The Hockey PDOcast - Episode 149: Fixing The Game

Episode Date: March 9, 2017

Tyler Dellow joins the show to discuss his time working with Dallas Eakins and the Edmonton Oilers, the adjustments we can make to improve the NHL product, and the main takeaways from this year's Sloan Analytics Conference. Here’s a quick rundown of the topics covered: 2:25 Dellow's Time in Edmonton 7:45 Getting Info Through to Coaches and Management 13:30 Position names and Soccer 16:30 Special Teams Adjustments 21:00 Analyzing Hockey vs. Soccer & Basketball 25:00 The Blue Jackets Power Play 26:45 Rule Changes GMs should be discussing 37:45 What we learned from the Sloan Conference Sponsoring today’s show is SeatGeek, which is making it easier than ever before to buy and sell sports and concert tickets. They’re giving our listeners a $20 rebate off of their first purchase. All you have to do is download the free SeatGeek app and enter the promo code PDO to get started. Every episode of the podcast is available on iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play, and Stitcher. 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 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 Filippovich. and making his debut to the show. It's been a long time coming. It's Tyler Delo. Tyler, what's going on, man? Hey, Dimitri, not much. How you doing, pal? I'm doing well.

It's been a few days since we chatted. We hung out quite a bit in Boston at Sloan, which was pretty fun. Have you sorted out that spontaneous bleeding situation you had going on? Yeah, actually, okay, well, this is, let's explain this. This is really inside baseball for those that weren't there.

Very inside baseball. We were doing the panel together, at Sloan and I cut myself shaving that morning and right before we went on, it started bleeding again and it would not stop. And so I thought I had it under control when we were starting. And, you know, I said to, I was sitting next to Hillary Knight and I said, if you can notice it's bleeding, just give me a shove and I'll deal with it. And I guess we were too far apart for her to do anything because I realized it's on mine. I'm like, oh, this isn't good. And so I jumped off and finally somebody in the audience had a Band-Aid and she came over, provided me with

band-aids, so I managed to get back up and do it. But it's funny, you know, like Sloan being Sloan afterwards, I was telling this story to you, I think it was Matt Kane and Ryan Stimson and someone else was there. And this other person, I guess just a random scientific guy, he's like, oh yeah, if you cut a mole, it will bleed forever because I don't know, there's blood vessels or something. I got like a five-minute explanation about why that bad thing to do. So the downside was that I cut myself and it wouldn't stop bleeding. The upside is that someone was there to explain why. Yeah.

And also it was like a very hockey panel thing of us to do to someone to start randomly bleeding. So we fit right in. It fits with the sport. I don't know. Yeah. I've been telling you for a while. I mean, nothing good can come from shaving.

Just don't do it. Yes. No, that seems to be the advice I'm getting from all the young people with your beards and such. Unfortunately, I know what you're good Serbian stuff, you people can grow beards. My people don't seem to do it so well. Yeah, yeah, that's good.

It's a good point. All right, let's get into this. I think we'll talk about a bit about Sloan and all sorts of other sort of various NHL topics, but I think it'd be a bit disingenuous for us to start this show anywhere than other discussing your time in Edmonton a little bit just because I feel like fans are always itching for a chance to kind of get a peek behind the curtain and a glimpse of what's really happening behind the scenes with their favorite teams. And you obviously got to live it out a bit for a few years there. So I don't want to put you in like an uncomfortable. spot or, you know, get you to open up old wounds or talk about stuff you're not, you're not very comfortable talking about. But I think there's, there's some insightful stuff we can get into

with that. Oh, yeah. No, it was a, it was a fantastic experience, you know, like anybody who is interested in this stuff and gets a chance to learn, you know, how people run hockey teams who've had a lot of success doing it, like, like Peter and Craig and Kevin and Scott, you know, it's, it's a wonderful opportunity and I know a lot more about how things work and, you know, have formed some of my own opinions than I did before. So, so yeah, no, it was a great experience. It was, you know, the really interesting part for me was working with, with Dallas. And Dallas wasn't really somebody I knew a ton before he got hired by the Oilers. I subsequently found out sort of secondhand. I think he used to read my website.

So, because he's, he's kind of an interesting character. He's really. really interested in sort of finding edges. Like, it's funny, in 2015, Dallas was at Sloan, and I happened to be there that year as well. And it was interesting, like, we were sitting in on a fitness panel talking about sort of training athletes for sports like hockey, right? Like, where there's a lot of short, high-intensity bursts. And it was amazing because, like, the sports science side of things isn't really something that I was all that familiar with. And I still wouldn't say I'm familiar with it, but I've gotten kind of interested in it through knowing Dallas, and I've kind of gotten into cycling as well, and that's very much a science-driven

sport. But it was funny sitting in it because I said to Dallas, like halfway through. I was like, everything these guys are saying, I've heard from you or I've heard from a guy by the name of Dean Gallich, who was working with the Oilers at the time as a kind of fitness consultant, and Dean trains all sorts of high-performance athletes. I think he's done some work with the military as well. So it was kind of a case where I think, you know, Dallas is constantly, you know, he's the kind of coach who's always looking for an edge. And so he and I, he and I got to know each other sort of over the course of the 2013-14 season. I spoke at a presentation or the others had a coaching seminar at the start of 2013. And I got invited out,

so I went out and did a little chat. And, and I talked to Dallas a little bit afterwards. And, you know, beyond that, we didn't talk too much in 2013-14, but at the summer of 2014, he emailed me and he said, look, you know, you do some interesting stuff. And he said, you know, I want to float your name around to a few places if that's all right with you. And I was like, sure, you know, that was great. He didn't owe me anything. And I'd probably been more critical of Dallas than I had of any Oilers coach when I was writing. Like, I think, and not to get off on a tangent, but, like, I think it's really difficult to criticize coaching intelligently. I think it takes a lot of time to sort of figure out what are they doing, what are they supposed to be doing, and does it make sense?

And you also have to figure out, like, what are the options available to the coach? Like, if the other guy's throwing out Patrice Bergeron and Zadano-Chara, you don't have a good option. You know what I mean? Yep. Yeah. So, sorry, I'll just wrap this up. So anyway, I know we got to know each other that way, and then one thing led to another, and there we were 2014. team. Yeah. Well, I imagine that, you know, he was probably one of the biggest proponents or biggest

supporters in the organization of bringing you on board to kind of help find some of those edges. And, you know, I was looking at the numbers because it's been a few years now. So I was trying to jog my memory and what was going on in Edmonton at the time. And, you know, for a few years there, Oilers were at like a 43, 44 percent, a coursey team, which was like in the bottom three or four in the league. And then all of a sudden at the start of 2014-50 and it jumped up to like near 49 percent, which was quite a dramatic improvement, but I imagine that, you know, he probably just got some poor Puckluck

and weren't winning a lot of games and Eekins ultimately wound up paying the price for that? I don't want to get into why, you know, I think we didn't win. Ultimately, we didn't win enough. And when you don't win enough, that's what happens in sports. That's all for us.

So, yeah, no, that was too bad. But, you know, they say, there's a saying, I used to practice law and they say in law that you learn more from the cases you lose than you do from the cases you win. And, you know, so that was a great learning opportunity. And I know I certainly took a lot of stuff away from that that will help me both writing. And, you know, if I ever ultimately do something on the hockey side again. Yes, yeah.

There were a lot of learning opportunities in those few years. So I think a big topic that we kept harping on during our Sloan panel was finding a way to kind of take the next step with a lot of our analysis, just in the sense that, you know, for years now, we've been coming up with some really cool stuff and some new findings online, but there's still that next hurdle to take in terms of actual application,

whether it's, you know, down to an on-ice perspective, passing along to coaches who are then using it with their players, or whether it's actually passing it along to your GMs or ownership and making player personnel decisions that way. Like I imagine that was like a, a big, big eye-opening or learning experience for you during your time there. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like, talking about the coaching, you know, like, it's funny.

Like, when you're outside, if you haven't played pro hockey, you really have no idea how the coaching works as far as, like, what's their process and how do they go about pulling information and giving it to their players and what's their process sort of on a day-to-day basis in terms of preparing for games. and, you know, a big thing I find with a lot of analytic stuff is, you know, I'll read it and I'll say, okay, if I was giving this to a coach, how would I make this actionable? Because you can't go to the coach and say, we give up too many shots. Right.

You know, that's not helpful. And so how do you make it smaller and make it actionable? And that's something, it's funny, I'm actually working on something just finishing off right now for the athletic, looking at penalty killing and forwards. And that's an area, actually it's funny, it's an area, one of the first times I talked to a hockey guy, he said to me, he's like, you guys worry too much about five on five, you know, what about special teams? Right. And he was absolutely right. And so I've tried to sort of throw some more of my own attention at that.

And I've noticed, like, the community's doing a really good job of there's more stuff coming up with that, particularly, I think, with five on four, because it's kind of sexy and the big names are involved. Yeah, and I'm interested in four on five. So, you know, like I'm working now on sort of coming up with ways where you can, you know, measure players in ways that you could give it to a coach or give it to a manager and say, look, this is a problem, this is a problem. And it's a discrete thing where, you know, they can make a choice as far as using somebody differently. But basically, I really think a lot of, you know, what you're doing with analytics, you know,

it's great if you can find a solution on your own. but if you can define a problem very, very tightly, and then you're working with people who have a lot of expertise in hockey, they can frequently come up with a solution to it. Well, I think that here's something that we need to get better at. And I know that especially back when you were still writing for your own blog, you would do this a lot, and I really admire it just that, you know, not every article you write or everything that you discuss

has to necessarily have like a convenient answer at the end of it conclusion like it's okay to uh just raise critical questions and kind of question whether the beliefs that we've had all this time were right in the first place or whether we should be evolving and like the penalty kill and power play is is a great example of that like there's so much stuff in hockey these days that it's like you ask someone well why aren't you doing this or why haven't you have you ever thought about maybe using your players this way and the common refrain you get back is well not really because it's just always been done this way and i i always kind of find that to be an amusing answer because it's it's it's such an easy thing to say but it like doesn't actually

mean anything if you think about it yeah no that's and it's funny and i can't remember like i read so much sports stuff that i start to remember the context for it but there's there's two things that come to mind me there the first is that uh it's a line about bill james i think talking about prefering um um you know an honest mess to a tidy lie and you know i think it's fine to say look you know um um This is where I think the data could take us beyond this. I don't know. As opposed to being super conclusive and glossing over maybe some areas of critique or challenge. So I definitely think there's something there.

And then the other, the second half of that, I've lost my train of thought, but I knew that was going to happen. Trying to remember two anecdotes at once is hard. But the second half of that really to me is, oh, oh, if we, you know, if we, you know, if we were starting today, is this the way we do it? Right. Right? Because so much stuff kind of evolves and practice over years. And, you know, sometimes it's good.

But sometimes I think, you know, teams or hockey kind of gets trapped into something. And it's good to say, like, if we were starting this today, is this the way we do it? And I think you've seen examples in hockey. Like, you know, one example for me is kind of, like, there's been a real decline in sort of pure fighters. and I don't think analytics can really take any credit for that, although it's something that a lot of us sort of said, look, it's hard to believe that sort of the mystique around these guys makes a lot of sense, and you're better off if you have somebody to play.

I don't think that's what happened here, but I think what happened was a lot of coaches and managers were asking themselves some sort of variance of the question. If we were starting this today, is this the way we do it? And they came to the conclusion that, no, you know, we'd rather have a guy on the fourth line who can give us something on the penalty kill or whatever. And as a result, every time one of those guys disappeared, the next guy asking himself, if we started this today, is this the way we do it? There was one fewer fighter around the league he had to worry about, which made the answer no that much stronger. Yeah, I think that that's a great point about if we started from scratch right now.

like I think the game would look dramatically different. And one particular sticking point I think with people is just the positional names, how we've sort of boxed guys in. Like the term defenseman is a great example because it just like paints this picture of that's just so different from what's actually going on right now in 2017 where we're still struggling with what a defenseman is supposed to look like or what a good defensive play is. And I just think like if you change the name all of a sudden to like a soccer term like a back or something or even like a,

a guard like in basketball. Like I think that would just change our perception and the way we evaluate the position so much more. Yeah, what's interesting. Like I kind of think of hockey as being sort of like soccer, but with players filling different positions at different times. So when a team has the pocket going forward, it's almost like they don't have any defenders.

What they have are midfielders and strikers. And then when they're defending, it's almost like they don't have any strikers. It's like they have midfielders and defenders. So it's sort of like a game. It's kind of like soccer. If you compress the pitch down to 200 feet by 85 or whatever. And then if you then got rid of a bunch of the players and said to some of the other players,

you have to fill multiple roles. So I agree with you. Like I think the term defenseman, like it does, you know, people kind of get hung up on the fact, well, you know, does he defend? Does he defend? And it kind of misses the point that that's maybe half the job. And the other half the job is, you know, being a midfielder when your team has the puck when your team's going forward.

Yeah. Okay, I'm going to pitch you on an idea. I've been mulling over back and forth in my head for a few weeks here. But before we do that, let's pay some bills in here from a sponsor. We actually haven't done one of these in a while, but I've got some exciting news to share with all of you. We've got Ckeek back on as a sponsor, the PDO cast. And hopefully that will help save you guys a bunch of time and money in your pursuit of tickets

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So all you got to do is download the Seek app and enter the promo code PDO today. Now let's get back to the show. All right. So here's my idea. Let me know if this is completely crazy or this is, something you thought about or if we're on the right track here. So just up based on the topic of you know, power plays and penalty kills, we've seen this shift that you've written about it in power plays going to more of a four forward one defenseman set this year and even the year before.

And obviously, I mean, it makes sense. We know that you're going to give up a bit more coming the other way, but ultimately the net gain is going to be positive because you're going to be generating so many more shots and so many goals. And I wonder what the next, adjustment to that is on the on the flip side of things with penalty kills because that is has been an area that has been pretty slow to adapt and I just kind of wonder what we're going to see there to kind of combat this this new offensive approach on on the power play uh I have no idea to be honest I think that's I think that's a great question um and it's interesting because I do think penalty kill learned like if you look at Washington's power play this year I think teams early in the year

we're finding a way to take away kind of the OB-shot. So I don't know. I actually don't know what the answer to the question is if I was trying to solve it. I think there's ways to identify penalty kills that are doing well against the four-forward 1D and to look at what they're doing and see whether or not there's something in there

that can be lifted and taken to your team. So, you know, I guess I don't have an answer for you. I do have an approach on how to get an answer. And I'm sure someone will do that at some point. Well, I have a working theory. Do you have a working theory, Demetri? Yes, a little. I mean, obviously, we don't have any, unfortunately,

any sort of statistical backbone here to kind of test this theory because it hasn't really been done yet. But just like, if you're pivoting from the idea of, you know, if we were just starting from scratch right now, how would you model your penalty kill and your approach? Like, I've yet to hear a compelling. argument for why teams are so insistent on using two forwards and two defensemen to kill penalties? Like why beyond just having a reprogram guys and make them kind of solve playing different

positions? And maybe that's something you'd have to do in the offseason or during training camp. But like what's stopping teams from going with three forwards and one defensemen to try and combat that and kind of have a more aggressive penalty kill where you're just like you're trying to be on the attack as opposed to just conventionally sitting back and trying to eat up as many shots as you can. in your shin pads. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I'd worry about what happens

once the puck gets played down low because I do think that defensemen are, they have a lot more experience dealing with plays in close to the net from a defensive perspective than forwards do.

And if you're running three forwards 1D, all of a sudden you have a guy down there who that's not what he's trained to do. And I'd be worried about passes getting through and putting the goalie in a tough shot as far as a tough spot as far as the shocks you see

But don't you think that speaks to Where we're at with hockey that like no one has ever even tried it Even for like a stretch of games Like like what's stopping a team like the avalanche or the coyotes who really Aren't going anywhere this season and nothing to lose Just kind of trying it out on occasion and seeing if they can stumble upon something to use moving forward Yeah um no I think that's a like I don't know I'll be honest I'm skeptical of that particular idea but I do think in general you've got a really good point about teams that know they're not going somewhere.

Like it is a good opportunity to try some things that, you know, maybe you've wondered about, but, you know, you've wondered about, but you've never really tried. Let's give you an example. Like, you know, I was talking about face off recently, and I saw Paul Gostad. He taught himself to take base off either way. So if he was taking a face off on his left side, he'd take it, you know, on his back. backhand. And if he's on the right side, he'd flip his stick around and take it like he was a right-hander on his strong side. And so, you know, something like that, I wouldn't want to be

fooling around with that in games where they matter. If I had a bunch of guys, and particularly if I had some guys who really struggled on their weak side, you know, that's an opportunity to get some NHL reps, you know, and exploring whether or not that's a solution to the problem. So I do agree with your general point that, you know, if you're a team that's out of it, it's a good chance to kind of try things that you've wondered about, but you've never really put into practice. Well, I guess you've got to weigh and balance the opportunity cost because, you know, maybe you stumble upon something, but you don't really want to show it off to the rest of the league

while you're not going to actually be tangibly benefiting from it. Like maybe you're kind of just like saving it in your back pocket for when you're actually competitive and have a chance to win games that matter. So I guess that that would be the argument for why you wouldn't want to showcase too much, you know, new, innovative stuff when you're not really going anywhere. Yeah, although, you know, there's nothing stopping you from trying it for a couple of games and if it works, just putting it away. Like, I think something that's really underappreciated is how difficult pre-scouting is in the

NHL. And it's funny, they call it pre-scouting. And it's, I've never understood that because nobody talks about post-scouting. They don't do a video review. They don't do a post-scouting. do a pre-scout. And, you know, and I was talking about this with some of the people down at Sloan this weekend, but I really do think hockey is the most complicated sport from the coaching perspective in terms of the complexity of the game and the frequency of the games. So, you know,

you look at soccer. They're playing at most twice a week, and there's 11 guys on the pitch and maybe three substitutes. So it's a pretty standard thing. You look at basketball. What do they, what do they play with, an eight or nine-man rotation? So they have the same frequency Maybe a little more of games as hockey But your rotation is much simpler Than a hockey team's rotation, which I'll come to And so is the other guys

So when you're game planning, it's a lot more straightforward On football, one game a week Super complex sport, but one game a week Baseball You know, you're playing series of three games So basically you have one or two opponents Two opponents to prepare for per week Right

So and and even then you know like it's there's one pitcher per game or one starting part of me pitcher per game for the other team and then you think about hockey right so to start with you've got three main game states with game states with five on five four on five five five five and then within those game states you've got these ridiculous rotations where you know if you're the head coach of teen a you've got a five on five rotation of 12 forward six D you you've got a five on four rotation of two units and then you've got two, four on five rotations of, or two or three, four on five rotations of forwards and

defense and the other guy's got the same thing. So when you're going in to play the other team, you know, particularly like say you're at a conference and you're playing a team that played the night, or you played the night before and you're playing again the next day, it's a team you're going to see twice all year and you don't have a ton of time to prepare. So I think, you know, I think the fear of, so I guess my point first of all is that, um, You know, teams in the regular season are more limited by the schedule and complexity of the game in terms of doing the pre-scouting than people might think in my view. And secondly, when you talk about more broadly, like, should you be worried showing something, I wouldn't worry about it for a couple of games. And it's funny.

Like, you look at Columbus's Power Play this year, and it's one of my favorite stories of these things. But it took forever for people to kind of catch on to it. Right. And, you know, I watched them play against a team that was, you know, opposite conference, so they wouldn't see Columbus a lot. And the first game, you know, it looked like Columbus caught them with some things. And then the second game, it looked like they suddenly, and they played fairly quickly in succession. At the second game, it looked like, you know, they were like, okay, here's what they're going to do.

Let's take that away. And, you know, and I think Columbus now has had the league maybe catch up to them a little bit on the power play. because I know that power play, that first unit's been struggling a bit. But it takes longer than people think. And if you're a coach and you only have so many hours in the day, you know, for every hour that you invest in your team, you're going to get payoff for however many games you have left in the season. Whereas if for every hour you invest in the opponent,

particularly if it's an opponent at the other conference, you know, your payoff is relatively limited compared to what you could get putting your time in your own team. Yeah. you know that meme that's online where it's like find someone who looks at you the way blah blah blah looks at whoever there should be a meme that's like find someone who talks about you the way tyler delo talks about the columbus bluejackets powerplay you love that thing man i've heard you talk about it like 15 times well i just you know like it's to me it's such a fascinating thing like it's um it's fascinating to me that it was sort of a power play

because i like one of the things i like about power plays i find fascinating is i'm not sure that necessarily you want your, you know, your quote unquote best players on them. Like, it's about finding people who can fill a role and do a job. Right. And so, like, you know, that Columbus power play, like, they're, you know, they're good players on there, but Sam Gagne is not a star. Right.

And, but on that, you know, on, in the context of that power play, doing what he was asked to do, you know, he could do it very well. You know, Nick Polino is not a big star. Although he's probably more famous than, you know, he's a better player in Gagne, but, but, you know, He was killing in there. Same with Atkinson. Like, to me, the story of that or the interesting thing about coaching and, you know,

where you can identify things that you can maybe do well is when you can identify a player. Like, you know, I don't know. Anyone can say, hey, you know who we get in the power play? Sidney Crosby. It's a little more, it's a little more challenging to go, hey, you know who'll be good on the power play? Sam Gagnang, our fourth line center. Like that to me is, you know, I like stuff like that because it, you know, I like stuff like that

because it kind of suggests opportunities for teams where they can find advantages in the future. Yep. You know, I completely agree. I mean, it's the ultimate example of just kind of the parts just adding up to being something completely greater. Let's pivot a bit and talk about some of these rules or maybe the ones they haven't been talking about at the GM meetings that we'd like them to discuss. And I don't know, I was completely baffled by the fact that they viewed what's going on in the NHL landscape right now. just said we're perfectly cool with just keeping the entire offside rule the way it is right now because I think it's just so fraught with just problems and loopholes that keep negatively

impacting the game that are pretty easily solvable but they just don't really seem interested in addressing them at this point yeah I'd like to see I'd like to see the uh I'd like to see a time limit if nothing else put on the offside challenge and I'd like to see the league look at maybe shifting a TV time out to cover it like say we said to the linesman or we said, okay, you have two minutes and 30 seconds to look at it. And beyond that, you don't get extra time. Like at that point, the iPad or whatever they're using shuts off. And you have to make a decision. Because I think you can stare at it forever at some, you know, sometimes trying to parse it. But if you can't make a decision in two minutes and 30 seconds,

to me, it seems obviously inconclusive. So rather than staring at it, for another five minutes, you know, let's just have the call on the ice stand, get on with the game, and we've gotten a TV time out of the way. And I think there would be some real benefit there from a game flow perspective. And it's just like, there's a balance,

and it's funny, like you're talking about this in law, but there's like a balance between getting the right decision, which is obviously something that law, and I suspect officiating value, and finality, right? Like at some point it needs to be over, and some of these offside reviews, I think that the value of finality and ending it

is not being taken enough into account. Yeah, it's, I don't know, it's so frustrating to me just because it seems like they're making a big problem out of something that doesn't really isn't really there, it doesn't really need to be such a problem. Like, I just think the entire concept of, I know you were tweeting about this, but it's a great point about how,

like why wouldn't you be allowed to open it up as soon as you're in the offensive zone so that you can kind of regroup and maybe reload in the neutral zone and then come back in with speed in the offensive zone. Like that would open up the space because instead you're just kind of cramming everyone into this small little quadrant of the ice

which doesn't really seem to make sense intuitively. Yeah, no, so just to clarify what you're talking about because you kind of jumped in there without clarifying. And I was talking on, I put out sort of a note on Twitter the other day, talking about how I'd like to see the offside rule changed, which is I would like to see

I call it making the blue line permeable once the team has gained the offensive zone, as long as they had two guys in there, I'm okay with letting them take the puck back out to the red line. And for me it's an issue of space. I think that the game, there's big

players, they're well coached, they know how to take away space on the ice. And the blue line, almost becomes sort of a punitive thing where it's holding teams in. It's like having a ceiling that's too low. It's like being in a basement with a six foot ceiling and you're

constantly ducking. And you know, so what happens, you know, if you watch a game and watch like an extended sequence of offensive zone play and just watch how the defensive team moves around and they're kind of in like a little group of five guys and they move as a unit

and they're just you know, they're aiming to take away space. and they've made the calculation that doing that kind of prevents anything dangerous from happening and so they can stay in their tight little unit and not take risks and wait to the point where the offensive team gets into a bad spot and force the turnover.

Now what I think the league should look at happening to try and increase some offense is make that blue line permeable because imagine if the puck goes back to the point and if you're the defenseman and you're looking and you see two or three bodies on their team between you and the net and you don't really want to go D to D because they've got a guy out high on the far side of their, you know, box or five-man unit.

So what do you have? You have a shot that's probably going to get blocked or you can go into the corner. What if you can just pull up into the neutral zone? And your partner can pull up into the neutral zone. And one more of your guys can pull up. And all of a sudden, you're going to tear apart that kind of five-man unit that defense and create all sorts of space for wingers or forwards to kind of cut in between the lines and take a pass. or if they decide they're going to stay in that unit, you know, you can, you know, pull back and come in with speed and all of a sudden they're going to be trying to defend flat footed.

And it's interesting, like this is, to me, an argument that flows from data. Like, if you look at what teams do shooting percentage-wise after they win an offensive zone face off, it's pretty low. And the reason is because the other team has five guys behind the puck defending. And, you know, I'm not sure this would work. but it seems to me that if you could open up some space and make it harder for teams to have those five guys behind the puck, you know,

you might be able to bump up the shooting percentage, get some more goals in the game. And frankly, like, I think hockey's that it's most exciting when it's kind of a rush game with guys working with speed. Like, it's, you know, it was so funny. You remember that L.A. St. Louis playoff series a few years back? And so many people were like, oh, this is great, this is great. and I was like, this is 60 minutes of guys slamming each other along the boards.

Like the fuck maybe got off the boards for like 30 seconds a game. And otherwise it was just like, oh, I thought it was, I didn't enjoy watching it. I didn't think it was, you know, like, I didn't, I don't know. Like people talk about liking that kind of hockey. You know, I accept that sometimes you got to play it. But, but I think from the league's perspective, like you can compare this to basketball, right? Like, remember how the NBA 15 years ago? maybe it's a little more

but like they had those like Knicks teams that were just like you know they were just sort of fight or not fight but they're very physical tight defensive and scores were like 8180 and you know like the NBA

was was not particularly popular at the time and then you know they found a way to really open up the game and you know create shots and all of a sudden like I'm not even a basketball guy like the sport I don't I've never followed it

particularly strongly, but man, it's exciting and it has a lot of buzz. And it's because I think like the NBA kind of gets it. Like there's things that are the essence of the game. And the essence of the game and the NBA to me is five guys on each team, two baskets and go at it. And beyond that, you're trying to create a product that makes people sit up and go, holy cow, this is exciting. And, you know, so to go back to that rule change,

I really get people to sit up and go, wow, this is, fantastic, you know, because I think it would create more skating, more speed, more opportunities for skill. And, you know, series like that L.A. San Jose or that L.A. San Luis. I don't ever need to see that again. Yeah. No, I agree with you. I mean, that's something that NBA has done a really good job of sort of realizing what it has going for it in terms of star power and what gets people excited and then kind of modeling their game or allowing it based on the rules to kind of cater to that and let those stars shine. And it's just like it's it's so mind-blowing to me because you look at just the sport of hockey.

And it's, I think everyone would agree. It's like such a cool, exciting sport that has so many possibilities. But then I feel like the NHL just hasn't really done anything to like allow it to kind of spread its wings and fly and really reach its potential. And I think this is just like a small little thing. But I think it would go a long way or at least provide some new interesting opportunities. I mean, we see it kind of in three on three OT. Like I know it's an entirely different animal. but you see when guys are in the offensive zone and maybe the three defenders get settled

and they kind of lose some of their momentum there or don't have any obvious passing lanes, they just pass the puck back out into their neutral zone and regroup maybe change on the fly and then come back in with speed and create a nice opportunity. And I think that we could see a lot more of that a 5-1-5. They just made this one little adjustment. Yeah, no, I agree with that. And it's funny, like, you know, you talk about other sports. Like, it's not just basketball.

you know like other sports you know like their sport like baseball is a very traditional sport and they made some changes to try and enhance you know excitement and offense in the past like they dropped I think it was 67 they dropped the pitcher's mound after that year maybe 68 but they had like a year of the pitcher and I think I think he has won the batting title with a 301 and and they were like this is no good drop the mound

the American League introduced the designated which I'll be honest I'm still a little sketchy on but but that was them you know looking for ways you know without violating the spirit or the essence of the game to to make it a more exciting product um you go to um so that's that soccer in after the 1990 world cup soccer ban the back pass to the goalkeeper his teams to just kick it back to the goalie and he'd pick it up and it was boring and you know again soccer is a pretty traditional sport and yet they kind of recognize the need to make a change there. And similarly, like soccer, you know,

even going back 10 years before that, they recognized how the incentives of the point system, because it was two for a win, one for a draw, were influencing what teams tried to do. And they were willing to make changes to, you know, try and pursue a more exciting game. So, you know, like, I don't think that there's anything wrong with coaches doing everything they can

to win within the context of what the current game is. Like every, it's popular to kind of bash coaches. The goal, you know, the coaches wreck the game. The coaches wreck the game. Well, the coach wants to keep being a coach, right?

And, you know, you can't blame the coach for trying to figure out ways in which, you know, he can maximize his chances of continuing to be a coach. What I, what I do think you can do is, you know, the league can say, okay, well, coaches are going to coach.

But we as a league, you know, we don't care about any one particular individual coach and his careers, or, you know, if he's able to keep his job. So we're continually going to be looking for ways to inject offense into the game and make it harder to defend. Because to me, the balance has gone way too much towards the defendant. So I think this is a good place for us to, or one last point to hit on before we get out here. And that's a little bit of a slow in recap because I imagine a lot of the listeners, weren't able to attend for whatever reason and I haven't really done anything on this show so far to

help recap it. I don't know. What was your favorite part of the Sloan experience and just being there? There were a couple things. I always like just sort of seeing different panels. And I always like seeing different panels and seeing stuff like people from other sports and talking to them. So, you know, it was a good chance for me to talk to some guys I knew a little bit.

Like, oh, darn, I'm going to, Seth, is his last name, Partnow? Seth Partnow, yeah, friend of the podcast. Yeah, Seth. And I find that you get a lot of ideas from other sports about stuff that they're working on. That you go, oh, yeah, I could see how this translates to hockey. And I think it goes the other way, too. Like, it's, I think it's out of fashion now in soccer. But for a while, like, people paid attention to PDO in soccer.

And, you know, like, PDO was never intended to be an end point. It's sort of a point. You go, well, how can we improve it? But it's funny. Like, it was so bizarre reading soccer stuff five years ago, and they were talking about PDO. And I was thinking, this is, what's his name, Brian King, moaning about contracts.

And now there's Europeans, you know, complaining about their soccer teams on the basis of PDO, which was bizarre. But the stuff that really stuck out for me this year, like one thing is Sport Logic had a paper there, and the people aren't familiar with them, they're a data company to track hockey games through video. So what they'll do is, like they, my understanding of their tech is that, you know,

they put the hockey game on a computer screen and the computer watches the game. You can tell I'm not a super technical guy. And the computer tracks what's happening in the game. And so, you know, they're a fairly new company and they're starting to build stuff on top of that. And they had a paper there that I thought was really interesting. It was talking about, you know, identifying contributions to scoring through what are called Markov chains, which as I understand it are, it's kind of like this happens and this happens and this happens. And at every opportunity, there's maybe 30, I'm picking a number of the air,

things that could happen. And if different things happen, there's a different likelihood of scoring. So say I'm coming up the ice on you, Dimitri, and I've got the puck at the blue line. If I beat you and get in and say I beat you and I go wide and get around you. That would never happen, Tyler. Well, I don't know. Can you skate? I play a physical brand of hockey.

I knock you off the puck, I think. Yeah, I... Probably not. I can't skate at all. I suck at hockey. You'd probably be me. All right. Well, I'm not great, but I can skate, you know, forwards and backwards.

So I feel confident that I could get around you. But, you know, imagine how the probability of my team scoring the next goal changes if I get around you versus if you, you know, knock me on my butt and take the puck and shoot it up ice, right? Like it's a change in what's what's likely to happen next. And so they're basically working on developing stuff there. And, you know, what was, like, I had some quibbles with it. And I won't go too far into it because I think they're doing good work. And it's easy sometimes for people to kind of seize on the criticisms. You know, I do think they'd benefit from involving some people with a little more hockey specific knowledge in it.

But what was really cool to me was seeing how, you know, I think they did a pretty good job with little hockey knowledge. of identifying specific skills of players. And so they, you know, they looked at a player, it was Taylor Hall, and they said, you know, this guy is good at, you know, breaking out of his own end with the pocket as I understood it, and also forcing turnovers in the offensive zone. And I thought that was just a tremendous conclusion to reach

from, you know, just using a computer without having a person injected along the way. Yeah. And it's tremendously exciting because it's, suggests, you know, there's some real potential for their technology as far as identifying traits in players. And then you can start getting into questions of synergy and whatnot and do certain players, like if you've got a guy who's great at carrying the puck out and great at gaining the offensive zone, should you try and put him with players for whom that's not their strength?

And I suspect the answer to that's maybe yes. If you're coaching against them, you know, do you want to try and get out your guy who's great at denying zone entries on his side of the ice or do you want to just concede you're going to give up a bunch and maybe save that guy for the marginal case? Like there's a ton of stuff you can do once you start to identify that. And so I looked at that sport logic paper and I was like, yeah, you know, like, you know, there's, there's issues here. But it's very interesting to me that they've identified strengths of a player solely on the basis of computer technology. And so, you know, that I thought was really exciting as far as where's hockey's going. You know, what I think will be good is

once the data starts to make its way to people who have some background in hockey analytics. And, you know, even them working with the, you know, the PhDs. I think you're going to see at that point some really interesting findings start to pour out. Yeah. Yeah, that's the next step. Just sort of getting access to the data so that we can test whether it's, whether they're like repeatable skills and whether they're ultimately meaningful. But just the pure capabilities of the infrastructure they've set up is amazing.

I mean, yeah, it's, I'm excited to see where it goes the next few years. and I think you hit the nail on the head with regards to the benefits of slow, and it was just kind of cool bumping into people from different sports and trying to get ideas of how we can take some stuff that other leagues are doing well and try and apply them to ours. Tyler, thanks for taking the time to chat, man. I've been trying to get you on this show for a while. You were a little gun-shy at start, but I think it went pretty well.

I'm elusive. Very elusive, yes. I finally caught you. Now I just got to get you to follow me back on Twitter. and we'll really be cooking with fire. Ah, I don't tell you. You know, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's a system there to me. There's a method to the madness.

There's a method to the madness. Yes. You get it. Obviously, by not doing the, now maybe I'm wrong here because I was declining to do the PDO cast. So it may be that I'm bad at, uh, at, at the brand stuff. And, uh, you know, not following you is just a, another example of my, uh, failure. Well, I think you're just, you're, you're, you're, you're tactically playing hard. to get and it's uh it's it's it's intriguing me yeah well there you have all right man uh let's uh

everyone can check out your work on uh on the athletic and and all the stuff you're doing there and we'll make sure to get you back on the show sometime in the future now that uh you've been on and seeing that it wasn't so bad yes uh yeah and uh links to work and sometimes the odd graph or whatnot or at delohockey on twitter all right chat soon man yep thanks budd the hockey pdo cast with dmitri philip Follow on Twitter at Dim Philipovic and on SoundCloud at soundcloud.com slash HockeyPedioCast.