The Hockey PDOcast - Episode 268: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Episode Date: December 19, 2018

Rob Pizzola joins the show to discuss the impact of the NHL suddenly changing its stance on sports betting, how it becoming more and more socially acceptable in the mainstream has influenced the market, the pros and cons of wagering on hockey, the effect full-fledged tracking data will have once its finally publicly released, the emotional rollercoaster ride that is daily fantasy, and a variety of other related topics.  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 $10 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. A reminder that we’re hosting a daily fantasy listener league contest over at FanDuel every Thursday this season. While you wait for the next opportunity to play to come around, go over to fanduel.com/PDO and tell them we’ve sent you. They’ll hook you up with a bonus $5 to play with after your first deposit, which will surely come in handy throughout the year. See you there! 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.

Are you ready for the most ridiculous internet sports show you have ever seen? Welcome to React, home of the most outrageous and hilarious videos the web has to offer. So join me, Rocky Theos, and my co-host, Raiders Pro Bowl defensive end, Max Crosby, as we invite your favorite athletes, celebrities, influencers, entertainers in for an episode of games, laughs, and, of course, the funniest reactions to the wildest web clips out there. Catch React on YouTube, and that is React, R-E-A-X-X. Don't miss it. This podcast episode is brought to you by Coors Light.

These days, everything is go, go, go. It's non-stop hustle all the time. Work, friends, family. Expect you to be on 24-7? Well, sometimes you just need to reach for a Coors Light because it's made to chill. Coors Light is cold-loggered, cold-filtered, and cold-packaged.

It's as crisp and refreshing as the Colorado Rockies. It is literally made to chill. Coors Light is the one I choose when I need to unwind. So when you want to hit reset, reach for the beer that's made to chill. Get Coors Light and the new look delivered straight to your door with Drizzly or Instacart. Celebrate responsibly. Coors Brewing Company, Golden Colorado. Pressing to the mean since 2015.

It's the Hockey P.D.O.cast with your host, Dimitri... Welcome to the Hockey Pediocast. My name is Dimitri Philpovich. and sitting across from me at a surprisingly long island in this kitchen is my good buddy, Rob, what's going on, man? Doing well, man. Good to see you. It's great to see you. I haven't seen you since the Sloan Analytics Conference a couple years ago. We've been trying to, I've been coming in and out of Toronto. I've been trying to

get a podcast going together, but for every reason, our schedules have always kind of conflicted. Yeah, I know I travel a lot too. So I remember last time you were in town, we had a message and it just didn't work out, but good to see you this time. Well, I'm excited about this. I mean, you're kind of relatively fresh off of being cited as a source in Elliot Friedman's 31 thoughts, which I'm glad to see your head didn't explode from the fame and you're actually willing to come chat on the podcast. Which is funny because I first met you at Sloan a couple years ago. I had met Elliot before, but he doesn't remember. This is when I was still interning at the score when I first started. And I think Elliot was still there.

Or at least I'd seen him in the building a couple times and interacted with him. But I met Elliot officially formally introduced myself at Sloan last year. And we had a little bit of an off-the-record conversation for about 15, 20 minutes about sports gambling. I guess the name stuck in his mind to reach out to me when the news broke would be about a month ago now. Yeah. And so he referred to you as a semi-pro sports better. And right now, before we started recording, you actually refer to yourself as such.

I do because, I mean, that's the fair term. I was betting on sports for a living, and that was my exclusive sole form of income. Right. Which would be a fully professional sports better, but I'm not anymore. I do some consulting. I have other gigs on the side that lead to income. So it is a semi-professional job. So yeah, I mean, that's the right term.

And he asked me, I mean, Elliot, he didn't pull that out of thin air. He said, what should I call you? And I said, and he kind of laughed when he heard that. But that's what I tell people I am. I'm a semi-pro sports better. Do you feel like, because I feel like, we're going to talk about this, but, you know, sports betting is becoming more, I guess, mainstream or socially accepted now. And it feels like, you know, more people are doing it and it's becoming more of a thing.

Do you feel like those people who, like, have been following an indie band for years? and then now it's exploding and becoming mainstream and you're like so over it or you're feeling jaded by it or are you excited about the fact that it's becoming more of a thing now i'm not excited no to be completely honest you feel like that kind of takes away your advantage a little bit or do you feel like you can take advantage of it more because there's going to be more novice betters so there's there's a number of reasons the first and foremost and this will sound um this will sound arrogant on my part and it kind of is but i hate the fact that there are now so many people in this gambling space who are forced to talk about sports betting who really have no idea who they're talking about or what they're

talking about and they're just forced to do this for a living now kind of been thrown into the fire you see a lot of major networks who have not hired people from outside but instead have converted people from existing sports into gambling writers or sports betting writers and frankly there's just a lot of misinformation that's out there now and as a sports bet or that is extremely frustrating to me seeing people talk like they're experts in something and really not not being an expert in something. As an actual better myself in terms of long-term edge, yeah,

it's certainly concerning. More people involved in the space. It will reduce my edge over time. There will be more people competing in the same market. And I mean, I think about that at least every week. Like hold on to what you have, maximize what you have right now,

and do the most with it because these opportunities might not be available in five years. Right. Wow. It sounds like a really, I had a pressure point there. I feel like I, no,

not really, an existential crisis. You're not the first person to ask me about it and, um, you won't be the last for sure, but it, it's always bothered me. And you know what?

I was probably five years ago, one of those people that, um, probably irked other people because I kind of passed myself off as an expert at that time. And I realize in the span of, you know, even a few years,

how much more I've learned. Right. Um, so I don't think anyone's ever, there's a very, very, small amount of people that are truly experts in the field that really understand everything, but I've already seen so much misinformation.

I'm a huge Twitter guy. I'm on social all the time. I see the gambling articles that are posted and I read them and I see the retweets and the amount of people that are actually reading these and I'm like, oh my God, these are like sheep being led to the slaughter. They have no idea that what they're reading is complete misinformation. So that, I mean, that's the most frustrating part on my end. But as a better, that works in my advice.

advantage as well. The more information that's out there, the larger edge I'll have over time. So, I mean, it's sort of a catch-22. It rubs me the wrong way, but it probably benefits me as well. Yeah, I mean, the reason why I wanted to have you on the show is because obviously, I believe it was like late October now that NHL announced its partnership with MGM. And that was obviously a big storyline. And I don't know, you can correct me on this, but I believe the NBA was the first to wade into these waters. And since then, the MLB has joined as well. Is that correct? I'm not 100% sure on the timeline, but all three. Yeah, all the three have.

So anyways, I mean, it was a big topic of discussion. And I kind of wanted to get you on just to, because I do feel like there's a lot of misinformation, a lot of people talking out of their ass. And I feel like at least you and I can have an intelligent or at least kind of well-research conversation about this and hopefully shed some more light on it. I don't know. It's interesting because in the grand scheme of things, like I brought up, I think that I remember there was once a time where, like, I was just,

I was betting on sports with my brother, and we were kind of doing like online stuff. And when you tell people about it, they'd raise their eyebrows or they'd kind of look at you like you were, I don't know, some sort of a junkie or, you know, there was this whole stigma to it. And now it feels like, and I think fantasy sports goes a long way to adding to this, there's just so much appetite for sports gaming and sports betting. And it makes a ton of sense that the NHL would finally jump into this. Like, I don't know, what was the reason behind it taking so long?

Was it just sort of that moral quandary of kind of like protecting quote unquote the integrity of the game? Or is that pretty much it? I think it was really. I mean, I sat at Sloan in Boston last year and listened to a panel with Gary Bettman talk about how this is something that the NHL is not exploring. They do not want to get behind sports betting. And then six months later, completely different story. And they're in. And I mean, part of it is the NHL and all the pro sports, they're recognizing this as an opportunity.

This is an opportunity to make money. it's an opportunity to increase fan engagement. That's what it's all about. And if people can bet on a game and that's going to increase their interest in the game, then it's silly for the NHL not to partner up with someone and accept the fact that, A, this is already happening. It really is. People are already betting on the games regardless. But now we can make it sort of morally acceptable and bring it to the forefront.

We can do all sorts of things. I mean, we can start increasing the prop wagering for a game, live betting from, in the actual arenas and so on and so forth. So at the end of the day, I mean, they're not dumb. This is an opportunity for them to make money. And at the end of the day, just driving a bunch of fan engagement. So I've just found it so interesting how quickly leagues were quickly took a stance on no. Gambling is a no for us.

And then probably behind the scenes got into a room and said, you know what? This probably makes a lot of sense. And eventually now we're seeing all these leagues come on board with it. What was it? Like, I think Bloomberg was reporting or I guess estimating that would be like well north of like 200 million annual revenue for the NHL. And obviously I feel like that's pretty conservative, especially when you look at what the other leagues are projected to make. And it's it seems like a no-brainer, especially if people are going to be doing it. You may as well like vetted and do it kind of under your own watch. Right. And the numbers are probably a little bit conservative. People don't realize though how far behind the NHL is in North America in terms of of total handle for sports betting, especially in the states. I mean, Canada's not. a problem. Although in Canada, NBA is even surpassing NHL in terms of handle. People are a lot more interested in betting the NBA now, especially with the success of the Raptors. But especially in the United States, you look at the U.S. and total handle on hockey is extremely small. So there's

an opportunity for the NHL to really bite into that market share if they do things right. If they bring more interest to the game, it's always been a little bit tougher down south than it is in the north. But there's an opportunity for them to well exceed that, that particular. Well, so part of the announced partnership between MGM and NHL was that NHL will be sharing its proprietary game data, which it's, I guess, expected to roll out next year, although I feel like we've been hearing that for some time now. And I think, you know, from a practical perspective in terms of my job as an analyst in the sport, when that stuff does become publicly available, I think there's going to be equally, if not more misleading of information,

kind of misleading and misinformation being spread by people who don't understand what those numbers actually entail and how predictive they are. And, you know, we're going to have a vetting process where all these numbers are going to come publicly available. People are going to write articles and do podcasts about shot velocity and how this guy's shooting so hard compared to this other guy. And then eventually a few years later, we're going to run a bunch of statistical research experiments that show that it's actually not that useful of information. And then we're going to look back and think we were idiots for doing it. But there's going to be this window. for people and for teams using the data that are using it more properly or more safely to actually squeeze out value from it. For sure. But when you think about the MGM, for example, getting access to this data, the possibilities are infinite with what they can do with it because we know, or at least I know, that recreational betters, the vast majority of them, they gravitate to betting options. They love to be flooded with options of anything imaginable that they could possibly bet on.

This is why the Super Bowl is so big every year because there's hundreds and hundreds of prop options. There's prop options that span multiple sports. I mean, you can bet a team's points against LeBron James points on a single day. And people love that. So now all of a sudden books have access to all this additional data, they can offer huge prop markets. Who's going to win the next face off in this game? who's going to draw the next penalty in this game. And people will bet it.

So from a sportsbook perspective, it completely makes sense. From a public perspective, this happens. We think that there's a metric out there that is the be all and end all. Of course, is an example. And now we're into the expected goals movement. For sure. These metrics have serious flaws.

And the people reporting on them a lot of times do not understand them either or they don't understand the flaws with these metrics. We will get that just by nature of having access to more data. there's going to be some misinterpretations of the data. I always remember when Boston beat Vancouver in the Stanley Cup and Boston that year led the league in face-offs. And they had all these guys that were, they were winning face-offs at an alarming clip. And the next year was like, you need to get face-off men. Like if a team doesn't have face-off men, then you're in trouble.

But there's actually no correlation between face-off success and points. And it's just the way that that data was interpreted based on a, very small sample size of one team winning a cup with a bunch of, so that's always going to be a problem regardless. Yeah, Dave Steckle used that for a glorious multi, multi-year career in the NHL. Yeah, it's, it's, I'm already foreseeing like,

I think shot velocity and I think skating velocity are going to be two stats that, you know, I mean, they're descriptive. And I think for a casual fan, it might be fascinating, especially on an in-game broadcast to kind of visualize how fast the puck's moving or how fast some of these guys are moving.

But yeah, ultimately I'm sure we're going to find that it might actually be like negatively correlated like maybe shooting the puck slower might be more deceiving for opposing goalies to try and stop sure and there's always the risk too of information overload as well i mean we i love to consume data that's what i do i i love it the more data points i have to work with it's great a lot of people don't feel the same way about that a lot of people are hesitant to move over to analytics or believe in analytics a lot of people just want what's important and they don't want uh everything available to them so you always run the risk of that uh

I mean, it's not a data thing, but you remember back in the day where they had the puck tracker. And it was just a complete change in the ideology of how the game was broadcast. And all of a sudden people's heads blew up and they're like, no, we can't do this. There's a possibility that the broadcasts become overloaded with too much. Where it's just like, no, this is not the hockey that I'm used to and this is not the hockey that I want to watch. And there's a risk. So I think broadcast, NHL, everybody involved has to find a happy medium of not, don't want information overload, but enough to satisfy that appetite for the people that do

have that information out there. I feel like we're also kind of setting ourselves up a bit for disappointment from the perspective of, I feel like there's a certain segment of the hockey fan base that is positioning this puck tracking data that's going to come out as sort of this golden goose that it's going to reveal all the answers to us. And especially I feel like it's people who are like pushing back a bit against Corsi and shot metrics. They're going like, yeah, that stuff's junk, but once we know all this other stuff, that's really going to paint a better picture. And I'm sure it'll reveal certain things that we don't know so far. But like, I'm trying to temper expectations for people, especially in the early going to not just expect that it's going

to completely change the game. Because I'm pretty sure we're probably going to find that a lot of the stuff we have right now is much more useful than some people who are like to believe. Yeah, probably. A lot of the information that's collected at a player level will probably be meaningless, to be completely honest. I would be very shocked if the NHL is ready for the start of next year with some huge database and they're tracking all these metrics. Like that would be very surprising to me. Unless they've been building things out in secret for a long, long time, probably you will see a phased approach over the course of two or three years

and just building on top of some basic metrics that they come out with at a player level. Right. That's what I would. Are you, because you obviously, you work in, with football and with baseball and, and every sport. Like, are you, because hockey gets this rap as being way behind the times in terms of it's embrace and sort of evolution of this stuff. Do you think that's a fair portrayal or do you think sometimes it gets a bit overblown? No, I think it's fair.

I really do. There's less data available in hockey than the rest of the major sports. I think part of that is just the interest level in North America and someone who is going to build out a website or use football outsiders as an example for NFL. There's nothing like that for hockey. I mean, there sort of is. Mani's Corsica. There's the evolving hockey.

and I mean, those are good sites, but they're not to the same level as other big sites that are not only pumping out data, writing content around that data, deriving projections. We're starting to see more and more of that happen, but I think that's fair personally. And especially at the player level, we're starting to see a movement in that over hockey the last couple years. I think there's been some great strides. But I still think it's a little bit behind. Yeah, I mean, obviously it's at a lower level, but just considering the HL's sort of purpose in terms of being a pipeline for the NHL and Developmental League, the fact that we don't have something as simple as time on ice for that league is a bit mind-blowing to me. There's a lot of things. I'll give you an example.

And I know of a group that bets NHL for large amounts of dollars that they actually pay people to watch games and report on metrics. report on things that they feel are more important or that are not reflected in any publicly available data right now. That probably won't happen down the road a couple of years from now. Someone will come along and be publicly giving out what they need. But there are people that pay major expenses every year for people to actually sit down and watch games or say, my definition of a scoring chance is much different than the definition that somebody else

has a scoring chance or a high dangerous scoring chance. And that just doesn't happen in other sports, really. What would you like to see from sort of a practical use perspective, I guess, in terms of a stack? Because I know there's been so much debate about war and hockey and sort of getting one catch-all statistic that's going to be able to encapsulate a player's value. And that would obviously be useful. I'm not sure, like from a practical, especially betting perspective, how value that would be. But like, just in terms of something that we don't have publicly available right now that you think would be a bit of a game changer. Is there anything that comes out?

Yes and no. so something like so for example dom i can't even pronounce his last name loose chicken yeah he's got his game score right yeah loose chisham which is a metric that he basically invented by combining a bunch of other metrics um the way that i built my nchl model is very similar to the way that dom did um i wouldn't i don't have a name for the metric that i use but it's a one that i consider to be proprietary that encompasses everything that i think uh players should be tracked on I'm not really comfortable going into the details. But I think there is room for that type of evolution.

And yes, war, I mean, kind of stealing from the baseball and bringing that over to hockey is another great example. And I think you'll see that evolve. And depending on who's tracking war, just like in baseball, you'll get players wins above replacement being some level on one site and some level on another site and no universal standard. And that's completely fine. Right. It really is because just the same way. that cites that track expected goals right now, which I think I'm aware of three. I think there's Corsca evolving hockey and Moneypuck that are tracking them live. They come out to vastly different

numbers. Yeah. And that was something I learned a couple years ago when I just built my own expected goals because I would rather trust myself to do it than somebody else. And I get different numbers. So I think there's certainly room for more metrics. And I think you will see the evolution of more metrics because we have seen that in every other sport. Yeah. But I think even in baseball, there isn't a universally agreed upon war, right? Right. It depends on whether you check fan graphs or what baseball reference or whatever it is.

You'll get a different number for war. And that's fine. I mean, they're both trying to measure the impact of a specific player and his level above replacement. And there is no right, at least we haven't proven there to be a right way of doing that right now. okay. And I think you're going to see that in hockey. I really do. You already do, like I said, with expected goals and you'll see it with all sorts of stuff, but no one can really accurately

measure the value of a player right now. Yeah. Well, I feel like that's especially true. And my answer to the question that I posed to you would have been, and I know it's not particularly exotic, but just I feel like defensive play especially, we are so far behind in terms of evaluating and kind of capturing it. Because obviously, I mean, there's the concept of like the best defensive play is one where nothing really happens, right? So it's like, how do you put that into a number? And obviously, if a guy's constantly on the ice and nothing's really happening in his own, that's generally a good sign that he's in the right position and he's stopping stuff from happening. But just in terms of that and then sort of goalie play, especially, I mean, we've had some

advancements with goals saved above replacement and stuff like that with the man he does, which is great. But I feel like there's still leaps and bounds to be made there just beyond like looking at a guy's safe percentage. I mean, at least we've come away from goals against average and wins. So like we're making strides, but maybe it's not as happening as fast as some people would like. Right. And maybe, I mean, it could be overload too. Maybe measuring even strength, safe percentages, an accurate indicator of things. I mean, I'm not saying that it is.

But I'm trying to put my, to remember back to last year, I think it was Tobias Anstrom was injured. Yeah. And my model sees Enstrom as having a minimal impact against a betting line. And when he was announced out for a game, betting line didn't move. but you talk to Jets fans and they'll be like, this is insane. Like he has such a massive impact on the game. So that goes to show what you're talking about with the defensive play. Maybe it's not measured properly right now and maybe I'm not measuring it properly.

And maybe betting markets are not accounting for that because there's not good enough data available yet on somebody's defensive impact in hockey. Goalies, you see it all the time too, especially in betting markets where I will have a back. I'll give you an example, Pittsburgh, for example, with. Matt Murray and Casey DeSmith. I think Matt Murray is a worst goalie than Casey DeSmith. I think Matt Murray had a really good run in the playoffs. A few years back, a Cam Ward-esque run, I would say. But since then, has not done a whole lot of anything.

But when he is back for the Pittsburgh Penguins, which looks like it's happening now, he's coming back, the betting market will value him as higher than DeSmith. And I don't think that's right. There's just so many ways to measure goalie impact. now that I'll take my personal stance on what I believe is right, but sometimes the market disagrees, sometimes the general public disagrees. And it's tough. I mean, we will get there at some point, but we're nowhere close yet. Well, I feel like, and some of it is definitely fair. I mean,

I think people generally believe that one player doesn't have nearly as big of an impact in hockey as in basketball, obviously, and especially like, let's say a quarterback in the NFL. But, I mean, at the same time, I do feel like sometimes we go a bit too extreme in the other direction where we devalue superstars and individual contributions in the purpose of the whole team picture. And I look at, I mean, look at a guy like Connor McDavid, for example, right now, just what he's doing in Edmonton and sort of the singular tour to force performance by him. Like, do you think we do a good enough job of capturing just how valuable one game changer

can be? And that's obviously an extreme considering he's by far the best player in the world. But I think even like a guy, like I was doing a podcast today with John Mattis that's coming up. And we were talking about Johnny Goodrow and sort of how he has basically made Elias Linholm into a 30, 35, maybe even 40 goals score this year just by getting him in the puck in the right areas. And I feel like sometimes the way we talk about stars, especially guys to make other guys around them better, we don't do them enough justice based on sort of this whole team concept. Yes. I mean, I'm going to put you on the spot for a second. Connor McDavid.

If he's out for the Edmonton Oilers, do you have any idea what he's worth in terms of a percentage? How much does the Edmonton Oilers percentage chance of winning a game against an average team decrease? Well, I'm not sure if I can give you that answer from a percentage perspective. What I will say is that when he's on the ice, I think they are one of the best, if not the best teams in the league. And when he's not on the ice, they're unequivocally the worst team in the NHL. So I'm not sure from a betting perspective what percentage that would drop down to you, but I imagine it's pretty extreme. So when McDavid's been out for the Oilers, the betting market reacts by about 3%. Right, because he missed that one game with the flu recently, I believe.

They make the Oilers about 3% worse than they would be against a league average team. That is nothing compared to any other sport. It's nothing compared to an NBA player, like you said. Now NBA is a little bit different, shorter lineups. Right. One guy I can play like three quarters of a game. Quarterbacks in the NFL. But I'm just going to run, I have my laptop up in front of me.

here and I'm going to take 3% off the Oilers and tell you where they fit into the league according to my projections and they wouldn't even be in the top in the bottom five of the league right now. Does that pass the sniff test for me? Maybe. Maybe not because Oilers don't have a whole lot of talent. I mean, this is Koskin and that we still don't know what he is. Defensively, this is including clefbaum being out for them.

But there are so many measures of a player impact right now that it's really, really, it's very, very difficult to tell you what a player is worth in the NHL. If there's cluster injuries on a team, three of the top six forwards being out for a team, it's so hard to value what a player that's jumping up from a fourth or third line into a first or second line role, what that downgrade is. There's a million things that go into it right now. And this is one of the struggles with actually modeling the NHL as it is. Yeah.

Well, that's the type of thing I was thinking about, like, for example, when Buffalo got the first overall pick this year and everyone was talking about Rasm's Dali and sort of his impact on the team. And obviously, you know, they're kind of handling him with kid gloves so far and he's not necessarily playing that many minutes. But I just thought like the net positive of adding him would be so big just obviously adding a great player is one thing. But then it's effect on the guys around him where a guy like Rasmus is the line and who I don't think is very good.

Probably some of that is underlying numbers have to do with the fact that he was being asked to play as a top pairing defenseman against the other team's best players. All of a sudden, you bump him down into a more secondary role. Maybe he thrives. and then there's this like domino effect. And I feel like sometimes we don't necessarily do a great job of accounting for that. And I mean, there's obviously a lot that goes into it. And there's still tons of debates about quality of competition versus quality of teammates and what's more valuable and all that.

But you're right. I mean, that kind of just clouds the picture and makes it. I mean, that's part of our job as analysts are better is to try to figure out what is valuable. But I mean, like Josh Levo was traded by the Leafs a few weeks ago or less than a week ago or whatever. and I think Josh Levo is a good player. But how much of that has been Josh Levo playing fourth line minutes or third line minutes against other teams third and fourth lines who are worse than the Leaf's third and fourth lines? I mean, that certainly has some sort of impact. It's not like Levo is playing large minutes against, you know, large minutes against second liners, first liners.

That's not happening. It's kind of, it also, and I hate to use the Leaf's examples, but I do, I'm a die-hard least fan. I watch every Leafs game. So, I mean, that's what sticks with me. But it kind of reminds me when Tyler Bozac was their number one center. Right. And his metrics were terrible. But he was in a role where he was put up against players that were better than him.

He should have never been a number one center. And in a third line center role, he's extremely valuable to a team, or at least more valuable than if he's in a first line center. So there's so much that comes in the play in hockey that makes it more complex than valuing other sports. especially some other sports. I mean, football is extremely complex as well because you can have two or three injuries on an offensive line. Yeah. That impact the game, but really hard to say how much because you have small sample sizes on backups and there's so much that goes into it. But it just goes to show, I think not only in hockey, more so in hockey than some other sports, but yeah, we are, we're not close to figuring out those problems yet.

And we may, we may not. Yeah. And there's going to be a lot of, with more data available, and a lot of analytics people involved, there's going to be a lot of healthy debates about what is right and what is wrong. And I, for one, I'm looking forward to that. That's what I enjoy.

I think that's part of the fun. I mean, I tell us to people all the time, but it's because a common sort of strawman argument you get from the other side is, you know, the numbers don't tell you the full story, everything. And I think any, any stats person that tells you otherwise is full of it

and you should run away from their advice because I would never tell anyone that, I have a great grasp on the league and everything that's happening. Like, I follow it on a daily basis. I eat, breathe, sleep, hockey, and I still, there's so much unknown and so much happening. And that's part of the fun. If we knew it, it would be boring, right? Like, it was like, if everyone had the answer in a formula, all of a sudden, why would

they even play the games? Right. I mean, and that's, yeah, I completely agree. I mean, that's what the unknown makes it interesting and striving to find answers to to the questions that no one has found answers to yet. It kind of sucks for me, and this is sort of like a personal thing. But because of what I do and because I betting is such a big part of my livelihood and my income, I can't really get involved in a lot of the discussions.

And as a fan, I mean, that's the toughest thing for me is I'd love to, but I always risk giving away too much. And I'll do it in sports where I'm not betting as much, especially football. I mean, I, yeah, you're doing it with the periscopes. I do enjoy doing them. I don't bet nearly as much on football. I'm not hurting my edge by doing those, but the NHL market is fairly small. There's not a lot of people that are betting it heavily,

only about a handful of groups that are moving real money on NHL. And I feel like everything I say in regards to that could negatively impact me. Right. Because people are listening. When I was posting my model numbers publicly, someone was betting them on screen and moving lines. And that's sort of how I got involved in this in the first place, was somebody reaching out to me and saying, no, you need to stop posting your stuff publicly because it's affecting our ability to bet on the game. That's literally how it all started for me.

So, I mean, that is sort of like a tangent I've gone off to here. But that's what kind of bothers me or irks me a little bit about what I do because there's so many great discussions to be had. I follow some great guys on Twitter that, I mean, the work. that they're doing is fantastic, but I'd love to engage them a little bit more, but I actually can't. I'm not in a position to do that. Let's take a quick break here from a sponsor, and we're going to finish up this conversation on other end. Getting tickets to sporting events can be far too complicated. With hundreds of websites and varying levels of reliability, how do you know how to trust out there? That's why Seekek is so clutch, because they're going

to take all the guesswork out of it for you by doing all the work. Seekkeek's going to pull millions of tickets into one place so you can easily find the seats you're looking for for a price you're willing to pay. There's nothing quite like being there in person and CKKK is going to get you closer to their action for a great value. Not only does CKKK identify the best seats that fit your budget with their grading system, but every purchase is also fully guaranteed so you can shop with supreme confidence knowing that what you pay for is what you're going to get. That's why you need to make CKee is your go-to ticket source for everything from sports and concerts to comedy and theater. We're in that gift-giving part of the year now with Christmas approaching and it's going to make for a great

opportunity for you to get in on the action and get someone significant in your life that you hold near and dear your heart tickets to go watch their favorite team play live in person. And the best part is, is that I know that all the prices and all the costs are going to add up as you get all these gifts around this time of year. And Sikh is going to, you know, make that a little bit easier for you by giving you a little bit of a discount just because you're a pediogast listener. So as my listener, you're going to get $10 off your first seekie purchase. To get in on it, all you have to do is download the SeekKK app and enter the promo code PDO. That's promo code PTO for $10 off your first Seek purchase.

Now let's get back to Rob Pizzola on the HockeyPEDO cast. Okay. So I was venting to you the other day. I slid into your DMs and I was telling you about my trials and tribulations with playing daily fantasy. And I know you were telling me that you don't do it anymore. But I did want to get into a little bit here because it kind of ties into our conversation. it's obviously slightly different than actually betting on the outcomes of games, but I mean, you're trying to predict basically performance

and you're putting money down on the line and the person who does a better job of predicting it is going to come out at the victor. So it's a similar concept. I feel like the league hasn't done nearly a good enough job. And I feel like for the most part, I think the NFL is the only one that's really doing a good job in this regard. But obviously with fantasy football being king in North America,

that's part of it. But now even when I watch these pregame shows, like they've got actual fantasy analysts on to talk about the price for a player on a given day and who you should have in your lineup and matchups and stuff like that. And obviously it's easier considering it's only happening really once a week. So like really key in on it. And on a night-to-night basis, when there's eight games one night and then 10 games one other night, it's like it's free flowing and fast.

And so there's a certain element of it to that. But I think in terms of driving fan engagement, and we're always looking in hockey to, especially in the American market, to capture the attention of more casual fans and bring them on board because hockey is such a fun, fast-based sport. And I feel like that's an area where the league could do a much better job of capturing casual fans and driving that engagement you were talking about. They might be able to, but it's tough for that. You hit the nail on the head with the NFL. The NFL has a huge competitive advantage in that they have, each team plays one game a week.

So what happens with fantasy players is that they spend their entire week doing research. And they don't have that luxury with the NHL or NBA or. or MLB where they have to just start guys every day. And it becomes overwhelming. That's the problem. I mean, NFL, if I want to take a break on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday or whatever, it doesn't really impact my lineups for the week. I can do my DFS one day a week.

And that's it. So they have a competitive advantage in that sense. Can the NHL do better with fantasy? Absolutely. It's a market that they should attack. Consistently we see, I mean, especially NHL DFS, it's just not as big, nearly as big as any other sport. is it because of the lack of interest in NHL compared to other sports across North America?

Yeah, that's part of it. But I just, I'm trying to think of like if I see any promotions of fantasy. I know TSN in Canada does like some fantasy tracker. I've never actually checked that out in my life nor what I do. They do like a draft before the season with all the insiders. And that's not going to interest any. And that's just like a sponsored draft or whatever that they do. But aside from that, there's really.

really not a whole lot. So sure, there's a, there's room for opportunity there. They could really market that around Saturday nights. If the major DFS companies, Draft Kings, Fandul, they do do some Saturday night stuff, but maybe market it specifically to Canadians and run some larger tournaments than they're running. Potentially, there's something there for sure. Well, did you read Dan Barberisi's Dueling with Kings book that he came out about a year or two ago? This is a sad statement I'm going to make, but I don't read. I don't read unless it's for a specific purpose. Unless it's some, I'm going to gain some sort of knowledge that's going to help me.

I'm very targeted. I read fiction. I don't see. I, even most of the articles, I'm really bad. It's not an attention span thing. It's just, it's a time thing. It sounds so sad, but it's hard for me to spend time. No, I get it.

I mean, there's so many things attracting our attention these days. I get it. but it kind of got on my radar for whatever reason. And basically for those of you out there who haven't read it, but are interested in doing so, I highly recommend it. He basically was a sports writer, and he was fascinated by the whole concept of daily fantasy,

and he quit his job and tried to become a pro in the daily fantasy world and kind of documented his own trials and tribulations, and he was doing so in NHL, actually. And it was fascinating and sort of I've made my first initial foray into it this year, just mostly for fun. I'm not trying to become a multimillionaire and go to all these exotic places to play in tournaments. But I think it's kind of fun in terms,

especially if you're watching the games to kind of make you cheer for certain stuff, especially when you become a jaded sports writer that doesn't care about the results anymore. It's interesting that you brought that up because one of the few books I've read in my life, and one of the most interesting to me was a very, very similar concept. It's a book called Trading Bases by Joe Pita. And essentially, it actually was a life-changing book for me, completely changed the way that I looked at sports betting. And essentially, Joe Pita was a Wall Street trader that got hit by a car and broke both legs or something like that.

And he was forced to just be at home. And he was a baseball fan. He said, why can't I apply a lot of my learnings from Wall Street into baseball? And he developed a model to bet on baseball. Right. Now, a lot of the stuff in there, I mean, it's outdated. It's not really going to help you win. But it just gets you into the mindset of actually modeling sports using data.

to arrive at projected outcomes on games. And this sounds very similar, except rather than sports betting, it's DFS. So, I mean, it's probably something that's right up my alley. And you,

I mean, in 30 seconds, you talked about it. You sold me on it. I probably will give it a read at some point because it sounds interesting. But it's, it's just,

there's, there's so much going on right now in this space. And it's hard to keep up with, with everything. But for sure, with DFS, it's an opportunity for leagues. The struggle for me,

and I'm going off onto so many tangoes here. That's what podcasts are all on. The struggle for me with hockey DFS. So I played DFS for a living. Before I started exclusively sports betting for a living, and I tried to do the overlap between both, and I just don't have the time for both. So I picked sports betting because I had a higher ROI at that point.

The struggle with hockey DFS is that there is so much variance. Yeah. There are so few scoring events in hockey that it just be, it's not luck based. There's skill involved, but there's more luck involved than in some other sports, especially surrounding empty net goals. Yeah. Like teams now pull their goalie with like four minutes left, a couple empty net goals. And it, it's, that's a fiasco and a nightmare in and of itself. There's just so much that goes into it. And also with the late scratches in hockey, the injury reporting is terrible. Yeah. It's terrible. You, have no idea how guys are playing some night game time decision here this guy has the flu bug we don't know if he's going to play it's and it's bad across all sports leagues but man i can't tell you how many times i sat at a computer at like 645 just refreshing a twitter list i have built of all the nchl beat writers to see who's in a lineup and who's out of lineup trying to guess what line they're going to play on it's that's that's the struggle it drives you insane i mean i uh yeah like i've

i've been playing kind of casually once or twice a week or whatever. And I was telling you about this, but I wanted to share with the listeners where I believe it was like two Saturdays ago, maybe three Saturdays ago. And literally like two minutes before buck drop, I decided to switch Matthew Joseph for Dominic Simone, which is like the most niche NHL nerd probably quandary to have. And Matthew Joseph had like two goals and an assist or something. And Dominic Simone did nothing. And the difference for that was it went from $5,000 winnings to like eight bucks or something. And like I'm not playing like it's not going to be a life changing summer anything. But like it just drew. It just drove me crazy that that one random decision influenced my outcome in that way. And I understand, like, as a kind of hot-headed Eastern European, like, I've struggled with those fluctuations on a game-to-game basis. And I know that in betting and in DFS, you really have to embrace the fact that you're playing this over a long haul and you can't just be going like one event at a time. I think the one of the, only people who play DFS will know what I'm talking about, but I think one of the biggest problems or mistakes, I should say,

that you can make when playing DFS is looking at your contest winnings in live games. I've had, I've lost $100,000 in live winnings from a guy like blowing a tire coming out of the pits in NASCAR. I'm not even exaggerating. Yeah. You just see your account going from like winning $150,000 to a thousand. Yeah. Or like even less, like it's create.

I'm not built to handle those swings for those who do play DFS and are. regularly refreshing to see where they stand i don't know how you do it like you're gonna you'll die before you're 50 if you do that yeah it's like it's a guarantee i would put money down on it is just so much anxiety associated with checking your contest winnings oh yeah i mean daily fantasy ruins your life with that being said i'd appreciate everyone listening go to fandal dot com slash pdl let them know he sent you and uh you'll get a deposit bonus and uh come play against me um that was a shameless little plug there you slipped it in there good yeah very good time it was on point like It's not like you went off track.

I'm just kidding. I highly recommend not getting into Daily Fantasy if you don't play. It drives me crazy. All I would say is this. I mean, if you're going to play Daily Fantasy, there's, do it for fun, I think. Exactly. Or you should, it's tough. But if you're, if you're playing Davey Fantasy, don't go with the expectation that you're going to win a lot of money.

Or if you're playing these tournaments to win a million dollars or whatever, it's extremely unlikely. Like, it's a lottery ticket, right? Yeah. But just like with sports betting, very few people win. Less than 1% of people win. So you have to go in knowing that. And if you're recreational and you're not using sophisticated models or something along those lines, chances are like it's extremely likely you're not going to win. But that doesn't mean don't play.

I mean, I have friends that know they're not going to win, but it's entertainment. Like instead of going and spend $15 on a movie ticket, they spend five, 10 bucks a night in front of a TV, enter hockey. You care about games you would never have cared about before. It is, it's an expense at the end of the day. they're probably not going to win, but I mean, and it sounds a little like degenerate, but it's entertainment. You have no idea how many Edmonton, Ottawa Senators games I've been invested in this year because they are daily fantasy heaven because they're giving up every goal and they're scoring every

goal and just stacking against them and playing their guys has been very beneficial. But I otherwise would never have really cared that much. And now I'm just watching these games like cheering for Wayne Simmons to score. How you wonder why the NHL is getting into sports betting? This is exactly why. Exactly. Yeah. Because, yeah, I mean, I'd never watch a Senators game.

I'm not going to walk. Half these teams in the league like L.A. I know. There's so many things I'd rather do than watch a Kings. The Wild are a good team. I still don't even want to watch their games. So now all of a sudden you add a little bit of excitement to it. Opportunity to win money.

Oh, sure. I'll watch a king. What was I watching last night? Ducks stars. Like Klingberg is out. Terrible hockey game. And it's just like, I'm tuned in. Like I'm invested now.

No, it's true. I think it's kind of a bit of a buzzing and a curse, but I think there's a lot of people listening to their show right now or they follow us on Twitter to think they know, they're convinced that they know significantly more about hockey than us and think we're idiots. And so obviously that'll lead to a lot of people getting into betting and DFS to try their hand at that,

and I think that's a good thing. But I think sometimes people can delude themselves into thinking maybe they know a little bit more than they actually do. I think that's just general for sports fans. Sports fans have an ego. It is what it is. The vast majority of people think they know more than someone else. I remember when I first started posting my models publicly, the comments I would get.

And people who still do that, I mean, I look at the comments and they're like, I don't know why you continue to do that every day. But there's people that just don't understand probability, like a basic concept. Like, I'm not saying a team is going to win. I'm saying they have a 60% chance to win. If they played this game five times, they'd win three out of five. That's a very, very difficult concept for someone to grasp. It goes way over their head. You pick a team to win and say they have an edge as a favorite and they lose.

You get the, what an idiot. Dom's mentions are hilarious when that happens. I tell him. I mean, Dom is, I went to a Leafs game with him a few weeks back. I consider him a friend. And I understand, I don't want to get talking about Dom. And I understand why just people in general do it. And it's the same reason I did.

I mean, I was trying to build a following. I was trying to build my own brand. And Dom does a good job with that. But man, you've got to start muting some people or like, it's tough. It's tough dealing with people with sports fans in general who are always adamant that they were right. Yeah. I mean, like when I flew here to Toronto from Vancouver, I wasn't on the plane thinking, I better go in the cockpit and fly this plane because this pilot has no idea what he's doing.

Right. But people watch game. And this is another thing. another tangent by me. There's this mentality that I watch the games, therefore I know what's going to happen in the future. And the best NBA better I've ever encountered in my life does not watch the NBA, period.

Not a single game. He wouldn't be caught dead watching an NBA game. He has the best return on investment I've ever seen or like personally seen from anyone who does NBA. It's a huge fallacy. You need to watch the games to win. Or if I do watch the games, I know. And honestly, when I was young, when I was a teenager, I lost a lot of money betting on

sports for that exact reason. I watched so much hockey, so much football. I always thought, I was so confident I knew what was going to happen. That's not the way it works. If you don't take a mathematical, I don't want to say 100% of winning sports betters take a mathematical approach, but it's the most likely outcome or scenario that's going to lead a path to success. And a lot of people just, I mean, I hear it all the time. Just these lazy narratives. Oh, it's the father's road trip. Like the fathers are all going to watch the game.

Like, how is this team going to possibly lose? Or the first game after a coach got fired and the team is going to play harder. Or the team, they got blown out by five goals last week. Last game, you're going to see an increased effort. You get all these narratives and all of it is fluff. It's really fluff. And when you take a mathematical approach and you remove. yourself from that and you just start to say this is what my model says I'm going to trust the

number and you've proven to win over time that's probably the best way you can go about betting over sports yeah I mean I feel like I'm probably just too close to the situation because I do follow hockey more closely than other sports but I feel like hockey is subject to much more of that than we see in others like there's just so much like psychoanalyzing and buying into emotions and sort of these storylines and you'll watch any broadcast and they'll be kind of like zoning in on this one random tangential thing that obviously has no outcome on the bearing of the game, but they're acting like this factor is going to change everything for this team. And it's like, I'm not here to rag on people. And I watch a ton of NHL broadcasts, but a lot of the analysis you get is misinformed or just it's, it's like I, I like to say fluff a lot.

It's fluff. It's stuff that is meaningless to the outcome of the game. And I think honestly, watching the games sometimes does you a disservice because you develop this inherent bias. You watch a team play one or two times and they play like garbage. You don't want to bet on the teams anymore. Right. This happens to me all the time. I just, I wake up in the morning. I'm like, please, God, do not like give me a bet on the Detroit Red Wings today or the LA Kings or whatever. Like, because I've watched them and they stink. Yeah. But at some, there gets to a point where you make bets based on price and probability. And yeah, the Kings are probably going to lose this game, I know, seven times out of ten. But if I'm getting all,

offer the right price, I'm going to take it. And you remove the human element from the equation. Because once you start watching games, you develop these biases. You know teams are good. You don't want to bet against them, even though the price might be offering you value to bet against them. There's just so much that goes into it. But it's funny because I just laugh at the guys that are like, oh, I watch three hockey

games a night. It's like, it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. If you can't put a price or a probability on these teams, winning the next game. I don't care how much hockey you buy. It's useless. No.

Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with that. Yeah, I mean, you do, it really needs to, it's a testament to sort of how you can emotionally distance yourself from it. Because, like, I bet much more in an NFL than I do anything just because I can kind of distance myself and have fun with it as a fan and I'm watching on Sundays and I'm sharing for certain things. And like, I find myself, like, betting a spread where a team is like a 14 point underdog just because I feel like they're going to cover that.

but then you're ultimately left rooting for this disastrous quarterback and you're just like, I can't take one more three and out. I'm going to throw my remote up against my TV and break my screen. But you're like from a number's perspective, it makes this bet makes sense, but it's pretty rough to watch. Well, I get it. And like the NFL more so than any other sport is the league of overreactions. Like people only remember what they saw last week in the NFL.

A recreational player is like, oh my God. Like how is this team going to possibly lose to this? terrible team when they beat the Patriots last week. It's like, well, I mean, teams play one good game or one bad game. It happens. There's variants in sports. There's so much that, so many things that affect the outcome of a single game. And if you're just looking and using single games, I mean, God help you.

It's not going to end well. But we see that in the NFL. I see it in the NHL. I, uh, the score, the score, a company I used to work for. They, in their box scores, they now have. a chat feature for NHL, which they added like a month ago. It has got to be the worst chat imaginable on the face of the earth. I mean, if you go into one of those during the course of the game and see the comments,

it will drive you to insanity within like one minute because of all the things you will read that make no sense whatsoever. And it's along those lines like, how could Pittsburgh be or like, how could the Kings beat, I don't know, who's the lightning and then lose to this team? or whatever. It's like, it's almost like those factors aren't related at all. Exactly, right?

It's just completely random or like ignoring the fact that maybe when they, they beat this good team, that good team was playing a back to back or a three and four, four and six or was playing a backup goalie. Right. Like there's context. People are lacking context. They strictly look at the results of the games.

Buffalo. Perfect example. Buffalo Sabers. The Sabers, they're not good. I mean, I don't want to offend Sabers fans. You guys have been.

been through enough. I feel bad for the city of Buffalo. I hope that that franchise, I mean, I don't want them to be better than Leafs or anything, but I hope that they eventually get the success, but they go on this win streak. I mean, they probably should have lost two thirds of those games. Right. And it creates this perception that like Buffalo is back and you're getting force fed that. I mean, you watch SportsCenter or SportsNet Central, whatever, ESPN. And that's, I mean, win streak, win streak, win streak, that's all you hear. This team is winning. But there's no context. It's not like they got badly outplayed. Yeah.

They got a shot 40 to 16 and they won a game. Just win, baby. That's it. And that's what people gravitate to. And as a better, that's probably why I still have an edge in the marketplace because there's enough people out there that are still leaning on those things. Yeah. I mean, one of those factors we're talking about that's fluff is, you know,

the concept of wins and one goal games are close games, right? And if you're looking at it logically, you're thinking, okay, well, we know that this stuff evens out over the long haul. and if a team has just won. And in that 10-game win streak, I believe, like seven or eight or nine of the games were shootout overtime, one-go-gall games, and Buffalo won all of them. And I was reading, I was overwhelmed with articles that were basically positioning it as the Sabres finally have a winning culture.

They finally, the guys they brought in, after years of losing, they now learned how to win. Right. And we hear that all the time. And I'm sure there's like some psychological element to, especially for the Sabres who are historically bad in those Timor years, I'm sure it comes. coming to the rink every day sucked. You probably knew you were going to get blown out and you were going to be a historical footnote and that must have been a crappy feeling.

And I'm sure just being mediocre is a great step in the right direction from where you came from before. So I'm not downplaying that, but just this idea that teams that win close games more often than not are all of a sudden have this clutch gene is just one of the most infuriating things that happens in all sports. Well, I mean, I can go on forever. I can think of a million examples in the NHL. Like Paul Maurice as an example has been the worst coach and the best coach in the league.

at some point. Yeah. Because of his team's records. Right. It's, if a team is winning, the coach is amazing. Yeah.

Like, he's doing a great job. He's pulling all the right strengths. No one can fathom the fact. And this, I get into this argument every year. Who was it that in baseball? Dodgers just signed Dave Roberts to an extension.

I think Dave Roberts is a terrible manager. But people will be like, well, Dodgers won whatever, 97 games last year. How can you say that? Well, if he has a 110 win roster and wins 97 games, that's not a good.

coaching job and that's very hard for people to comprehend or wrap their head around this team is winning green bay packers why did mike mark mike mccarthy last as the head coach of the packers for so long because they're winning are they winning because of him no if anything they should have more wins than they do have with arguably one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time yeah just being wasted away but he survives and for it it took people a long it took till this year for the general public to realize Mike McCarthy is not a good coach. If you asked anyone before this year, oh, McCarthy, yeah, great, great. You won a Super Bowl.

Of course. But that's just, I mean, it all comes back to wins and losses. No one can understand variance. I don't want to say no one. And I don't want to paint people in a bad picture. The vast majority of people, they just don't understand that, or they equate winning to things that are just non-existent or refuse to admit that there's luck involved. Yeah.

And there is luck involved in every sport. Yeah. Period. And whether you want to admit it or not, if a team goes 10 and O in overtime and shootout, it's like flipping 10 heads in a row. Well, yeah, and I think on an individual basis, and I feel like hockey really is subject to this and you see us on broadcasts all the time. And I've heard from people who are on these broadcasts occasionally and sort of the

common refrain is like, we understand the concept of this, but we only have a limited amount of time so we can't get into it. But the concept that, like a shooting percentage, if a guy is, on fire and he's scored on five of his last eight shots. Like that's generally painted as like a positive thing that a guy is on fire that he's converting at this astronomical clip of shots. And meanwhile, you look at that and you go, okay, that probably means that he's due for like three straight games of not scoring on 12 shots.

And I just don't understand why we can't do a better job of storytelling from that perspective. Because what frustrates me is I feel like a lot of casual fans watch these games and they kind of take it as gospel what's said on them. And I feel like it's a disservice to them and everyone when this misinformation is being spread. It is for sure. I mean, like that stats 101, right? Small sample size. Yeah. Eight shots. Like you're not telling me anything. Yeah. We, goaltenders save percentage stabilizes after like 3,000 shots. So when people say like, this guy is garbage, because he's let in nine goals in the past two games, I mean, small sample size. But, but you will have people tell you, oh, this guy's hot. He's not seeing the puck. Yeah. He's not seeing the puck. He's not seeing the

right now. Like, and part of it is, I hate to say it, but it's like this, this old boys club, especially in the NHL where all the analysts are X players. And I, this is going to sound really poor and whatever. I'll say it anyways, but a lot of them are low IQ. And I'm, I, again, whatever, it come across is what it is. But these are people who don't understand what, like certain metrics or that a sample size is smaller.

And they've played the game and they feel that these things. matter and that's fine. I completely understand that. But this is the culture of not only hockey broadcasts, but all sports in general. You see this all the time. Just try to find me a color commentator in a game that didn't play or wasn't a coach or some like it doesn't exist. Yeah. I mean, maybe one day it will happen where some person that is truly well respected as a statistician or a mathematician is put in a box to give his comments. on the game and maybe it'll be a completely different perspective that people will gravitate to. Maybe they won't because they're used to in a traditional sense. But yeah, that's the issue.

I watch a lot of games on mute. I'm not scared to admit that. I'll put on music in the background and put up a few games on the TV or I'll mute the games and play my guitar while I'm watching because I can't stand it, man. It bothers me. No, some of the commentary, and I rail on this on Twitter all the time, but there's certain broadcasts out there that are just abominations. It's really tough to listen to it. And I do think, I get what you're saying. I think there's something that X players can add in terms of a storytelling perspective and anecdotes. And they can share stories of, oh, this happened back when I was playing.

But I just want to hear a more well-rounded approach of you should have someone else in the studio or in the broadcast booth that can sort of bounce back against that and go, well, you know, in the grand scheme of things, it's probably not that important. Maybe you felt so when you were playing. but now things have changed. Times have changed. Or for me, I'd just like to see an evolution. And this is completely biased because he's a friend of mine and I worked with him. But Justin Bourne, for me, is one of the best. He's the best.

He's the best. Yeah. What he does is fantastic. I don't read a lot. I read everything Justin Bourne does. His breakdowns of the X's and O's are fantastic. He's got the right mix, in my opinion, of understanding that he played the game and maybe not at the pro level because he was injured.

But he played. Yeah. He's worked with the Marleys. He worked in the league, so as an understanding of that. But he's sort of embraced the stats side of things as well. And I think it's a perfect blend. I'm not saying somebody needs to, like the broadcast need to be 100% analytics driven. No one wants to hear that.

And frankly, it gets tiresome after a while, regardless. But someone who can bring both those qualities to the table, it's a little bit of experience, understanding the game from an X's and O's perspective, plus understanding the metrics that are available and using them to outline players play. To me, he's fantastic. I mean, I'd love to see him work on a broadcast one day. I mean, he would be the ideal person for me to listen to while I'm watching a game. But there's just, there's very few people that have that breadth of knowledge about the game.

Yeah, no, you're right. Justin's the best. Yeah, I'd love to see it. All right, Rob, let's get out of here. Where can people follow you online? Usually I have other writers. I'm like, oh, what are you working on next? I got nothing to promote.

I really don't have anything to promote. If you want to follow me on Twitter, at Rob Pizzola, that's P-I-Z-Z or Z-Z, if you're in the States, O-L-A. I'm not the greatest follow on Twitter. I post- You're entertaining. I enjoy following. I think I am, but I used to be really,

like I used to live tweet like Dallas Cowboys games. I'm a huge Dallas Cowboys fan. Right. Man, that was, I don't want to get back to that, but I still do every now and then. But I try to post, I try to be helpful. One thing I will say, and I say this on every program I'm ever on, even if you don't want to follow me or you have a question about sports betting

or you want to know something more about hockey, my DMs are open. That's done intentionally. If you ever want to ask me a question and you're embarrassed about something or want to know more about something, feel free to DM me. And I will get back to you and try to give you some insights. Well, I highly co-sign that and encourage that. We're entering a brave new world here. And I feel like we're going to be talking about sports.

betting a lot more. And I'm looking forward to it. I'm excited. And obviously your insight's going to be very valuable in that topic. Appreciate it. I hope so. I'm excited. I mean, it's an exciting time. Yes, it is. I'm worried, but I'm excited. Cautiously optimistic. It's a little bit of both. I mean, for those who bet on sports for a long time, like, how can you not be excited that this is being widely embraced now? Yeah. It's, it is exciting. Yeah. Yeah, you're being like acknowledged and vindicated. Yeah, it's true. I don't want people to get good at betting on sports. I just bet on it, have a good time and enjoy it, but don't be too good. Yeah, keep drinking that beer and keep placing those bets.

Listen to those analysts that are telling you about a team's will to win and the desire that they have and the playoffs and whatever other narratives you're getting fed. Listen to them. All right, man. Well, I'm glad we finally did this. And I'm going to keep you as the PDOCS official betting experts. So if there's any new developments with the NHL in this regard, we're going to have you back on. I mean, good enough for Elliot Friedman. Good enough for the pediatist.

Got to be. Cheers. The Hockey Pediocast with Dmitri Filipovich. Follow on Twitter at Dim Philipovich and on SoundCloud at soundcloud. At soundcloud.com slash hockey pideocast.