The Hockey PDOcast - Episode 123: Asking The Right Questions

Episode Date: December 16, 2016

Alex Prewitt joins the show to discuss what it was like to cover Alex Ovechkin on a daily basis, making the jump from being a beat writer to a league-wide features writer, and how we can ask better questions without relying on worn out buzzwords. Here’s a quick rundown of the topics covered: 1:00 Covering Alex Ovechkin 10:24 Working the Daily Beat 16:30 Change in approach writing features for SI 19:30 Face to Face interviews vs. over the phone 26:00 Avoiding analytics buzzwords 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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My name is Dimitri Filipovich. and joining me as a first-time guest on the show. It's Alex Pruitt. Alex, what's going on, man? I love how just kind of calming your voices on this podcast. Is it? Every time I turn it on, yeah, every time I turn it on, I'm just very, very soothed when I'm driving in my car.

It makes me less angry at the road around me. Well, I'm happy to hear that. I'm sure that there's some people out there that would disagree with you, and maybe it goes the other way, maybe it even makes them more angry than they were to begin with. Wouldn't that be great if I got into a Fender Bender and the other guy was, like, really jacked up because he was listening to the PDO cast.

Oh, man, that'd be awesome. So people that don't know you or haven't been following your work, you, uh... So everyone? No, come on. You have more Twitter followers than I do, so I'm sure that I hope that some people know of you. But you, uh, you're currently doing some fine work at the Sports Illustrated. But before we get into that, let's talk about your time at the Washington Post on the, on the capitals beat, which you did for what, like roughly two seasons or so?

one season just one season just one season yeah yeah i came in uh i used to cover university of maryland football and basketball um and then one day i was basically told i was covering the caps now and so that was my first day was uh the first day that barry trots and brian mcclellan got introduced into their new jobs well and and we were talking about this before we started recording but i think it's interesting that you know you mentioned that you weren't really a hockey guy before getting that job so you kind of came into it with a with a fresh face and a fresh mind can i curse on here yeah absolutely okay cool uh i think my response to my boss my former boss when he told me i was covering hockey was i don't know shit about hockey and i think his response was all right well go figure

it out so i mean you know you spend a summer like calling and scrambling and you know i think i set like a broad goal of like let's try to watch every caps game from the last year and that never worked i didn't even get kind of close to that um but it's a lot of calls it's a lot of learning a new language almost. You know, like, I'd grown up in the D.C. area, so I was familiar with the capitals, obviously, and friends were fans, so I'd been to a game on, like, a Little League baseball trip or something, and friends had talked my air off, or, you know, they've been watching when I went over to their house or something. But, it was a world I didn't really know, especially definitely not on the level that you have to have to know it in order to cover it. Well, I think that probably worked into your favor a little bit.

Like, obviously, once you got sort of the feel for it and you got the terminology down and sort of how things work, obviously your job become a lot easier, but just like, I feel like sometimes the, the content we turn out becomes like so stale, and it's all just, you're just like regurgitating stuff. And for you to come in, coming into it without all this kind of backstory and sort of things clouding your mind, you could kind of approach it from a different new perspective. So I think that, I don't know, maybe you feel differently, but I feel like reading your work, you can kind of tell that you're approaching it from a different perspective than most other people there. Yeah, and the circumstances certainly helped. Like I was coming into it a fresh,

relatively fresh organizational structure, right? Like Brian McClellan was new in his job as the GM. He had been there before, but Barry Trots was new and a couple assistant coaches were new. So, you know, you go to them and you say, hey, I'm new as well. Like, let's talk about this. Let's figure out what you're trying to do so I can actually have an understanding so I can write on an educated level about what you guys are trying to do here because it doesn't benefit everyone if I don't know what's going on or if we don't communicate with each other. Yeah, for sure. And so, I mean, it probably helped that, you know, in your first year on the job, you got to cover someone like Alex Ovechkin. And I've always wondered what kind of being around him on a daily basis would be like,

just because from the outside, he just seems like this bigger than life character, both on and off the ice, which I think at hockey is, is pretty rare. I mean, it's admittedly a sport that kind of beats the personality out of its stars, especially at an early age. I mean, you look at guys like Connor McDavid and Austin Matthews and I guess maybe McDavid had that recent outburst directed at Brandon Manning so it kind of goes against the point I'm trying to make but you listen to their interviews and they're just so calm, cool and collected and you could tell that they've had this vast media training where they've been kind of just told to not say anything that's going to rock the boat or be too controversial and then you have a guy like Govechkin who just like is willing

to just like say and do whatever he can and does it in an amazing manner and I mean he he can say whatever he wants because he goes out on the ice and backs it up at the end of the day. So I don't know, just like what was it like spending so much time around him? That's a really interesting point. That like a lot of the superstars in hockey, at least I feel like to the people who cover them, don't necessarily feel like

superstars because they are accessible because you know, the locker room door opens and Sidney Crosby sitting there waiting or Stephen Hamco is sitting there waiting in the whole court for you know, 20 minutes and chat off the record and catch up with the guys who are you know from Cole Harbor or from Brampton or whatever. Ovecansans not really

like that. I mean, he does his responsibilities. He shows up and he talks, and especially after games and after losses, he's there, and he'll explain what's going on. But I found that in covering him, you can probably do a better job covering him by not really talking to him a heck a lot. You obviously have to get his side of stuff, but guys around him will do a much better job, I think, of explaining who he is. And, you know, so much about writing about Ovechkin is about the phenomenon of Ovechkin and, you know, to what you were talking about, the personality the I don't give a fuckness that way he kind of carries himself

and it's totally informed how he plays on the ice too I mean he's this totally unique style of the combo of a power and dazzle razzle dazzle dazzle when he has to or just you know we'll bowl you over or he'll cut inside and dance around you and whip a shot through your leg

it's very unique in the game and obviously the rate at which he scored is unique too and it's kind of in a way mirrored in his personality. I mean, last year I did a big profile on him around the playoffs, and I sat down with him for I think probably about an hour and a half at the team hotel in Pittsburgh when they were on a road trip there. And that was really the only place I had to drive. I live like 15 minutes from him.

And I drove up to Pittsburgh to go get him because that's the optimal scenario. When he's home, he has a life. He has a fiancee now. He has his boys. He has his house and his nice cars and things do. But when you get him on the road and you can actually sit down with him and you get him engaged, the longer you talk to him, I feel like the more you can kind of uncover stuff beyond the surface of, you know, here's this enigmatic guy who scores goals. Like, oh, what do we know about the Russian enigma or whatever?

But there's definitely some substance there. There's definitely some thought behind. I think he's also very aware, I think, of how he comes off. he's very aware of how he can say very little and then that's fine if that makes any sense when he's in scrums and stuff he doesn't really need to elaborate because like you said the play speaks for itself and it has for a long time with him well i think that's why patrick linay coming to the league reminds people so much of evetchkin i mean obviously the the goal scoring ability and the shot is one thing but we just rarely see a guy come into the league and just immediately be

able to just like openly say what he's thinking and show off his personality and then also be able to to go and do it on the ice as well. And I remember during the whole pre-draft process, like, you could already see like some of these interviews line it was doing. And then there'd be like certain segments of the media or different people online. They would be like taking issue with it and being like, oh, this is never going to fly in the league. And it's like, like, come on. So like, how about we just like let this teenager have a little bit of fun? Because after all, he is just playing a game for a living. so why not have some fun with it? Yeah, and he's not being a jackass about it.

He's just 19 and being like, okay, I think I'm the best player in this draft. Okay, that's awesome. Now go prove it, and he's doing a great job of it. And if you can score ridiculous goals from just inside the blue line, yeah, I feel like you're entitled to flip your stick a little bit and holsterer it, like it's a gun and you're in the Wild Wild West. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing because obviously, I mean, hockey is the ultimate team game, and we hear that, we hear that, sad enough.

but at the end of the day, like, it is the stars that move the needle. Like, good luck, good luck, you know, doing it, like selling tickets, selling merchandise, winning a lot of games, winning the Stanley Cup without at least like a couple of these guys that are ultimately making the big difference. So, I mean, if you want to make a team full of role, like veteran role players who are all playing the game the right way, go for it. But I don't think it's necessarily a successful model. And I'm sure some people would love that.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure they would. Not you or I, though, because I love Alex Webetchkin. And, I mean, the other day, he scored his 200th career power play goal. And we're reaching that point of both his and Crosby's careers where they're going to start knocking off these milestones and reaching these nice big round numbers. And I guess it just sort of provides some perspective. And it makes you think just we spend so much time trying to nitpick a guy, especially like Ovechkin, just looking for his deficiencies and reasons to knock him down. And I feel like sometimes we just lose sight of the fact that he's unlike anything we've ever really seen.

And I don't know if we'll ever see anyone like him because, I mean, he's scoring 50 goals annually. these days where no one else is really doing it. And I feel like somehow that's still going underappreciated, even though scoring goals is the main objective of the game, and I think people realize how insane it is. I don't know. Well, I mean, it's a little ironic, right? That the big defense that you can give of Alex Ovechkin

and, you know, the supposed, like, playoff failures, whatever. It is that it is a team game, and that it's the most team game in that even in the playoffs, superstar forwards aren't playing more than really a little bit above a third of the game, right? Like they're playing, you know, maybe 25 minutes in regulation. That leaves a lot of time left for your teammates to mess shit up. Yeah.

Yeah, no, it does. And then obviously, I mean, it's never their fault. It's always comical to me when, like, the best player gets blamed for the team not succeeding. It's like, well, I'm sure if the other players were as good as that best player, then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion. Yeah, we might be okay. Yeah, we might be okay. Let's get back to the daily beat job you had, though, because I have,

always, you know, tell people, like, whether it's friends or family that ask me, like, oh, is that something you'd ever consider doing, whatever, something you'd be interested? And I always tell them that I just don't think I could ever really do that job, because it seems like the sort of thing where, I don't know, you're just like, you're spending every day around the same people, but you're also technically kind of reliant upon those people to help you do your job by providing you with information and interesting little nuggets that you can use for stories. and I assume the toughest part would be finding that balance between being true to yourself and maintaining your voice while also not stepping on toes and offending those people. Yeah, I think I realize like the mental toll it takes after I left the beat and moved to this new job, when I would walk in the locker room and Caps players would be like, yo, you look way less stressed out than used to be.

Because, you know, it's a long season, especially if the team goes in the playoffs. I mean, any playoff run is extra games for you as a writer, which, all right, I'm going to preface this. I'm just watching sports. Like, ultimately, I'm going to complain about waking up at 4.30 in the morning to go on a flight, but, like, at the end of it, I'm just going to land in a new city and go watch sports. So let's take this all with a great assault. But, yeah, I mean, you stretch yourself over the long season. There are games where the same thing will happen four games in a row,

and you can only write that Braden Holpey stood on his head and saved the team so many. many times. So yeah, you have to find, I think, unique angles. And you know, the best B-writers in the league are doing this. I mean, Isabel Khroudian, the woman who replaced me at the post is, you know, doing stories about the Capitals Crossword Club or something like that. It's, you know, these little windows, or, you know, like Aaron Portsline is writing stories about Sergey Brabrovsky and how the strength coach from the Blue Jackets is, you know,

went over to Russia to help him out. And, you know, that's informed how well he's played at a certain. stretches this year. You need to kind of telescope in and out. The best advice I got was to basically treat the whole season like a book. And each game is a chapter. And sometimes you want to, you know, go really heavy on what happened in the actual game. And sometimes it's very action heavy. And other times you want to telescope out and think about, okay, what does this mean in a big picture? You know, maybe they're starting a road trip soon. Or maybe they're, you know, going out west and they haven't had success there. And you can kind of go big picture and think about what does this mean for the

trade deadline or what does this mean for their playoff chances. And it's kind of this undulating rhythm that you get into where because of because of the pace of the season, because things happen over and over again, and it gets boring for people, I think. It gets boring if you're just writing about the penalty kill over and over again. Or even if you're just writing about guys who are on hot and cold stretches, I think you need to add a little bit of personality in there. Yeah, yeah, I imagine, especially like the game recaps, right? It's like generally the best players were why they won or something bad happening, that's why they lost. It's like, how are you going to differentiate that from the other 81 gamers you're going to do in the regular season?

Right, so maybe it becomes, you know, you turn it into like a mini feature story about the guy who scored the first goal. It's not the game winning goal, but, you know, it jumpstarted them or something. And then, you know, because ultimately people were reading your story probably watched the game. And if they didn't, you still need to give them a sense of what happened. but I feel like there's probably a little more latitude there than I initially expected. Yeah. Well, so now you're a staff writer at SI, and you've definitely broadened your horizons by kind of bouncing around the league

and seemingly just writing about whatever catches your eye or strikes your fancy these days. I wanted to self... Literally everything, yeah. Literally anything at this point, yeah. So I selfishly wanted to have you on the show just to pick your brain about how you go about doing your current job because... God, you should have found so much...

you should talk to Michael Farber or something. Yeah, yeah. Well, you were more accessible. You answered my email. But no, listen, honestly, I'm not trying to butter you up, but you're becoming one of the prominent kind of feature guys in the hockey world. And I think that the angles you take in the manner in which you approach kind of painting the full picture before finally digging into it is something that I appreciate just because

it's so different from what people like myself generally do where it's like, quick intro, here's my main point, here's like a check. chart or two that supports it and then we're just like we're done and and i'm not necessarily trying to you know tell a story or take this person for this wild ride i'm more so just trying to prove a point of why a player or a team is playing well or isn't or what's going on or certain trends i see as opposed to actually being a storyteller so i think that i think that yeah and there's i mean there's there's i mean there's not to say that one's better or worse i think right like it's the totality of those make up good hockey reading for fans like i mean a big a big chunk of my learning process was

like, you know, reading Justin Boren's system stuff or reading like Myrtle or reading you. And, you know, those charts give you ideas and they help you think about the larger context of the league. And they, you know, I mean, for instance, like I wrote a story earlier this year about like Brock Nelson. And his, you know, his lineage, his uncle and his great uncle and his grandfather were played in Squaw Valley. And, you know, they had the Christian stick factory. And, I mean, that whole story started because I looked at the like stats out hockey analysis and was like, Brock Nelson was like top five last year and even straight goals per 60. Like, what's up with that?

So then you ask and then it turns into something broader, but sorry, yeah, to your point, that, yeah, I mean, it's, I can't do my job without the rest of y'all. Well, I think you're giving us a bit too much credit. I'm sure that you'd find a way you'd ask the right questions and get along. But it's, it's, I want you to walk me through your process without necessarily giving, giving up all of your trade secrets and stuff like that. But it's like what goes into first deciding the subject matter for your next article, and then once you've got that nailed down, just what's next?

How do you approach it? Well, I'm kind of in this hybrid role where I got duties to fulfill for s.i.com, but obviously the main bread winner at the company I work for is the print edition. It's the magazine. So the longer features, the more in depth, the more publicly visible ones will go in there. So, you know, the Brett Burns, Johnny Goodro, Say again, Novetska, and those all guys I wrote last year. For those, it's generally, you know,

it's a pretty long back and forth with editors about, one editor, Sarah Kwok, who used to cover the NHL for SI, and now she's in an editorial role, and it's very, very wonderful. So shout out to her. And, you know, we'll just go back and forth about who do you want to write about,

what's going on in the league. You know, there's a balance to strike in terms of timeliness. You don't want to necessarily write about the hot team, Dejure, because by the time it comes out, and by the time people actually get the magazine that the team could suck. So you tried to, you know, if you want to write about a hot team, you've got to find a different angle there.

So, like, you know, Florida Panthers last year was kind of writing about how wacky they were with Spacey and Space and Yager and Luongo and, you know, what was fueling their rejuvenation there. So, you know, you settle on a topic and then it's a lot of phone calls. You know, there are days I just, I guess, won't leave the house because you're on the phone like 12 hours a day just talking to people and transcribing and trying to do pre-reporting. And then eventually you try to get enough in place so that when you go, you're not chasing things. You're not doing background reporting when you're there. You know, when you go down

to Dallas and you talk to Tyler saying, and you know, what you want to ask him or you can say, hey, you know, I talk to your mom or I talk to your dad or talk to your youth coach or talk to your teammate and he or she said this. And then you can kind of advance. And then you can kind of advance the reporting that way, so you're not necessarily going and saying, like, hey, just tell me about your childhood. You already know about his childhood. You can kind of pick in at the little details that you think might be relevant to the story. So as the process goes along, your focus, I guess, starts to narrow a little bit. And you can start looking out for stuff that you think we'll make it in the story. And then, you know, you spend however

long it is there, depending usually a couple days, I think, depending on the subject, depending on the amount of access that you can get. You know, you try to report around them. And usually when I'm on these trips, I'm doubling up for web stuff too. And those things are, you know, a little bit on the fringes, so to speak. I think, like, when I went down to Dallas and did Tyler Sagan, I also wrote about like Matias Yanmark, which, you know, I mean, not on the same level, but it's something that I could just kind of, you know, knock out while I'm there, I guess. Right. And then you go home and then you write, and then it's just the general bang your head against the keyboard for like four days, and tell yourself that you really, really suck at this.

And then eventually something comes out. So I know that you travel quite a bit for your job, as you mentioned, for some context, you're hanging outside of the Islanders practice facility right now. So you're on the clock. But do you think that, like, would you say that you get more enlightening or more open answers from people when you actually kind of have these face-to-face sit-downs with them as opposed to if you're just talking over the phone for a little bit? Oh, yeah, yeah.

I mean, even 10 minutes or something. I mean, it's hard to get time, right, within the context of the season. You know, morning skates are tough because the guys want to get out of there and go have lunch and take their nap and ready for the game. And postgame is tough because they either want to get the hell out of there because they're on a road trip or they just want to go home and see their family. So, you know, you try and find those little windows. And I feel like that puts a lot of pressure to maximize the chances that you get.

It puts a lot of pressure to make the questions count because you can't really beat around the. bush. I mean, if you're just bullshit in for a little, but that's, in my mind, kind of wasted time. But there's a fine line there, too. You got to actually get to know the person. You can't just come in guns blaze, and they're like, who the hell is this little kid from S.I.? I've never been heard of him before. So yeah, it's for sure a feeling out process. I do think that having the S.I. label is a benefit. I think that, you know, if you come in, you say, him writing a magazine story about this guy that's different than, you know, even if I was like

the Washington Post be writer for the capitals. And I was calling someone up and saying, like, hey, you know, I need this for like a print story. It's, you know, the guys in hockey generally are very willing to talk because I think they're aware of where their sport falls on the pecking order in the United States, which is also to my benefit. But at the same time, you know, when I call up and say, hey, like, we're interested in really doing an in-depth feature here, you wind up hanging out at Brent Burns' house. Well, we'll talk about Ben Bears' house in a second, but I think that the best I've seen

personally at that sort of thing is Craig Custin of ESPN, a friend of the show, where, like, I remember a few years ago when I was just getting started, I went to the draft in Philly, and he was just like, I just took a step back and just watched him, worked a room, and it's like, I don't know, he was like already on this next level with everyone, where he just bounced around and, like, he wouldn't even really need the small talk. He'd just, like, get all the answers out of every single person within a matter of seconds. I was like, I don't know how he's, I don't know how he's doing that, but I'm sure he's like laid the groundwork over many, many different interactions with him.

Oh, God, yeah. I mean, he's one of the best there is. I mean, all the ESPN guys, I think, it's cool being on the road so much at national events because you get to hang out with them and you get to kind of, because, you know, we're not necessarily doing the same thing. So there's not that competition there. I'm not chasing daily stuff or even really breaking news. So I can kind of float on the fringes and watch them work.

And like you said, it's pretty amazing how seamlessly they can just kind of float from conversation to conversation and are able to get stuff out of guys. And, yeah, it's for sure a product of being around the league for a while, but sheer longevity is not going to get you there alone. It takes savvy. It takes relationship building. It takes not being a jackass. Yeah. Well, and it's funny how important sort of phrasing or putting the question in the right way is because we often see with these, like, generic interviews with a player, especially like after a game or something where it's like, well, tell me about this. And it's like, you're just like, they just give you back like a one sentence, that boring answer. And it's like, well, that was kind of a waste of time and space. But like, how do you like, let's say you've got an idea of, you know, you were saying you're

writing about Brock Nelson or something like that. And you have this big idea of where you want to go with it. But, you know, what he says to you might dramatically impact the path with which you write your article. So it's like, do you just sort of. kind of leave that open the chance and just let him guide you, or do you try to steer it in a particular direction when you're asking the question, hoping to get certain answers? I guess it depends on the amount of time that I have with the guy. Someone like Brent Burns, who's more than willing to open his house up to you

and is very gracious with his time outside the rink, I think you can be a little more open-ended with it and just kind of say, hey, tell me about your world, like show me, show me your life. what is life like away from SAP Center or whatever. But when you're grabbing a guy in the hallway after the morning skate, I feel like you kind of probably have to go in with a little more of an angle or at least a focus. So I think with Brock, I think I had already talked to his relatives by then. So that's an advantage because, like I said, you come in and you know what you want to ask,

you know which direction you can go. I think that's something I've tried to focus a little more on it, is at least mapping out of my mind certain points I want to hit in an interview, especially if I know that it might be a little more, you know, like Ovechkin, for instance. Like I knew at some point in my interview with Ovechkin, I wanted to ask him about his brother, Sergei, who passed away when he was still living in Russia. And I had kind of mapped in my mind, like, all right, how am I going to eventually get there? You know, I knew I also wanted to ask him about, like, meeting Wayne Gretzky and stuff.

I, so you go into an interview thinking like, all right, I probably need to hit certain checkpoints because these things are more likely than not going to show up in my article. But as soon as you lock yourself into the rigid, I'm only going to ask these questions, I'm only going to focus on these things. Then you're leaving yourself vulnerable and missing some cool stuff. What was Brennan's house like? Big. Was there a lot of like leftover pizza boxes and stuff hanging out?

He's very healthy at home. He made us grilled chicken on his green egg. There's randomly like a giant armored knight right in the doorway as you walk in. He has like a chilled wine closet right off his living room. He's got his own gym with a hot tub and like a, I think a sparring area in the back near the pool. He had his RV parked out front. It's like, I mean, it's literally what you would expect. He added the Brett Burns Chia Pet in his kitchen.

That's awesome. Yeah, no, he's quite the character. So the reason why I brought up sort of how you phrase questions and how you ask some of this stuff is because I'm still, you know, trying to gauge the right way to ask, quote-unquote, hockey people about some more nuanced topics regarding on ice performance, let's say, without using buzzwords like courseier analytics just because as soon as you say that, you just risk their eyes just glazing. over and then quickly jumping back into bro mode where I have this running theory where you know I think there's a bunch of guys in the league whether it's players or you know coaches or GMs that would really be willing to have these sort of deeper informed conversations with you about it but you kind of have to be careful how you choose your words because it's like in the school yard where they don't necessarily want to be seen or heard doing something they they think is kind of lame so they just like

because they risk being made fun of their peers about it so like as soon if they suspect like someone's on to them. It was like quickly, you know, like shell up and just, you know, act like they act like how they think someone who's being super cool would act like, which ironically isn't very cool at all. But it's like, how do you, how do you brochish? To me, by the way, that that one of those words, Corsi is just like this mustachioed goalie coach in St. Louis, who like is a real live human, but his last name is like anathema of some people. Yeah, he's like the definition of a hockey person too. Like, he's like a hockey lifer and just been around forever. And it's, So how do you, how do you, like, how do you dip your toes into the water?

How do you, how do you start, get them talking about this sort of stuff without, you know, scaring them off, essentially? I think you, you kind of have to ask them what they know about it first. Or at least that's been my approach, especially with players, is like, hey, what do you know about, you know, shot rate statistics or stuff? And they'll say nothing or they'll say, oh, like, coursey. I've heard of it, but I don't know what it is. I have one guy go, that's just shots, right? I was like, yes, that's it. That's all it is.

So you kind of start there, and I think you probably feel out where they are with it. You know, some guys will be more engaged with advanced stat talk. Some guys will, like you said, be in what you call it, promo. And just like instantly dismissive because it's like this Pavlovian reaction where you hear this word. and you clam up. Because I think it probably speaks to this approach thing you're talking about that in the past,

you know, guys who come up to them, reporters who come up to them, and use this, use this lingo or whatever, this jargon with them, this, you know, strange, foreign concepts of numbers, it's probably usually, I don't know if it's in a,

it's probably in a critical way, right? Like, it's usually, it's bad. Your course is usually bad when you're going to talk to someone about that. maybe not, maybe I'm wrong, but at least in my experience, that's the sense I've gotten that, you know, just the way it's been approached or the fact that they don't understand it makes them initially resistant to it. So if you engage them in the level of, like, hey, let's just talk about what you know, and, you know, I'll kind of explain this to you as we go along and we'll see if

it makes sense and we'll see, you know, if what I'm seeing, or you know, you say, hey, like, the numbers show this. what do you see, basically? Like, I know what I see from my eyes and, you know, in my very, very untrained eyes, and I know what I see from, you know, reading stats that are provided online, but, like, what do you see?

Is this mirrored in the eye test? And you can kind of combine the two. I mean, because it, you know, ultimately what they say is what they believe theoretically, unless they're lying to you, but, you know, what they say you can use because that's how they truly feel. And if it doesn't match up to the stats,

that's one thing. If it matches up to the stats is another thing, but it's, I think it's always helpful to just kind of go in open-ended and just ask them, you know, what they think about a certain trend or a certain stat. Yeah. Yeah, I think that, you know, a lot of this stuff is, I mean, we've discussed this off the air, but the whole like, Pucks on Net thing, right? It's like, that's like, that's what course he is. It's like, it's like, you know, all this stuff is very common sense and it's ingrained in hockey culture. So it's like, it's weird to have this sort of push back against it when like we're both trying to, like, if I'm asking you a question about it, it's because. I want to find out from your perspective as a player or as a coach or whatever what's going on here since you can provide more detail and nuance to it from behind the scenes.

And I feel like once we sort of bridge that gap and mesh those two things together, that's when some of these stories will really start coming together. That's partially what's fascinated me about the whole Florida Panthers situation. They're now held up as the symbol of analytics, right? They're the so-called computer guys, which I love that. Computer boys. Sorry, computer boys. Let's belittle them a little more there.

I love that that's what we're latching on, which is hilarious to me, because my sense, and correct you from wrong, you got Merrick on you guys talked about this, but I don't think that they're doing anything terribly advanced there. My sense is that the majority of their, you know, they have Scott McDonald who's doing some analytic stuff, and they have the Canucks Army guys who are doing a lot of,

I think like future projections based off past performance and stuff like that, but the majority of the day-to-day analytics that they're doing and, like, the recommendations and the match-up stuff is really just, like, shot-based. It's really just scoring chance-based and, you know, stuff that's, like, readily available on Corsica and stuff. I don't think that there's much more beyond that, but they are, you know, they are going on,

they're combining the stats, they're combining the scouting. But I think the perception of them is that they're these, like, basement-dwelling number crunchers who put lineups into a computer in it, and maybe it's not. Maybe that's not the perception of them. but at least it certainly seems to be in a small sect of hockey reporting that, you know, these guys are just putting data into a computer and, you know,

it's spitting out more data and it's telling them who to play. But I think in reality, it's a little more rudimentary than that. Yeah. Well, I wonder if, like, you know, they got someone like, like, like, if Dale Tallon comes out and it's like, yeah, the reason we picked up Seth Griffith is because, you know, we really like his underlying numbers and, like, goes on this whole thing. I'm pretty sure some of these people wouldn't be like,

oh, like Dale Talon, like, what a computer boy. Like, it's like, it's funny how. No, it's like we saw Jonathan Marshall's production elsewhere and extrapolated it over a larger season. We thought he could produce. Yeah. And we thought he was cost effective. Yeah, it's as simple as that.

Yeah. Alex, man, thanks for taking the time to come chat. Where can people find your work online? S.I.com. And my Twitter is, my Twitter is Alex underscore Pruitt. Excellent. Yeah, man.

Is that, is that what you met? Yes, that's exactly what I meant. Yeah. Thanks for... The outer reaches, the outer reaches of the internet where only my mom goes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, what's your Snapchat and your Instagram and all that?

Yeah, man, thanks. That was a fun chat. All this stuff really interests me about how we can sort of get better at covering the sport. So I'm glad you came on a chat and let's get you back on again in the near future. I'm sufficiently soothed. The Hockey P.D.O.cast with Dmitri Filipovich. Follow on Twitter at Dim Filippovich and on SoundCloud at soundcloud.com slash hockey pdiocast.