The Hockey PDOcast - Episode 125: The Christmas Wish List

Episode Date: December 23, 2016

Micah Blake McCurdy joins the show to discuss the race for the 1st overall pick, how Darryl Sutter and the Kings have managed to keep chugging along, and help pen a Christmas Wish List. Here’s a quick rundown of the topics covered: 1:00 The Race to the Bottom 4:15 How the Avalanche dig out of their hole 10:15 Darryl Sutter's defensive system 17:25 Tampa Bay Lightning's struggles 23:00 Quality of Competition vs. Teammates 27:30 Christmas Wish List 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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Welcome to the Hockey PEOCast. My name is Dimitri Philpovich. And joining me by popular demand, Michael Blake McCurdy. Micah, what's going on, man? Not much, how you doing? Thanks for having me on. I'm good, man. Yeah, it's my pleasure.

I think this is the last show we're going to do before Christmas. So I guess we better do it well because I know a lot of people are going to just be listening back to these while they're trying to avoid spending time with their families. But so no, the quick plan for today's show is there's a few things that I've kind of jotted down as stuff I'd like to unpack with you that's been amusing to me around the league. And then we've coordinated. a little Christmas wish list we're going to write up together for stuff we'd like to see around the league. So should we just get right into it? Sure. Cool. So I guess you're interested in this

particular subject depends purely on how sadistic you are as an individual. But I mean, the rock fight at the bottom of the standings that's starting to develop here is endlessly amusing to me because on the one hand, you have this Arizona Coyote's team, which isn't even really trying to put up the illusion that they're interested in winning hockey games this season. I mean, you look at their roster and it's basically just a compilation of super young, inexperienced guys with aging veterans who are getting really long in the tooth. And, you know, I've, I've been pretty vocal about being perfectly okay with the strategy, like especially for a team like the coyotes who aren't just going to go out and outspend every team and throw money around. Like, you got to be smart about

this and you got to accumulate as much young talent as possible. And one way to do it is constantly bottoming out in the draft. But I think what's, what's amazing to me is, I mean, just by any single possible metric. They're one of the worst teams we've seen at five on five since 07. They're right up there with the with the 1415 sabres that were chasing Connor McDavid in pretty much every category. And yet here we are and they're not even, they don't even have the best odds for the first overall pick. Well, they, I think goalie evaluation is always a bit thorny, but I, I am a little higher on their goal tending so far than on the other teams that are down at the bottom. You know, I include, I include Buffalo and Vancouver in that conversation for people who

Buffalo is the best of those four, but I think they're going to be in that conversation for around the bottom of the league for most of the year. Their deadline's going to be really interesting. I don't think they're going to want to sell quite like the other teams could or should. Arizona, they don't have a lot of pieces to sell. Vancouver definitely should sell, although they might not. Colorado also probably sellers. So Arizona and Buffalo are more interesting there because you don't, you know, there's not, normally when teams really want to make sure that they get a decent chance at a good pick,

they want to sell off a few things, both to maximize their chances of the pick this year and also just to get more assets for the future. And I don't think those two teams are going to be in place to do that. So you're going to see some changes at the trade deadline for some of those teams, but not others. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, a team with coyotes, I think they're already ensuring that they're going to get a pretty high pick. I don't think they need to sell off many parts to get anywhere. but I see what you're saying.

And it is fair just that, you know, it seems like they're giving up 40 shots a night, basically on the regular. And Mike Smith, at least for the time being, has been nothing short of amazing. Obviously, I mean, his career track record probably indicates that he won't keep playing this well. And also that, you know, he has a long injury history,

and it wouldn't be surprising at all to, even if he gets, you know, pull something a little bit or gets a little nick or bruised, if they're like, Mike, why don't you just take a few weeks off here and let Louis Doming kind of try to sort this out for it. us. So I think that, I think, you know, as soon as Mike Smith stops kind of standing on his head every night, obviously some of those shots they're giving up will start turning into goals against more frequently. But I mean, I guess maybe even more interesting is this Colorado Avalanche team because we

had at least highish hopes for them heading into the season, just purely based on the fact that it seemed like they had a pretty smart summer and they changed their coach who we were all down on. But yeah, it's just, I don't know, they have a minus 34 goal differential right now and just 31 games and they're right there with the coyotes in terms of all these all these shot metrics. So I just, I don't know. I guess if you're them, you're probably selling off guys like Jerome McGinland trying to accumulate assets and just taking a big picture of view of this. But I'm sure it's not, it hasn't, it hasn't been pretty and it hasn't gone the way they probably would have thought they would. No, and I think they were more fortunate in recent years and that definitely

masked their underlying skill, if you like. I don't like this word underlying for for things that are, you know, results measured. But, you know, there's different outputs that people look at. You can look at shots. You can look at goals. You can look at one game. You can look at 10 games. And, of course, the other thing, too, is that we,

a lot of the things that looked like positives were really just wildcards. You know, you've got young prospects coming up, and you imagine that they're going to get better as young prospects generally do, but you can't ever be sure about that. And I think most people, including myself, I thought that Bednar would be an improvement over Patrick Wa, but I didn't really know very much about what kind of coach he would be. And I think any coaching improvement has been uncertain so far.

I mean, it's extremely difficult to tell anyway. And then, of course, the roster is essentially the same. There's not very many, you know, even though the moves were smart, I think, the ones that they did make over the summer, including their roster moves. It's not so much about intelligence as it is about impact. this is one of those things where normally on the other side of this coin where I get into a lot of arguments with people

where they say, look, this team did a stupid thing, and then they do another stupid thing, and then they do another stupid thing. But if you keep your mind in a quantitative frame of mind, if you keep trying to add up how many, what the impact of the decisions you make is, you can do a lot of stupid things

that don't actually matter very much. And in the same way, on the other side of the coin, you can do a lot of smart things that also don't matter very much. And so it's easy to have a good summer you know, for instance, or terrible summer if you make 10 great decisions or 10 terrible decisions, but one much, much larger, good or bad decision. And sometimes those things aren't even decision.

Right. So I try not to judge too much in like how many times I find myself nodding or shaking my head and rather how many, and try to make a quantitative impact. And then once you start thinking like that, you kind of are forced into this world of model making with all of its attendant problems. Well, I think that's also a good point just because obviously kind of some of that good fortune particularly in the like on ice percentages kind of help mask the fact that a lot of these moves they made even a couple of years ago, whether it's, you know, throwing a bunch of money at a guy like Francois Bocheman or Brad Stewart or Jerome Ginnla, even though he's clearly on his last legs here. Like they invested a lot of money in these guys that aren't very good anymore. And, you know, when we were heading into this season, we weren't kind of evaluating those moves because they'd happen in the. the past, but now they're kind of manifesting themselves in the results and they haven't been pretty.

Yeah, and that's another sort of part of the trouble of the pundit game, if you like, is it's very easy to say, to think about the things that happened most recently, but that doesn't mean that those are the things that are most affecting your team. Yeah. And very often, a lot of what makes decisions stupid when people make bad decisions is that they harm the club down the road without doing any particular difference in. short term. And so, you know, you, and the difference between somebody who's old and maybe lost a step versus, you know, that drop in performance compared to what they used to be able to do

compared to somebody who actually can't keep up at all anymore is really, really large, especially when you don't have people who can step up right away and take those minutes. And so you have the, some, a lot of NHLT's problems are based on things that, that no one's, seems interested anymore because they're not news in any way. Yeah, yeah, that's true. All the decisions that went into them, all of the things that affected them, all of the things that, you know, and sometimes even it can be a little harsh to say, oh, well, you know, they gave, they gave a bunch of money in time to this player, and they really shouldn't have, and it's,

but because it's old news, nobody remembers the reasons why they did it. Nobody remembers all of the extra factors that may or may not have made it seem like a good idea at the time. And that's one of the difficulties with, with a news-based world, you know, which I live in too, right? You're trying to always put up stuff to the topical. It's interesting. But anytime you have contracts that go back a long time,

anytime you have people who stay with an organization management or players for many years, you know, as lots of players and coaches do, you have those things that reach back. And so you have to keep on bringing up old things and people say, oh, you know, why are you still harping on this? You know, you harp on it because it still matters. Not because the decision makers can possibly change their mind,

but because it's still affecting whether they're on. whether their team wins or loses, whether or not they have the flexibility to make future moves, whether they can even get out of a hole that they're in where they have those options or not. Yeah, yeah, no, and I mean, they have a lot of those holes right now that Avalanche do, so I think it's going to take some time for that to adjust. And I think that, you know, we should have a little bit of patience with this new coach because we are kind of seeing, seeing the results of all the stuff that happened in years past there with the signings and whatnot.

So I think let's move on, though, to a more positive thing on the completely other end the spectrum because it is Christmas time. I watched a couple of Kings games this weekend, and it was honestly a bit jarring, just seeing some of the names they're giving legitimate minutes to at this point. I mean, listen, I don't want to completely ether any specific guys, but let's just say that Trevor Lewis may or may not be their first line right winger right now. And I don't know, I guess it's a testament to Daryl Sutter and his system, or maybe it's just like the brilliance of their top guys like Kopitar and Dowdy who are shouldering such a heavy

workload and doing so well in it. But, I mean, even with this litany of glaring holes in their lineup and Peter Boudai and Jeff Zatkoff being their two goalies, they're still second in the shot chair at 515, and they're only behind the Bruins, and they're still holding down a wildcard spot. And your model hasn't projected for the fourth highest point total in the West. So I don't know, like, do you think it's just like a combination of Sutter and the top players? Or, like, how are they – it has to be sort of systems-based just because you look at the players and they really shouldn't be controlling. play at 5-on-5 at this rate, as they currently are? So certainly, the defensive system specifically is excellent. I think it's right up there with the best in the league,

perhaps the best in the league. The only ones I can think of, which I think of as stronger systems-wise, are St. Louis and Winnipeg. We have three teams with completely different fortunes and completely different styles. But at 5-on-5, the defensive systems are, and personnel are very strong. which helps, of course, it helps defensively in the most obvious way, but it helps also in knock-on ways,

like Peter Boudai is putting up considerably stronger numbers in Los Angeles than he ever did in previous years with other teams. And I think there's a systems benefit there. And so, of course, the other thing, too, is that, you know, it's easy to say that there's trope, of course, that good defense means, well, it depends on who you talk to. Some people say that the only way that if you have an extremely strong defensive structure,

you limit your creativity, you put shackles on your best players offensively, and you make it so they can't create. And other people say that no, it's crucial the other way around, that good defense is the only thing that gives you structure that leads to finding opportunities for your offensive players to flourish. And while each of those things might be true for specific teams, I found an average that neither is true, that they're completely unrelated. So it could easily be true that some guys, you know, that some guys,

who maybe don't deserve quite the minutes they're getting or getting more than them. But the Kings are still generating offense at a reasonably good tick. The finishing talent is definitely not there like it might have been in years past. It's been considerably below average for a number of years now. They don't have the luxury of a really fresh shooting talent, like a handful of other teams in the league have, thinking of Columbus going on a tear, among other things, you know, with some great shooting talent,

whereas Los Angeles doesn't have that, but they do have the pure offensive quantity to keep themselves in a lot of games. Yeah. And that's part of how you get those projections, right? It's that you don't have to win overwhelmingly. You can just be a little bit better a lot of a time. Right. And when you're like that, I mean, you're controlling, you know, the puck and the shots

as high a percentage of the time as they are, it's, you know, it's going to be tougher to go through these crazy swings and, you know, there's just going to be percentage swings, but in terms of like wins and losses, you're generally going to be in a lot of these games. So even if it's not going away, you're probably going to just accumulate either if it's like individual points at a time. And so you're not going to have these massive gaps

where you just haven't gotten any points in like a seven game span or something like that. Right. And one of the things that you can do, if you, you know, making this identification, which I think is good broadly of offense with creativity, if you want to make sure, if you want to, how to put this,

if you want to shield your team from your own lack of creativity, the solution is just to have the puck all the time. Because then the other team has considerably fewer options. You make them play in a structured way. You make them the, I mean, it's very difficult to be creative without the puck. And so you can mitigate your weaknesses by playing a style like that. And that's really, for me, when I can discern it, which is not often the mark of a really good coach.

As a coach you can say, because we have these weaknesses, you know, we're going to play in these ways, and the weaknesses don't go away, they just don't matter as much. And so you can have weaker talent playing in certain spots. You can have people with specific liabilities, but because of skillful hide-hap,

you can't take all-over-week players or all-over-week systems and hide them, but you can take specific aspects and hide them. Sanaghani is a fantastic example of this in Columbus, where he's playing extremely sheltered, easy 5-15 minutes, and moating up on powerplay minutes and the benefit at least so far this year is extraordinary. They've managed to...

In fact, this is Charlie Connor who mentioned this to me on Twitter, or to the world, which I noticed. That kind of usage is not considered conventional. There's a lot of old-school thinking, which says, oh, you know, you have to earn those minutes on the powerplay by being good in a certain way. And it's all known good to use those rewards as levers to try to get behavior

out of your players that you want. And for some players and for some teams, that might be wise. But also, there's something considerably more basic about just saying, well, you know, it doesn't have anything to do with who deserve is what,

by what player has everything to do with, what puts the most goals up and what puts the fewest goals against up, and we don't care who likes it or doesn't like it. And then we just say, you know, we expect you to come to the rink and give 100% because your pros, not because of any rewards or carrots

or punishments that may or may not be offered. Well, why stop at 100%? Let's go up to 110. Yeah, right. No, but I think that is a very, like, a good point in the sense that, I mean, especially, you know, hockey convention's always been that, you know, your third lines, your checking line, and then your fourth line are, you know, play five, seven minutes, throw the body around, maybe drop the gloves occasionally. So you obviously, I mean, to begin with, you wouldn't really want to put those guys out on the power play because they probably don't have the requisite skill. But there's nothing kind of telling you, you know, there's nothing in the CBA that says that your fourth line has to be those. types of players and it makes perfect sense that you would take a player who might be limited defensively or a five-on-five but has great offensive skill and just limit his exposure there but

then once you give have opportunities on the power play you you feed him those minutes and I think that you know the smart teams that are paying attention will do that more frequently because I mean that really is the mark of a good team both in terms of the GMs that can sort of identify this stuff and bring those guys on board but then coaches that can actually use them properly and put them in a position to succeed. Right. And I, you know, there's an affism within hockey that says if you have time,

you should use it. It's typically applied to negotiations with players or to other sort of thorny organizational situations. We say we don't have to resolve this right away. And that fact is itself an asset that we intend to use. And I think there's a matching thing

which says if you have flexibility, if the rules give you flexibility, you should use that flexibility to your advantage. And so these traditional roles are like crutches for thought, and if you don't need them, you shouldn't use them. And if the rule system is good, it will bring you to a game which is good for the fans and also good for players and management as well. Yeah, I agree. All right, let's move on and talk about the Tampa Bay Lightning, because I feel like, you know, we as a group haven't really been, I don't know, it's paying. enough attention, but we definitely haven't been talking about just how abjectly mediocre they've

been this season. I mean, they're pretty much hovering around 49 of 50% mark in every single five-on-five category you look at. And obviously, it's tough to properly evaluate them now just because, I mean, they're missing Stamco's Kutrov and Palat, who were their first line for the start of the season. So it's tough. And, you know, now we're getting the revival of the Connor, oh, Corey Conacher experience in Tampa Bay these days, which is always fun. But I don't know, just like, what do you make of this team? Because, the bad news is they're currently in the outside looking in and your model has them just missing the cut,

but the good news is that at least they're in the Atlantic Division. Yeah, the being in the weakest division in the league really helps. I think that they're probably going to be fine. I mean, those injuries are stinging a lot. It's very difficult, as Dallas learned earlier this year, to lose essentially an entire, you know, top-to-middle-six forward line without really feeling the consequences. It depends a lot on depth, and of course I thought that

I would have said going into the season that I thought Tampa's depth was extraordinary. You know, when they were, like, when they had the luxury of having a very public fight with one of their better forwards in Jonathan Drew, you know, that that is a luxury. Other teams might not have had the wherewithal and might not have had the death that forward to be able to treat him the way that they treated him. And I think now, of course, but every time you have depth,

it doesn't take too long before you run through it. The RFA rules, the pressure to trade assets for better things, just the need to give people minutes is starting to wear on them. And of course, it's hard to estimate exactly the impact of Stanko's, but it's definitely very large. And that's part of why they're projected to fall where they are, is that they put up very middling results, even when they've had all of those players in.

So there's a little bit of uncertainty. or two. Of course, saying precisely why, you know, very broad team metrics go south or go north is really difficult. You know, you look at the last 15 games for Tampa, for instance. The first 10, the first of those last 15 are extraordinarily bad in terms of shot results. And the last five are very, very strong. So, you know, and these things can change very, very quickly.

Especially when you're dealing with, this is a little abstract, but I think it's true. when you're dealing with things that are very close to equilibrium, so things that are, we have a lot of different forces that are opposed, that are very tightly or almost tightly balanced, it doesn't take much of a shift to dramatically change the results that you're getting. And then people figure out what you did, and then they change it.

Now there's video coaches going over every little, every little thing that you do, and that you've done recently that's a different, oh, he's loaning up in a half wall now instead of at this other spot. All those little changes, so people are watching that and they adjust to you. But you can make a lot of hay in a short time, or failing to do that, you can lose a lot of ground in a short time.

And so I think the organizational depth and the long track record of results suggest that they'll, not that they'll change what they're doing so as to get some better results. Exactly what they'll change. I don't know. Yeah, well, that's for them to answer. but I mean that track record as you mentioned is so good that you know there's a reason why we just kind of came into the year just like yeah of course they're going to make the playoffs and be one of the

top teams in the east and the Atlantic especially I mean there's so much talent there you obviously losing a guy like Stamcoe's one thing kind of removing just the the goals he's going to score himself and he was playing really well to start this year and it looked finally kind of like his old self but it's also another sort of this trickle-down effect where now injuries like that at the top lineup force other guys to play maybe more than they should and and how teams are adjusting, as you mentioned, you know, it's going to put guys in, you know, uncertain, kind of weird positions that they haven't been in in the past and they haven't been responding well to that. But, I mean, ultimately the good news is that Atlantic Division.

I mean, beyond the Bruins and the Habs, I'm still pretty skeptical about how good the senators actually are. And with the Metro Division, just running away with those two wildcard spots at this point, that leaves that third Atlantic Division spot all the more important. and I think it's pretty wide open. I mean, the sands, the bolts, the panthers, the hurricanes. I mean, maybe even the Leafs if they get their stuff together. Like, I think all those teams are going to be in it, and I think that's going to be probably one of the most interesting races

in the second half of the season. Yeah, there's a lot of teams that are so close to one another in either current standings or in projected standings that I think there's going to be a lot of upheaval there, even without a great deal of motion in team strength or in luck. You know, only like six, six, seven wins that compared to three or four wins for a given team is going to completely change the complexion of a race.

Yep. So there's going to be, you know, all those shootouts, all those, you know, late in-game wrestling decisions start to take on a really large magnitude. Oh, yeah, we'll talk about the shootouts later in our Christmas wish lists. I have a take on that. One final thing before we get into those wish lists, we're talking off air before we started recording and we wanted to have a little chat about sort of just the general concept of quality of competition numbers and sort of how we as analysts should be incorporating it into our

evaluations and sort of how how much it affects the player's performance so I think we should probably do that right now okay sounds great so here's where I'm at I think that we've obviously come a long way from the days of just a few years ago where it kind of felt like I mean at least for someone like myself, we knew so little about the stuff still that I would just open up behind the net and I would cite a player's quality of competition numbers and their offensive zone start percentage and I would just wipe my hands and call it a day because that's sort of what we thought was the only important stuff. But I know you've been beating this drum for a while and I would highly recommend reading the work of Ryan Stimson and don't tell me about heart on

hockey graphs from back in October. But they did a really good job of highlighting the fact that, I mean, especially for forwards, we should be a. accounting for quality of teammates more heavily than we are right now just because of how big of a factor it is for shot metrics. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's by far the most important lesson for trying to get a handle on, first of all, trying to understand coaching decisions and then later trying to evaluate coaching decisions. And the most important is to keep your eye on the ball in the sense of what matters versus

what people talk about. and and so the quality of teammates what lines people get sorted into have such a large effect not because and you know not not because of anything intrinsic

you know you like the positioning of one player if it's really really bad or really really good can completely make a break a shift whether they're on your team or the other team but but because if you're set on a line even with what is not understood to be

scrambling coaches you're going to go out again and again and again with those same guys. And even if your coach is trying to get you a matchup, those matchups are not easy to get. Other teams are allowed to change whenever they want during the play, and they routinely do, to say nothing other times, and it's artificially restricted by home team or why I think. And so

matchups, you know, they don't actually stick, even if a coach has a fixed idea in his line, I'm going to get my third line out against their top guys. That's what I'm going to do. That's not actually what happens because he can't get the matchup that he wants. The rules of the game don't let him get

80, 90% of that, of the ice time of that top pair against the guys that he wants, it's always much more spread out. Because the rules are like that, you know, you, when you're a coach, you don't worry about that. There's no sense in it. You can't worry about things you can't control. You don't drive yourself crazy. So you still talk like, oh, I got that matchup, by which I mean, I got 60% of their ice time

against that line that I wanted. And so, you know, but that still, you know, if you want to just look at that 60%, then maybe that's what you do because that was what you were interested in doing. but if you're taking an analytical view, you want to look at everything. And look at, well, you know, they did okay against that matchup, but they got completely obliterated in another matchup, and so maybe as a net, it was, you know, it was a mistake.

And so that effect, where the quality of teammates is almost completely in your control, almost. And there's always still broken plays and crazy changes, and, you know, guys get hurt or guys get suspensions, or not suspensions, but misconduct. You don't see, a third of your second line is gone for ten. minutes, you know, you have to rearrange that. But you have almost total control of who plays with whom on your own team and considerably less control about who plays with whom on the other team.

And so even when you hit your theoretical maxims on both of those, you're still going to see more variation of opponent quality than you do of teammate quality, which all goes to say that if you're going to look at them, you have to look at them together. You have to take into account both of them at the same time, especially because they have the same sort of units. No matter how you measure player quality, you can do the same calculus, whatever you do to the opposing team,

you can do for your own team as well. Yeah, I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind because you kind of see some of these numbers just kind of throwing out without any context or bring it all together, and you sort of need the full picture to understand sort of the usage and how the guy's being deployed and how it's affecting his performance.

Right. And of course, it varies from team to team as well. And you can start to see, you know, particular patterns for particular teams when you dig into it. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay, let's get into this Christmas wish list here. And since you're the guest, I'll let you kick us off and go first. And kind of just as sort of an ex-explanatory, but we're just going to do sort of stuff we'd like to see moving forward, whether it's, you know, on a player level, a team level, or just a general league level.

So with that said, what's the first thing on your wish list? The first thing on my wish list is just because I could do so much with it is I want player and pop tracking data. Even before we get into making any evaluations of what is good and what is bad and who should be changing this and what coaches should be changing, what gyms, what moves they should be making and how players should play differently, I just want to see it. I just want to look at it. I want to find out, you know, where do centers play? Where do they? I don't want to be told where they play by people who think they know. I want to look at where they actually play.

Right. You know, where does this guy play? Where does this guy go? Where does this guy pass the puck? Where does he receive passes? You know, what is this goalie's depth? What is the, you know, the average speed? When is the puck moving slowly?

When is moving quickly? Just all of those purely, what is going on? I want to look at it. And I want to have it in a thousand different ways so that I can show it to people in a million different ways. That's my number one. Just so many different things I could do with that. Yeah, that's a good one.

I think the player tracking information is very key. And once we have access to that, it's going to open up so many doors for us. So I co-sign that one. My first one is sort of a big picture thing. And I, you know, it's my Christmas wish, so I can do whatever I want. I realize this probably will never happen.

But I think for, you know, the purposes of this, I'd love to just completely scrap the current playoff format and just seed teams one to eight in each conference. And obviously I'd ideally just go one to 16 across the league, but I understand the travel concerns and all that jazz, and it's not necessarily very realistic at this point. So let's just keep it simple. Let's go one to eight in each conference.

And then, I don't know, something like five to seven days before the start of the playoffs, we just host a draft on national TV where the first seed picks who they want to play, and then the second seed goes, and the third seed and so on and so forth. And we kind of play it out that way. And it's never going to happen because hockey's this game all about sportsmanship and culture and respect and all that jazz.

But I mean, like, for example, when Doug Seafo, the Panthers went out last year and said they'd love to play the Islanders in the first round, I thought that was amazing. And I wish we kind of heard more of that, even though it didn't really work out well for them. So I think something like that would be an amazing spectacle just to watch that draft and how awkward it would be. And then all the storylines and quotes that would come out about, you know, no one believed in us. disrespected us and all that. So I think that's definitely something that's on my list. I definitely have a taste for that, for that high drama sort of thing. And I think the way you do it is you build it in like that. You say, you know, you have to make these choices. Yeah. That's, I think, the way that you, I do a little bit of sort of theoretical game design

for fun. I'm talking with other friends. And one of the things I really like is that if you want to have people make interesting choices, you have to force them to make interesting choices. You have to give them the options and let them, instead of dictating it to them in the rules. So I think it's more, uh, so for instance, choosing playoff opponents, I think would be hysterically fun. Oh, it would be amazing. And I think it would also be, I mean, obviously you got to be careful what you wish for, but I think it would genuinely reward teams for doing well in the regular season because as we see time and time again, like sometimes it's all about just kind of good fortune in terms of matchups and where the chips fall. And I think if you're the best

team in your conference, for example, you should get to pick who you deem to be the, you know, the most inferior opponent. So I'm all for that. I like it. So then. Okay. So what's second on your list? Second on my list, I think, is gold drafting.

I would like to see the, I like the draft for a variety of reasons, but I don't like the way that the order is eliminated. I actually don't worry too much about tanking, although gold drafting completely self-tanking also. But I think rewarding teams who win with good draft picks, win, win out. after they're eliminated so that you keep the rough order where the weaker teams get the better picks, but the stronger teams get the weaker picks, I think is rewarding teams that win is, makes for exciting games. And down the stretch of every year for the last five or six years,

half of the games on, after the trade deadline, are extremely uninteresting to watch because at least one, if not both of the teams, is not especially interested in winning. And they don't, and of course, why should they? They don't have the incentives to win. So I think that's my, in terms of pure excitement, that's my number one change to the league to make 82 games be exciting for all 30 teams every year. Yeah, I think that's a common theme with this list so far. It's like just rewarding competence, punishing incompetence, and sort of limiting the amount of chance involved in some of this stuff that's very important. I agree. Yeah.

Okay, so the next one that I have is a little, it's a little, it's a little zany. it's a little out there, but I'd like to see teams start getting a bit more creative in actually pushing the envelope and installing some of these progressive changes being floated around in terms of player deployment and usage. And what I mean by that is if you're a bad team, like let's say the avalanche right now or the coyotes. And realistically, I mean the avalanche, for example, like you have like what, like one, two, maybe three actual above average an NHL defenseman. why wouldn't you experiment with maybe playing four forwards in one defense at 5-on-5 and just kind of seeing what happens and seeing if you can kind of throw the other team off and generate a bit more offense than you are right now? And I understand that by saying this, I'm opening up myself to all the jokes about how the senators are already doing this when they play three

forwards, Carlson and Mark Matha. So I, in general, I co-designed with that. I think the positions of having a left-wing, a right-wing of center, a left-defendant and a right defender, I think there's nothing in the rules that requires them. I think it's purely historical and I'm not at all certain that the skill sets we teach people to have when they play those positions match up as a set of five to the skill set we want to have hockey players to have. I very much advocate a kind of total hockey where all five players play essentially the same with a great deal of shifting with position in place where you

have to play a smarter much more cerebral system. Yeah. So that's that's my second one. Okay, what else do you have in your list? Speaking of out-there choice is possibly my least popular choice is I want to see goalies get penalties whenever they freeze the puck. I would like take the gloves away, replace them with another blocker or another blocker-like object, and just say if you cause a whistle, that's bad, that's delay of game, we don't want to have it.

So you've got to kick the puck out, you need distance, you need defenders who can not just crease clear, because of course the only point of crease clearing is to let your goalie freeze the puck. So you need players who can take possession of the puck even in front of their own net and skate it away. And I think it will mean that there'll be less players, offensive players will crash the net considerably less because you can crash the net with safety

when you know the puck is there because you know that the worst thing that's going to happen is that you're going to get a face-off. But if goalies aren't allowed to produce face-offs, if they get penalties for stopping the play, which is boring, then the puck's going to be coming out one way or another, and if they don't get it, they're going to be caught.

So I think that's going to make the game considerably more fun, and considerably faster, which is something in the league has already expressed an interest, and they'd love to get the game down to a slightly shorter level where they'd get, they'd get a lot more eyeballs watching the game when if they can get the stuff games from dragging on like they do, and I think always freezing the puck is part of it. Oh, and especially if they're just wearing two blockers instead of a glove, I feel like that would definitely get people to tune in. Well, here's hoping.

I can't decide. This one wasn't even on my list, but now that you started talking about goalies and little changes like that, I can't decide if this is more or less extreme, probably more. But I'm cool with just putting some sort of shock-haller device on goalies, and if they ever stray out of the crease to try and play the puck and just zap them and get them back into the crease. Because so many... I'm actually... Yeah? Sorry, I've recently changed my mind. about this.

Really? So there's always unintended consequences, and every time you change a rule, you know, teams are going to adjust to try to, and it might not come out the way you hoped it would come out. So one of the things, one of the troubles, you know, that there were a lot of people who were upset with that one play that Unquist made the other day, the one where Cody Eaton senselessly ran and got the four-game suspension he deserved or possibly less than he deserved. There's a lot of people who say, well, you know, why is he allowed to play the puck out there?

you know, it's not completely fair that somebody should be allowed to play the puck, you know, and in a way that's different from other players, allowed to play the puck. Like a defender in exactly the same spot on the ice that would not be allowed to play the puck in the way that he did and wouldn't have done it in the way that he did because it would have exposed him to a head. It would have been a legal hit on a defender and not a legal head, leaving aside the whole headshot discussion on that. And the more I think about it, though, the more I think that it's good to let the goalies play the puck wherever they want.

And if you want to, because what it does is it punishes offenses who don't control the puck. If you, I mean, of course, the only reason that Lundk was just playing the puck was that a star deliberately passed him the puck. That's not what they thought what they were doing. They, you know, they would have just called it a dump in, but that's what you do. You're passing the puck to the goalie. So if you don't want that to happen, don't do that.

And so I think if you keep the goalies in the nets, you're going to let teams dump it in, which is boring, boring hockey. So I think you want to do things that punish teams that dump the puck in, and and goalies who know how to play the puck are a great version of that. Yeah, I see what you're saying. I'm just talking about it purely from the perspective of, you know, obviously guys just generally kind of, you know, act or try to be stuff they're not. And a lot of these goalies are trying to be these playmakers out there

and trying to, you know, get the puck going the other way and spring the breakout. And they're just not very good at it. So I think just like from an efficiency perspective, I think that, you know, Golees, there's the rare case here. They can actually do some stuff with the puck, but most guys probably should just stay in their crease because the risk of a weird bounce off the boards or whatever coming back out front and being a goal

is probably higher than them actually setting up a scoring chance that's going to other way. Yeah, I don't mind people who do so. I think is getting scored on. Yeah, I think that's fair. Great. Do you have anything else on your list? I do. I have two more things,

and these are both, the rule things. One is a stats thing, and the other one is about point systems. The first thing about stats is that I want to see special team stats that aren't completely ridiculous. The penalty kill percentage and powerplay percentage, they don't mean anything,

and the way that they're defined clearly makes no sense on their face. When you take a three-second powerplay and you treat it the same as 120-second powerplay, you're going to come up with stats that are garbage, and then they get quoted all around the league. And there's a lot of people spending a lot of time talking about nonsense. And I think that the league could just fix it if they just said, you know, the stat was bad.

We kept it for a long time. It was our mistake. And here we're going to do something, I mean, something more useful. Just goals per hour would be much more useful. Yeah. But, I mean, that's a pipe dream. But it's also one of the easiest things to fix if anybody ever wanted to fix it. And to say nothing of people who, like, you know, like Eric Parnasse,

to introduce much more sophisticated stats. You know, level of sophistication is a matter of taste for stats. Some people want the simple stats. Some people want very complicated, sophisticated stats. You know, I think we can all agree that we don't want garbage stats that tell us literally nothing but the value of a particular set of the eyes. Yeah, I think on a related note, I'm perfectly cool with on my wish list adding, you know, have the NHL dump SAP and hire someone like, oh, say, Michael Blake McCurdy to help

make their website an actual thing people go to and use rather than the running joke it's been and continues to be. Well, my annual revenue is considerably less than SAPs, much to my own personal sadness. So, you know, they must be doing selling rate. So what's your last one? I think you said you have one left. My last one is I would like point systems that aren't gimmicks, that don't reward gimmicks. Yes.

And so I don't mind the gimmicks themselves. Three and three overtime, I think, is very, very fun, but it's clearly a gimmick. The rules are totally different from the rest of hockey, namely three people aside instead of five people inside. Whereas the shootout is even more gimmicky, although I also don't mind it from a pure entertainment point of view. I like the things,

and fans clearly adore them. Fans in the sense of people who go into the buildings. Both shootouts and transfer to overtime are fantastic crowd pleasers. And so my strategy is to have a point system that includes those

things, it just doesn't make them worth nearly as much. So fighting through 60s, minutes and being unbeaten to get a point for a tie is extremely good in the point system. We had ties for a very, very long time, and nobody ever argued that you didn't deserve the point for being unbeaten after 60 minutes. And part of the trouble with the three-point system is not just that there's three points for some games and two for other games, which is bad, but that that extra point is way too easy to get.

All you have to do is make one play, one time, in a gimmick, and I think that's unfortunate. So point systems, point systems where you had ties and you got one point each and that was it, except you still played one or both of the gimmicks and then gave people a much, much smaller reward, just enough so that they would actually do it, so they'd actually put people on the ice to entertain the fans, but not nearly as much as a full standings point. Like maybe a special, differently colored point that could only be used for tie breaks, so that you would come, so that you would, at the end of the year, now these guys have 80 points and these guys also have 80 points,

but those guys won three shootouts, and those guys won only one shootout, so that that's better. That's enough just so that people wouldn't, especially late in the year, they wouldn't just say, ah, you know, throw out whoever they want. But already you see teams doing things, you know, for theatrical reasons, which may or may not be the highest expected value in terms of who's going to win a game. Like Chris Neal, for instance, taking a shootout shot in his 1,000th, his 1,000th and first game, his first home game in Ottawa, which is, you know, I don't think there's any, even the best defender of Neil would say that he was the best possible chance. that the senators have on their bench to score. But on the other hand, it was fantastic theater, and the building came alive like at no other time. You know, and so those kinds of the...

And so, like, that instinct to please the people who are in the ice, who are in the rink on the day, I think, is good, and it should be rewarded. So I don't want to get rid of the gimmicks for that reason. But in the longer term, you fix those problems with the point system. And so I'd rather just see the bonus winner point, which is much too easy to get the E changed into something. else. Yeah, yeah, I'm all for that. I think even Chris Neal probably was like, wait, really? Me? Like, you want me to

take this? Oh, he had to get a smile as big as the moon on his face. I had, I mean, his sense of theater is as good as anybody else is. It's true. Yeah. If there's one thing about Chris Neal, it's his, it's his immaculate sense of theater. Um, I mean, theater comes in a lot of different types. Yes. Yes, for sure. Um, Micah, man, it's, uh, that was fun. I'm glad we did that. Um, I, I can't recommend your work enough to people. And I think that if someone out there is kind of scrambling, looking for a last minute gift for someone in their life that they know or suspect to be a hockey nerd,

I would definitely suggest something like a subscription to Michael's work online because it's fantastic and it's a must-see. Thank you very much. It's always a pleasure. Absolutely. Happy holidays to you and yours, man, and we'll have you back on in the new year. You too. Take care. The Hockey P.D.O.cast with Dmitri Filipovich. Follow on Twitter at Dim Filipovich and on SoundCloud at soundcloud.com slash hockeypedocast.