I found something really interesting when I dug into his shot metrics and looked at, them by game situation. So if you compare Russell to every defenseman in the league, or if you, what I did was I gathered 20 defensemen with similar shot metrics, both relative and raw. And what I found is if you look at score-tide situations, all of those defensemen are better

than Russell. And if you look at situations where his team has the lead, all of those defensemen are worse than Russell, pretty much. And it's one of the, and I said worse, and I said worse, and I know. mean worse because when his team has the lead, Russell actually outperforms a whole bunch of defensemen by shot metrics. And my theory about this is that he plays such a risk-averse game that I think the kind of game that Russell plays is the kind of game that NHL coaches want their teams to play when they have the lead. And we can argue about whether or not it's a good idea,

but the super conservative going to a shell, you know, clear the puck to the neutral zone. Like, don't turn it over, but you're not trying for a breakout pass. You're just cleanly clearing the lock out to center and creating one of those 50-50 battles in the neutral zone. And what that does is when you have the lead, it's a very safe, very low-risk game. But the rest of the time, which is why coaches do it. But the rest of the time, it's one of those games that really limits your potential because you're not maintaining possession. And I think that's what Russell does poorly.

And because he's so good in the defensive zone and because he has some legitimate ability in the offensive zone, he's another one of these guys who, all these things he does in transition that hurt his team or that limit his team's potential is maybe a better way to put it. They kind of get lost because he doesn't have those highlight real gaffs. He's just a very safe, steady guy at either end of the rink. But all that stuff in between that gets your team from one end of the rink to the other is where he falls short. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, on the same token, like that sort of conservative play with the lead is probably one of my biggest pet peeves about hockey.

I mean, I know what happens in every sport. it's sort of it's a bigger kind of human psychological thing where it's like it's easy when you're ahead to sort of just like be more conservative and turtle and not try to blow it and be the goat for your team as opposed to when you're looking for a goal or you're looking for whatever you're you're going to push more but like man i wish i wish teams were more aggressive when they had to lead like it's just like how many times do we have to see uh especially in the playoffs where it's like a team's up like three one or something and they're just they're just sitting back and then it's like oh you know the other teams just playing back and

I don't know why. It's like, well, it's because the team's just like spoon-feeding them here. Like, it's just, it's one of my biggest pet peeves in hockey. I completely agree. And I think the reason it's been so persistent is because the NHL is such a low-scoring league. So when you look at teams' records, when they're leading after two periods, they do really well. Like, if you take a lead into the third period in the NHL, you're going to win that game. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's an incredibly high number because there just isn't that much scoring. So you can go to these Uber conservative strategies

and not realize how it's costing you because there just isn't that much scoring. And if it was a higher scoring league, I think we'd see teams really get burned by this. But because the goals are so infrequent as it is, I don't think they get burned enough to learn the lesson that in the third period, maybe you should just keep playing the way you were playing

that got you the lead in the first two frames. Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think that's a point that wasn't really being brought up enough last year when we were having that whole debate about how we could increase goal scoring, because I do think that, you know, the bigger problem, especially last year, was like, you want to open up the game at 515 so that there's more chances and it's more free-flowing and goals are necessary.

Goals don't necessarily equal excitement, but at the same time, if you have more goals being scored in totality, you're going to have more lead changes. And, you know, some of these teams, it feels like when you go up like 2-0 earlier or something, it's like, well, this game's pretty much over. It's, though, one team's not going to blow out, and other teams not even really going to make a push to make a comeback here. So, like, let's just tune into another game. And obviously, if there was more goals being scored, we'd see more of that fluctuation. Yeah.

And I think you're absolutely right that those big swings in games are what make the really memorable games. Like, you think of the great comebacks. Those are always the most exciting games, you know, when a team's down three-nothing and they win four-three. And it almost never happens anymore. and that takes away a lot from the game. The other thing I think is that if there are more goals being scored overall, it makes it a lot more difficult for teams to, I think it highlights the talent differences between teams more, right?

Like if there's only five goals in a game versus ten goals in a game, there's more data sets per game in a higher scoring league to show you which team is good and which team is bad. And that's something I think that matters a lot over time and which really does highlight, you know, who's doing things right and who's doing things poorly, whereas, you know, in a three-two league, you have one year where you get a few bounces and you're kind of winning those one-goal games, which is hard to sustain long term. And, you know, you're a genius.

And then the next year you're terrible and nobody can figure out why. And I just don't think it's, I don't think it's a good product and I don't think it encourages good decision-making. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because I'm sure, like, Gary Batman or other people working, for the league would tell you that, you know, they're big fans of the parody the league has and how there's all these races that come down to the wire at the end of the season and how, you know, around the trade line, around the All-Star break, so many teams are in it that it doesn't feel like it's a completely lost season unless you have a team like, you know, in 2014-15,

like the Sabres, for example, or this year the coyotes where it's like they're woefully and equipped to actually compete on a nightly basis. But at the same time, like I just think that you should be rewarded for competence and for being and for doing your job well. And I feel like a lot of times we don't actually necessarily see that cream rise to the top unless it's like really later in the season or less it's completely obvious. Like we just see this sort of middle ground where it's muddled together with all these teams. And I'm not sure that's necessarily the best way to approach doing business.

Yeah, I understand the appeal of parity from a league perspective because you want all 30 markets doing well. You want all 30 markets invested. But I think it's it's one of those things that gets overstated. Like Vancouver right now, if you look at the standings, I'm not sure exactly how many points they are out. An insurmountable amount. Well, yeah, it really is, right? But it doesn't look like we all know it is. You know, okay, so there are four points out right now, theoretically,

because they've played two games more than L.A. L.A. has 30 points in 27 games. Vancouver is 26 points and 29 games. And, you know, so Jim Benning can go on the radio in his, talk about his 12, 15 and 2 record and say, you know, we're three games under 500, so we're really close or whatever. But realistically, they're not going to make it. They're pretty much dead right now, even though there's only a four-point gap in the standings. And I think fans realize that. I think that this artificial parody that is being pushed, I think people see through it,

and I don't think you lose much when you take it away. I mean, if Vancouver actually looked like they were out of it by the standings as opposed to by us just knowing. And everybody, like, sorry, I'm going off on a bad tangent here, but it hasn't changed the way fans view it. Like, every time I run into Vancouver fans, I hear things like, oh, they should blow it up, they should trade the Sadiens, they should rebuild this as a team that's going nowhere fast. And just because their four points out doesn't change that. Fans are smart enough to know. And this parody, you're not really fooling anybody, so why bother with it? Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. Let's get back to to this Russell discussion quickly just because

I think it's interesting from a larger perspective in terms of where like from Peter, Peter Shirelli's perspective because we've seen all these quotes come out from him and I don't know. It's like it seems like a lot of them are just

like be like he's feeding them to certain media members and they're just eating it up and sort of taking it as gospel because it's coming from a quote unquote hockey person whereas if you sort of just took a step back and, you know, either fact-checked it or just thought about it from anything resembling a critical level, you'd realize that a lot of it is gibberish. But like, it bugs me personally because I'm a big fan of micro stats, just especially just realizing that obviously there's still, you know,

a lot of kinks. We need to work out with them. And we're still trying to figure out the predictive value and what we can do with them moving forward. But that shouldn't obscure the fact that they're descriptive and we can use them as just another input that leads to the larger output of outscoring your opponent. And I think that when they're misrepresented like this, when, you know, he's boasting about how he's second in the league behind just Nicholas Cronwall at something. And it's like, well, Nicholas Cronwall has been skating around with a comically oversized fork sticking out of his back for a couple years now. Like, he's, he's completely cooked. And it's like, Nicholas Cronwell used to be a fantastic player. He's not anymore. So it's like, if you just think

about it that way. It's like, if you're behind Nicholas Cronwall on a metric, like, is that a good metric or is that even like factually correct? Like, these are the questions we should be asking yourself as Peter Schrelli and as a journalist writing these articles, but we're not seeing this sort of happen and that misrepresentation is turning people off from micro stats. And I guess that's what's bugging me about this. Yeah. Peter Schrelli's quotes on this subject have been fascinating. and he's been consistent in them, you know, all year because the stat that he was recently out there was almost exactly what he said in October. And I've got a whole bunch of different opinions about this. And some of them are probably wrong.

But one of the things I would say is when you're dealing with a rights holder, the rights holder always has some motivation to make the team look better. And in all the cases where I've seen this quote, it's been a case where Shirelli's talking to somebody who's basically, friendly to the team or is part of a media outlet that's, you know, has some connection to the team. So there's no incentive there to really, really hammer down the way there would be if it was a, if the hockey media was, you know, truly independent of these individual franchises. The other thing is, if you talk to a reporter who has had any reporter, I don't care who it is, who's had some confrontations with sort of the analytics community and you tell them, well, you know, those book smart analytics guys don't know what they're talking about,

that's going to feed into them. It's just like if, if you, if you, You're a very analytically inclined GM and you come to me and you tell me that, you know, these guys that I've had arguments with these dumb reporters don't see the underlying numbers, but I, Jonathan Willis, will appreciate them. Of course that feeds to my ego. I have to be really careful that that doesn't skew how I view things, right? So there's some natural inclinations if you talk to certain people to just perceive things in a certain way. We all look at the world through our own lens of experience and you can make sure your quote is accepted.

or gets at least some positive support from whoever you're talking to, if you pick somebody who's naturally inclined to believe the things you believe. So that's part of it. But the other thing is Matt Henderson wrote a piece where he basically said the Oilers are getting conned. Or, you know, he sort of suggested the Oilers might be getting conned by some shady analytics group that's feeding them bad garbage numbers. And to me, this is a case of Hanlon's razor. You don't want to attribute malice when you can adequately explain the situation via ignorance.

having Nicholas Cronwall and Chris Russell as the league's two best puck movers is farcical on the face of it. I don't know how you, you know, Peter Shrelli, I think actually said something like ahead of Duncan Keith and you just go, really, Peter? Ahead of Duncan Keith? Okay. Think about that for a moment. But when you look at the numbers and I'm going to give a shout out to the Oilers blogger, Wheat and Oil on Twitter here. He's been tracking defensemen passing puck exits, zone defense all year and just fantastic. work. But when you look at his numbers, you see that Russell handles the puck more in the

defensive zone than pretty much any other whaler's defenseman. He handles the puck a ton. He makes a ton of zone exits, and he makes very few turnovers. And so if you're looking at just zone exits that don't lead to turnovers, Chris Russell's a fantastic buck moving defenseman. But the problem is a lot of them are these 50-50 ones where Chris Russell has clean possession in the defensive zone. He dumps it out to center and a 50-50 battle for possession ensues because he's just put it to an area where there's an oiler and an opponent. Those puck exits are not effective. Half the time they're going to come back the other way, that's the nature of the beast.

And what you want to do is you want to maintain possession, and Chris Russell's really bad at that. If you look at his zone exits with possession, he's down in Eric Greiba, Adam Larson, you know, they'll ring it around the boards and are off the glass kind of defenseman. He has a bad puck mover for that reason. So to me, it really comes down to just not understanding what you're looking at. If you're looking at a certain type of exits and you're just, as long as he doesn't turn the puck over, you're not dinging him. You're going to think he's a great puck mover.

If you look at zone exits where he actually maintains possession of the puck, you're going to realize he's a highly mediocre puck mover. And to me, I just think Edmonton's looking at the stats and they don't know which one's actually predictive. They're looking at the numbers and they're looking at the numbers which support their existing view of the player. and because of that, maybe they're inclined to be a little less critical than they should be. Well, yeah, I mean, having access to the data is one thing, but then actually interpreting it correctly as another. And that does bring up a good point. Like, when we call someone a puck mover, we're not describing the literal act of them moving the puck across the ice. We're describing, like, moving the puck to a teammate with a purpose. And it's like, I always, whenever I track a game,

I always ding players for those sort of 50-50 clears. I just mark it as a, you know, He cleared the zone, but without possession. And I don't view that as a good thing. And we saw a lot, like when I was tracking the playoffs last year, we saw a lot of that with Russell for the stars. And we're seeing a lot of it this year. And I just think if you're valuing the right things for your defenseman, which I think that, especially for the plays where it's like,

it's one thing where you're getting a heavy four check and you're just trying to get it out of your zone and regroup, but it's like when you have time and space to operate and you're just your purpose or your goal or what you view is the best place to just get it out of your zone and worry about it later, like that's not. not an optimal way to approach the game, in my opinion. So I think that, you know, differentiating between those things, those two things is very critical here. Yeah, that is absolutely it.

Outside of sort of execution in the offensive and defensive zones, the thing that really matters most to winning games is the two factors of possession and position. And if you can improve your puck position on ice, if you, like if you set, if you improve your puck position on ice while sacrificing guaranteed position, session, you're not really helping your team. You want to be a guy who improves both things at the same time. And it kind of goes back to the idea of whether you dump and chase in the offensive zone or whether you carry the puck in. I think from a coaching standpoint, there's a necessary

evil element to the dump and chase game. Sometimes you have to throw the puck in just because, you know, to counter certain defensive strategies. And in some cases, it can be useful to play sort of a chip and chase game with certain lines or in certain situations at certain times. And I've seen teams be very effective doing it. But in the long haul, which you want to do, it only works if you're getting possession back on the forecheck. And over time, teams adapt to you. If they realize you're just a chip and chase team

and you can't force them at the blue line while carrying the puck, you're going to start losing games because teams adapt to that. But that's all at the micro level. At the macro level, more often than not, the benefit here is you have to be able to get that puck back in the neutral or sorry in the offensive zone and you have to be doing things that lead to that behavior and most of the time that means not giving it up in the first place yeah so obviously we're kind of speculating here and and i'm a little uncomfortable doing it just because i'd rather

speak from a point of actually factually knowing stuff rather than just hypothetically guessing but like if you were to analyze the situation do you think that peter shirelli is being sold a bill of goods here or do you think he's just like scrambling to find stuff that justifies his his love for chris russell and to just kind of get people off his back. Like, like, is, is this stuff actually real? Because it, it seems like the numbers don't match up with what other people are tracking and with what we're seeing play out before our very eyes. We are speculating here, but my interpretation is,

ties into something that Todd McClellan said earlier this year. And I'm trying to remember what the exact quote was, but he was basically asked about, you know, the eye test versus analytics. and he said something along the lines of eyeballs first. And to me, what I think is if you're an established hockey guy who's been watching the game for a long time, and particularly if you've won a cup doing it, you're probably pretty good at picking out relative to other hockey guys,

the things that matter. If you have me or Peter Shirelli watching a game on one pass, you're probably going to ask Peter Shirelli for his opinion over me and you're going to be right doing so 90% of the time where we disagree. But the problem is if you have a set viewpoint, if you have your belief, then confirmation bias sets in.

So if you look at the game and you're really confident in what you've seen, then when you look at the data and some of the data skews one way and some of it skews the other way, you don't ask which of these things is true. You say, okay, well, this agrees with what I saw, so I am right.

And you go away, like when you, you see conflicting data, you should come away and more conflicted. You should say, okay, I need to ask these questions and answer them, and you should challenge your own beliefs. And I think when you have a strong pre-existing belief and you look at the data and some of it supports it and some of it doesn't, you don't go, okay, am I right or am I wrong? You go, I am right. This is good data. This is bad data. Yay me. And I think that's what the Oilers do. I think they're looking at it from an old school mindset. I don't think they challenge their initial beliefs based on analytics. I think they look to analytics for confirmation. And I think it's extremely dangerous to do it that way.

Yeah. Yeah. The way you can really get yourself in trouble is if you, you know, approach someone, you're like, find me some numbers that, you know, I can use my support of Chris Russell. Like, that's not how you should approach this. You should go, let me see the numbers. And then you see what, you know, what's going on, what the patterns are, what the trends are, and then go from there. And I do think that there's a lot of that happening here. So, well, and I don't know if it's even that blatant, like, you know, I believe this about Chris Russell, go find something that supports it. I think it's more of a, what do the analytics say? And you get a on the one hand, on the other hand answer, you go, well, the on the one hand answer agrees with me, so I'm right. And just instead of question. You get, you get two folders and you just take one and you just toss the other one out. Yeah. It's a, it's a good segue, though, because I had J.R. Lynn on the podcast the other day and we had a good chat about how, at least from the outside, it certainly seems like David Poil has. has adapted over time and changed the way he's gone about just sort of the thinking and the rationale

about assembling his roster where he completely went from, you know, when he had Barry Trots, it was his very defensive-minded, conservative team. And then all of a sudden now, you know, they've really cornered the market on, it seems like, on these like undersized, skilled forwards and no one really wanted particularly in the later rounds of the draft. And they're all of a sudden, like a fun, young, exciting offensive team. And I think that that sort of thing is very important to highlight because we see guys like Shirelli and Jim Benning who I lumped them together because they were together with the Bruins. And, you know, it's like there's sort of this mentality of, well, we want a cup so we clearly know what we're doing and you don't. And I think that you can

get yourself in danger there because we're learning a lot more about the game over time and things are changing and the way we approach all this stuff should change as we learn more. And I think that if you don't and you aren't willing to use all that information available to you, you're going be sort of passed by by both time and your peers. Yeah, absolutely. It's the National Hockey League, especially right now because we're in one of those fascinating transition eras where a lot of new beliefs are entering the game and, you know, there's kind of the same struggles that we've seen in other sports between using data and conventional wisdom and all this stuff. And it's a, this is all terribly interesting to me. It's a great time to be alive. But the thing is it,

Because it's one of those transition eras, it's sort of a red queen scenario where you have to keep running as fast as you can just to stay where you are. The things I believe five years ago, there's been a lot of change in the last five years. I know a lot more now than I did five years ago. Analytics has moved forward a lot over the last five years. We're constantly learning. We're constantly getting more data. Beliefs are constantly being challenged. And if you don't adapt to the times, you are going to get left behind.

I had a good friend point out to me a few weeks back that, you know, if you look at cup-winning general managers, after they get fired, how many of them go on to win cups with their next team? And, you know, you don't see a lot of guys win cups with two teams. And that maybe indicates maybe it's less that as general manager is a genius and more that, you know, one particular team had a particularly fertile prospect pool and roster of young players and the next team didn't. I don't want to discount what happened in Boston because obviously the Bruins made a bunch of pretty good decisions to get from 2006 to 2010.

But between 2010 and 2014, the Bruins made a bunch of bad decisions too. And it all has to be considered in the balance. And you have to be keeping up with the times because what won five years ago may not win five years from now. Yeah, yeah. I think one of my favorite quotes is the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence where it's like just because we see this constant argument

from from the other side where it's like you know the hockey is such a dynamic game you can't view it the same way you view something like baseball for example it's like yeah obviously it's not as cut and dried and we have to work harder but just because you know we don't have all the answers right now it doesn't mean we should necessarily just you know be like oh well you know what we don't have it so let's just keep doing stuff the way we've been doing it because the game is changing so much and we're seeing teams like the penguins last year, for example. It's like they had just had four lines all who could skate and play fast. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, years ago or, or 20 years ago. And I, I know that you had a fun little tweet store in last week,

where you're sort of kind of, kind of challenging, uh, conventions in hockey. And I, I think that's where, uh, a lot of this stuff is the most relevant and useful where it makes us challenge stuff and, and, and sort of rethink our beliefs, because that's where you can really get in danger where you just think you've figured it all out. Not just in hockey, but just in life where it's like, I know, and I have all the answers. I figured everything out. I don't need to, you know, look into stuff anymore.

And that's when, yeah, that's when things go awry. Yeah, there's a great slate piece on the NBA that came out a little while ago that I saw. And the, I can't remember the guy's name now. But basically what he said was, you know, if, he was talking to the scouts and he asked them for, for cases where they've blown it. And, you know, if they didn't, if they hadn't blown it at some point,

they, uh, he didn't have any time for them. And because, you know, we, we all make mistakes and we all should learn from them. And the day you've got everything figured out is, it's frankly the day you ought to be fired. Because as soon as you have everything figured out, you've closed your mind to new learning and, and you're done. Um, your dinosaur waiting for the meteor. The other response I kind of have to the, you know, hockey is a dynamic thing and you can't measure it with analytics.

argument is what other field does that apply to? Economics is complex. So do we, you know, you, how do you analyze it if not with data? How do you analyze anything if not with data? There's a whole bunch of complex systems in the world and the answer isn't, well, I'm going to go by conventional wisdom in my hunches and what I see with my eyes because this is just too complex for numbers to handle. The answer is okay. This is too complex for one person to take in with their eyes. So I want to collect as much data as I can and then make the best decision based on whatever that data is. And in hockey, the data takes a lot of forms. Sometimes it's numbers.

Sometimes it's all these other things. I don't think any analytics guy has ever advocated firing all his team scouts and drafting off a spreadsheet because all those scouts are contributing data that's useful. The question is how you balance it. So to me, you know, if there's complexity, that's an indication you need more data, not an indication you need to discard all the data and go off your gut. Yeah, no, I completely agree. And listen, every time I chat with you, I come away learning something new,

and that's why I love having you on the PDO guys, Jonathan. Where can people find your work online? It was very kind, Demetri. Probably the best place is just to follow me on Twitter at Jonathan Willis, and all the stuff I write, it's scattered around the Internet, but it all shows up there. Perfect. Thanks for coming on, man. we'll make sure to get you back on in the next couple weeks and months,

and I'm sure we'll have another fun chat like this again. It's always my pleasure. I love the show even when I'm not on it, and I look forward to it. Cool. The Hockey P.D.O.cast with Dmitri Filipovich. Follow on Twitter at Dim Filippovich and on SoundCloud at soundcloud.com slash hockeypedocast.