The Hockey PDOcast - Episode 306: The Next Frontier

Episode Date: July 10, 2019

Andrew Thomas joins the show to discuss the next frontier for analytics in hockey, player tracking, the relay of information within organizations, market inefficiencies that remain, and some of the lingering questions we hope to answer in the future. 5:50 Current state of hockey analysis12:40 Existing market inefficiencies 21:40 Borrowing from other sports29:45 NHL’s venture into player tracking32:40 Quantifying effort and hustle44:00 How data has changed sports debates48:30 The human element and defined roles52:00 The AHL as a developmental league58:00 Trying new things in hockeySee 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 Demetri Filipovich. And on today's episode of the show, you're going to be hearing a conversation that I recorded recently with my good buddy Andrew Thomas, who came over and indulged me and chatted about a variety of random big picture topics. It was really fun to kind of slow things down and change things up a little bit. We've been so busy over the past handful of weeks with this sort of rapid turnover of free agency, signings, trades, player transactions, and obviously it's a whirlwind and it's a blast, but now as we're transitioning more towards the offseason and the summer,

provides us an opportunity to kind of take a step back and think about some stuff in terms of the current state of the game, the future, where we're heading. how we can make improvements. And so I'm really kind of relishing the opportunity to do so. And I thought Andrew was the perfect person to come on and chat with me about all this stuff just because of his particular resume and his experience and all the stuff he's gotten to do over the past handful of years in hockey. You know, we got into player tracking.

We got into the relive information within organizations. The next frontiers for analytics, some of the questions we hope to answer in the future. just a lot of sort of kind of fun, fun theoretical stuff that we bounce around back and forth and just had a good conversation about. If you're listening to the show, chances are you're already very familiar

with Andrew and his work, but if you somehow aren't, you know, he was initially a co-founder of war on ice, which helped bridge the gap between Exorcader and Corsica as a public database. That was just incredibly invaluable for all of us in the community. He was a part of the Minnesota Wilds

Hockey Ops Department. most recently for a number of years. And now he's got this new hockey venture that I'm sure we'll be hearing all about soon enough. So anyways, yeah, we chatted about all sorts of stuff and we're going to get to that interview in a second. But while I still have you here, I just wanted to touch on a couple quick housekeeping things.

Now, one is I've been made aware that a bunch of you are still having feed issues with new shows of the episode, not popping up on your podcast apps as they previously had been and should have been. I think it stems back to everything after episode 299, and this is episode 306, obviously. It's been going on for a long time now, and we're still working on it, and hopefully we'll have a fix soon enough here. Chances are, if you're listening to the show, you already probably either fixed it or never had those issues to begin with, and that's great.

If some of you are still struggling with that, just know that we're working on it. But in the meantime, you can either try to resubscribe to the show. I know that's worked for some people, or you can search the... the Hockey Piedocast on your podcast apps. And I know that there appears to be a rogue second feed for the show that's appeared. And that one does contain all the new episodes. So you can just subscribe to that in the meantime and listen to it. Or you can go on apps like Spotify or Stitcher or stream the podcast on the Yahoo website.

When I tweet out the links, all of those have the new episodes available. And yeah, apologies for inconvenience. And thanks for sticking with us. And if you like the content, please do. go and leave us a five-star rating and review. Help spread the good word. I promise it only takes a minute or two of your time, and it goes a long way towards helping the show out.

Now, I've been teasing out long enough. I made you wait, and let's finally get to this Andrew Thomas interview. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed recording it, and let's just roll the tapes. Regressing to the mean since 2015, it's the Hockey PEDEOCast. With your host, Dimitri Philopoven.

Welcome to the Hockey PEOC. My name is Dimitra Filipovich, and joining me is my good buddy, Andrew Thomas. Andrew, what's going on, man? Hey, Dimitri, how's it going? Is it okay that I did kind of like a more informal Andrew Thomas and Andrew C. Thomas? Yeah. It's absolutely fine. Just don't call me Andy.

That's the only rule. Yeah, no, I won't do that. You're Andrew to me. It's good to have you on the show, man. We've been kind of circling this for a while. And obviously, while you were working from the Minnesota while, those kind of couldn't make the schedules work. And also, I hear that a lot from, like,

friends and listeners are like, oh, why don't you get more like executives on or why don't you get more people that are currently working with teams? And it's like, I mean, if you just want to hear like the company line toad and sort of just like the cliched answers, like it's like you can't really say anything that interesting. That's true. I mean, all we really get to say is, you know, there's plenty of, you know, businessy things that I guess we could say or nerdy things, but a lot of that we had to get you to ourselves on the inside. But one of the things that team policy usually revolves around is keeping the number of people who are authorized to speak to a team to a minimum.

Like usually just the GM, the coach, and then the players for their own sake. And, you know, I don't mind not being able to speak for a lot of the time because it stops me from saying anything dumb quite a lot of the time. But at the same time, it's nice to be able to get out in public and actually talk to people publicly once in a while. Yeah, not just lurking in the DMs and just nodding quietly when something is happening on the outside. Yeah.

Yeah. So this is a, it's an interesting time for you, obviously. You've had a bit of time off now here since leaving the wild. And in the off season, it's also really fun. fun to just be talking about hockey in the summer. No one else is really doing it. There's nothing else going on. And I love these types of shows because we can kind of just talk about random stuff

and not be talking about Player A, getting traded for Player B or. Hey, I love Player. I love Player A. What the hell is you doing getting traded for Player B? Yeah, or arguing about the latest, like, offside call. We can actually just kind of talk about fun stuff. I'm really curious. Okay, I don't know how much you can speak on this, but in terms of where the game is

headed from an analysis perspective and how, you know, teams, are operating and sort of it feels like everyone's kind of getting smarter obviously over time or getting more information readily available. We can kind of quibble in terms of the speed of that entire process or if hockey's lagging behind other sports obviously. But it's pretty clear that like some of the conversations we were having in the deep recesses of the internet a decade ago or now at least public and it seems like most fans that care enough to have a Twitter account and be online or at least familiar with stuff that's going on. I'm kind of curious, like from from your angle, what is, do you think that most teams are kind of unequal footing here in terms of

the stuff they're working with, the stuff they're playing with? Is it kind of more important to have a feel for what's important or what's not since everyone's kind of working with the same stuff? Or do you think that even though it is 2019 and we still have progressed that there's still like very obvious areas for teams to exploit sort of like market inefficiencies and fine little areas of value here and there with both players and coaches and systems or whatever. Oh, boy. There's a lot to unpack there. So I've got to have to start thinking about 2009 compared to today. Like I got mostly involved working in public hockey analytics, data science, these things back in, I'd say about 2013. I'd done some things when I was teaching

with my students and everything, but nobody really cared about academic papers. The world of the blogs and the Twitter and the internet in general was a little more robust with discussion than the sorts of things that I was doing then. So when I caught on then and started to talk more about doing graphics out there to get a little bit of data, start having those conversations. It was interesting to me how many times people were even just arguing about words. We already had the coursey Fenwick-C-PDO debate a long time ago, and I didn't even get to know those terms until then. It's like, okay, that makes kind of sense. I like guys with mustaches.

I currently sort of have one. So I understand where these things, these things come up in communities where it's organically grown, a lot of places how people talk about the concepts that they think are going to be useful. And when you're talking with people on the inside, they have their own language for a lot of these things too. Like one of the things that came up where it became clear after a while when I was talking to other people was, I mean, we, for war on ice, we coined the low, medium, high, danger scale because no one was really talking about it before.

Right. But then when I started to talk about coaches and they talked about grade A chances, it was obviously we're thinking about the same things. It was just defining it differently. So now we're looking a few years. later and how much of this is just grown because we're now sort of speaking the same language in a lot of places, it makes me feel good that we're able to make progress on those kinds of questions. I think at the same time, the idea that broadcasters are more open to it as well,

you're not seeing as much derision. You're not seeing Brian Burke. Right. Like openly mocking and even though he probably quietly still uses some of this stuff too. I think it's good for, it used to be good for a laugh line and now it's not. I think the idea maybe that not only is data more publicly seen and talked about, but that the NHL might actually be investing in putting new stuff in there has made people realize at every level that it's something they need to be thinking about and not, if they're going to be mocking it, they're still going to be investing in it kind of on the back end. Right.

So to go from there, you were talking about, you know, you have a lot of different people in different places doing different things. Yes. I think it's interesting to me because one of the things that I didn't really see, again, until 2013, 2014, people were starting to collect their own data. I mean, you had the zone entry stuff that a number of different people were working on and then sharing it. And when I first started doing my own work when I was in grad school, I was collecting

my own data in a cold rink with a laptop on my lap and people kind of looking at me funny. And like, what's this guy doing? And nowadays, that's a little more common to be collecting it because you can watch from home and not be freezing in a rink. But at the same time, people are kind of getting the idea that if they want to work on a problem, they can get what they need. If it's just they're paying for it or they're collecting it themselves.

So I feel like people are embracing the idea a little bit better that we can talk about these things. We can make these discoveries no matter how we're able to do it. I feel like there was a third point about how people are different. I'm thinking like from 10 years ago to today, there's absolutely

been a change in how people have accepted it. Of course. Yeah, I mean, there is still it's interesting. It's so childish in a way, but it's like you can tell when you're speaking with certain people, you have a certain area of like you have their attention. And then if you say the wrong word, even though they could be thinking of the exact same concepts,

like a record stretch out because they're like, oh, this nerd. Like, you know, I don't care what he has to say. But like all of these, that's what's been so funny from my perspective. And as someone who grew up as just, you know,

a casual hockey fan that I got into it as kind of watching it more obsessively before I even got into that. political side of things and sort of thinking about this stuff, it is so, a lot of the concepts are so intuitive and there are things that even like the most old school hockey people would never really quibble with or have an issue with. And so that's why when we have all these rock fights over, you know, you're stupid, this thing doesn't matter. No, it's this thing. It's like at the root of it, we are really all thinking about the same thing, but that language and the words we use

are so important. Incredibly. I think a lot of it just signals who the people you are friends with are saying. Yeah. And at that level, we're still kind of tribal about a lot of that stuff. And one of the interesting things about working for a team

for so long, and particularly with a team where I got to know a lot of really good people was we were willing to listen to each other and we were able to figure out where those concepts were different.

And maybe we'd make a little fun because it's still, you know, people will, people who are friends will make fun of each other all the time. But it was interesting for me to learn to speak that language and to know that the people

on the other end would basically try, trust what I was saying or at least give me the chance to explain why I was thinking about what I was. Well, I mean, and that sort of relay of information is kind of, I think, the most overlooked, but arguably the most important part, like you can have all the information in the world, but sort of that relay of like from analysts to general manager, whoever the conduit is, then to the coach, to the players, like all this stuff. You're going to be focusing on different stuff, obviously, because for certain people,

depending on what their job description is, they don't need to know certain stuff or be worried about it. But you can know everything in your head, but unless you're, you're going to be focused. able to actually like explain to someone or share with someone why that's important or how that helps them selfishly do their job better, it's kind of ultimately pointless. It's just like a fun fact, I guess. At that point. Yeah.

So, well, I guess the question you didn't answer was what do you, what do you think the current market inefficiencies are in terms of kind of stuff people can be targeting? Oh, boy. That's a good question because I feel like if I had a great answer, I wouldn't tell you. I'd keep it to myself. Right. But at the same time, the real, I'm, you can cut through all the garbage stuff, of course. The one thing that I figure is making the biggest difference to be kind of tapped is it comes back to that communication issue.

If you know that there are quantities that you can explain in a hockey way that you think are going to be valuable and you can sit down with them and figure out why that's going to be, why it's going to be useful to look at. Right. Then you can get people who are like me. who are quants digging into the computing side and being able to work with hockey people to dig some of that stuff out. So I've noticed a lot of people online much more embracing the idea

of zone entries and exits is a thing. Beyond what had been started up a few years ago, now it's mainstream analysts are charting these things and they're discussing it. And I would look at it and I would think a lot of the time that it's picking up things

we're already kind of getting. Like, if you're already detecting how shots are happening, it's good to know why they're happening, but it's not necessarily going to tell you as much of that story as you'd like. And so I think if you're trying to capture some things that are in there that are quantities that should be looked at, you're getting less and less gain now than you were five years ago.

Yes, of whatever is going to be available. And when it comes to getting new data, the market is going to be fairly expensive to collecting the really rigorous stuff. So if I was trying to think about some aspect of the game that I think was going to be worth looking at that hadn't yet, I mean, I'm a big. Goldie nerd. Any time that I'm looking at any kind of data. The great unknown.

Oh, the mass. Yes, I know it's voodoo. Yes, I know it's, what's on the shirt? The bullshit, the voodoo, the Steve Dangl shirt. I'm trying to remember it from years ago. Okay. What was it exactly? We'll get to it.

We'll get to it. But the idea that goaltending is one of these things where everybody thinks they can, it's a lot easier to see goaltending go right or wrong because you guys, you've got a very good look at what's going on immediately. You don't have to see them skate too far one way or the other. You think you can pick up a thing. But I'm not an expert either. I don't know all those subtleties that are going into it.

I feel like if there's an opportunity coming with new data and you're able to chart it yourself, there's a way to really get a good idea of a vocabulary for goaltending because it's events that are going to make the biggest difference in the biggest swing over a game. Is it goal scored or not compared to entry or not or takeaway or not? But see, what I've found is like a lot of, the analysis right now that happens and I understand why it is purely, especially if you're manually

tracking something, there's like a time and a manpower sort of issue where it's like you can only really get around to so much. And so like for example, someone who I've had on this podcast before, Kevin Woodley, who I think does a great job for NHL.com writing about and talking to goalies and really kind of like taking you behind the scenes and into that headspace of like what's going on for those goalies. And it's something we don't really know much about unless we put the position. The issue is like he has this great series where especially in the playoffs, he's like documenting all the goalies and goes back and watches all their tape and documents where they get beaten most commonly, what their weaknesses are. And we see time and time again

throughout the postseason we're talking about how Jordan Bennington gets beaten through the five hole, how Dukkar asks high blocker was vulnerable. But ultimately that means you're you're focusing on the events where they were beaten and the volume of those is so minimal that you're sort of it's very easily a storytelling thing at that point. Of course. Driven by small data. It's interesting and especially from a broadcasting perspective, like it tells a viewer who might not be following all this stuff a lot.

Like, oh, maybe I'll watch for that next time, where are the shooter's shooting and stuff like that. But in terms of like an actual analysis perspective, you're just basically getting rid of such a massive part of the data set, which might tell you probably more than just focusing on a few goals that went high glove, especially for like, that's my favorite when goalies are like, oh, this goalie's weakness is high glove. It's like, oh, yeah, perfect shot off the ball.

bar it in. That's usually most people's good to know, yeah. You know, find that goal that you can actually pick that one up and, you know, after it hits the bar, but before it's actually crossed the line and yeah, you can make some money off that. Well, you know what's interesting when you were talking about how the gains now are smaller, but they're still there. I was thinking about how I was watching

a while back the Russian Five documentary. I don't know if you've seen it, but it was just so fascinating to me because it's like, obviously it was just such a different time and different era, but it's like this idea that the Red Wings were getting just completely ridiculed for shopping, at the draft in Russia and overseas

and they were getting all these guys in the later rounds and it's like oh I don't know they're just wasting that fourth round pick on this guy and it's like obviously now with all the information available on how everyone is kind of speaking that same language it's just fascinating I would have loved to have grown up as an analyst in that era I guess

because I feel like who knows maybe we would have been those old school guys who are like no you can't draft the Russians you can't bring them over they're never going to come here so who knows it's a different time and a different space but I kind of like selfishly was like looking at that like, oh, man. Well, you got me thinking now about what the draft pick chart would look like in 1995

when you're going to fish that out. What actually is the value of a fourth or even a tenth round pick there? What's the chance these guys are going to make it? Like, I'm going to ballpark this for memory because I don't have it exactly right. But I think a pick at the end of the first round has about a 20% chance of being an impact NHLer. It's a round there. It's not going to be exact.

But it's still like, it's not nearly as good as you think it is at that level. How bad do you think it's going to be at the fourth round? Like, if you're buying lottery ticket to this point and you know, and the return on this at this point is whether or not the guy's going to come over and play, much less than whether or not the guy's going to be good when he comes over in place. So, and I'm, obviously, there are some cultural differences between, and there were 20 years ago, much more than the day. And maybe the, you know, the Red Wings had a touch for it by knowing that they got a group like this together they were going to play as a unit. And if that's one factor they felt was going to

be important, then they'd solve that problem. But if it takes that kind of a buy-in to get you through it, I mean, that's obviously a place where it's, in hindsight, we're screaming, what the hell's going on here? Why didn't we think of this? And in 20 years, what are we going to be saying about today, about the players we might have missed? Well, it is also, I mean, with the league transitioning more to this kind of faster, more skill-based game and everyone kind of acknowledging,

I don't know, we'll still see you. Like, you always have everyone, I guess, ideally wants a big player who can also skate and be skilled, but it's like you're usually paying a massive premium for those guys. And so ultimately, we've found over time that you can get, more value over the kind of underlooked, undersized guys. But I always do wonder, like, how far is the game going to go in that direction? And is there going to be sort of this, like, return, of course, where it's like all of a sudden, if everyone is thinking that one way, then all of a sudden maybe going back the other way, it might actually become a bit of an

undervalued asset if everyone is looking for the same exact type of player. Well, look at baseball. I mean, that's a key example right there is 15 years ago when the quant revolution really got underway there. People were saying, oh, defense doesn't matter. And really what it was was we haven't measured defense. And so we can't appreciate it quite to that same degree. So a scout might have a good idea for a shortstop club and think it might be worth something, but they just hadn't put it together of how important it was compared to getting on base. And then five or ten years later, suddenly the teams can measure this stuff.

They do go back the other way and figure, yeah, this is something we should be looking at. And it really just took all that time to come around on being able to measure it more than being able to appreciate it. But, I mean, we see that in a few different places, even with, I mean, whole argument we have now about character or on ice effect or these things. It's not that we don't believe they exist. We believe they don't exist. They absolutely play a large role. It's just we have no way of being able to appreciate them in a predictive way. Of course. And so it's tough to balance all those ideas in one mind when you're trying to evaluate a player. It's easy enough to think you can break ties with a guy if two players' numbers are identical, but one's a saint and one's

less so. Right. So that's a nice. way to put it to listen. Aren't we all less so once in a while? But at the same time, this is the point which, this is why it's a subtlety when we try to evaluate all these things and why it's easier to trust our instincts when it's backed up by numbers

is we've at least got some proof we can fall back on to say, look, this is something that we've known to be successful time and again and by how much. So now, I mean, basketball's been one of these other things where slight other skills that were underappreciated before are coming into more value. I mean, even just the the idea that shots have collapsed

into three-pointers and dunks. Yeah. But we'll look at the Houston Rock. It's basically either free throws or three-pointers is what you're looking for. Exactly. And in baseball, it's like home runs or you're striking out. Like, it's like, the three-true outcomes.

First or last, babe. And, and, but I'm very curious because, like, I do wonder, like, as someone who has essentially devoted his life to analyzing the sport of hockey, for now, while that was very depressing to say that out loud. It's true. I think about it all the time. I thought you're talking about me.

I jealously look over at these other sports because I do, obviously, don't follow them as closely as hockey, but I'm always kind of trying to pay attention, see what's going on, try to see if there's certain things you can glean from it that you can take and apply to hockey. And the common reaction is like, oh, it's too random, it's too chaotic. You'll never be able to isolate certain stuff like that and really hone in on it. And you just kind of have to embrace the randomness. And I'm sure there is an element of that, but it also feels so unsatisfying to just think of it is that and it's like oh well we can't ever find whatever hockey's a version of that is or maybe

we already have it with what i just said about players getting smaller faster more skilled and and the game changing in that regard yeah i mean one of the things that comes up every time i try to watch a game these days is just how much randomness plays a role like i'll tell you one one anecdote i was thinking of when i was talking to someone from the wild years ago about how they watched the game and it was people tend to get very frustrated when a shot gets missed or saved. Yep. And to me, I'm watching everything up until that play, watching that a shot happens.

Right. And there's so much randomness that goes into that that I trained myself at some point to not care as much, whether or not a save had been made, until the important games came along and, you know, we got knocked out of the playoffs and things like that. But when I was watching, it was more like I was, I was watching it differently than the people around me because I was trained, the randomness part of it had already been beaten into me. And it can be unfortunate that, you know, it's going to rely on a lot of that.

scoring just in general is the noisiest part of the game. So I don't know, like it makes me more of a team player to be as frustrated when things don't go right. And sure enough, they don't a lot of the time too. And it gets to you after a while that, yeah, you're watching the same game with everyone else. You want your team to win. You want them to score, and it's frustrating when they don't. But that I was seeing the game, it felt like I was seeing the game a bit differently because of how I'd come up with, how I'd come up through the system to be in that position.

rather than the people who'd been hockey people for a long time. Well, and you mentioned with baseball, for example, sort of how over time the way we evaluate and think about defense changed. And I do think, to answer my own question, I was kind of hoping you'd be like, hey, Dimitri, what do you think is the next market intervention? What do you think we can target? Well, Dimitri, what do you think is the next time of it is?

Thanks for asking. I'll tell you what it is. Obviously, goaltending is a great answer because we still know so little, and it almost feels like it's such like a daunting frontier that sometimes people just don't even bother that they're just like, you know, just don't really invest any resources in it because it is random and we don't know any better.

So until we find out more, let's just take as little risk as possible with it. It's fun to say goal is of voodoo. It is. It's kind of like, it's a bit cathartic to like let it go and just kind of put that on into the universe and not worry about it. But obviously I think,

and I think they kind of go hand in hand actually is what's going on in front of the goalies in a defensive zone and the defensive play and how we talk about it from a language perspective, how we evaluate it from a numerical perspective, what we're looking at because the great point about it is just like the best defensive play is something that theoretically never happened because the player was in a good position. So a center couldn't pass it to the winger coming down on his side

because his gap control was so great through the neutral zone. And we don't see the event because it was so well done to begin with. Yeah, exactly. So it's funny because I manually track a lot of the games, and I try to kind of focus on that part because I do think, the way we talk about it and a value of defenseman still has so much room to grow, and I love the idea that you could find some more information in the neutral zone. But it's like I give credit to the defensemen who force a lot of dump-ins

or break up a lot of entries against. But in theory, if you're constantly getting talking, targeted and you're constantly having to do something like that. That means that for whatever reason it might be you. It might be a kinetic thing where it's like a team system aspect, but you might just be a little, a tick out of place. And then all of a sudden, you're constantly having to defend as opposed to, and that's why I guess we say the best defenders are the guys who have the puck because you're never having to actually play defense. But so especially that in zone coverage and sort of how one player's positioning lends itself to another and all them kind of moving symbiotically,

I guess that is the next frontier for me. And we're going to learn. and more about that with player tracking obviously because right now I guess we know like shot suppression is good but I'm very interested in who's responsible for it and how is it happening as opposed to just like a five-man unit doing it all together right and that's one thing I've definitely tried to look at whenever I've got a glimpse of any of this kind of data is exactly what can you identify as players who are under pressure or are being forced one way or the other so if we have like two defensemen in a pair and one of them's always being targeted on entries that's a sign that the other one's going to be pretty good, but you might be overcompensating for that because the other guy was so good,

the other guy is going to look worse in that comparison, and then they split up and it behaves differently. But now we've got the idea that maybe we're able to look at that micro picture of two or three players just together. And what happens when that interaction happens? And I feel like you can at least start to talk about it that way, where you've now isolated the effect by looking so locally, given what has already come before. But it's funny now that you've got me goose up on this. I'm thinking now, but my own, coming back to what tracking did, I can tell you. Because I try, I borrow and steal liberally from other sports.

Nice. One of the things that I keep an eye on is some of the strength training or the, what happens in baseball, both with pitching and hitting. And kind of the technology they've been using there to get better pitches, better spin rates on pitches, more velocity. Launch angles. Launch angles, get better trajectories. More don't. I'm all about the dinghers, man. So all that's being done kind of the micro level in training facilities with big cameras and everything. And one of the promises of any kind of player in puck tracking, you don't even have to look very far to see speed, to see velocity of a shot coming up with that, one of those things.

Now, I don't know how important shot velocity is as an actual factor, quantitatively. But I can tell you that as a very, very mediocre, beerly goalie, faster shots are better than slower shots. Yeah. So can we get, can players start to get both into figuring out whether or not velocity on the same shot is going to make a difference, whether you can train for accuracy is a whole other thing. Let's just start with speed and work from there.

Right. And whether or not there's a certain way of clinically proving that you can get a shot velocity up three or four miles an hour and whether or not it's going to make a difference. So that's a place right now where there's an opportunity to get in there and refine your skill beyond what you already know in a way that you think is going to directly relate to more goals. Am I kind of like initial, I guess partly educated?

Because I obviously watch a lot of hockey and I think about it, but we don't have that necessary data to actually flesh this out. But I would say there's probably like a certain baseline of speed that you need to hit where it'll make it more difficult for the goalie. But after that, it probably doesn't matter unless you're hitting like the absolute peak velocities. I would imagine, and goalies would probably tell you this, that it's like kind of deception and sort of like the Austin Matthewsville, Forsberg, shooting from different angles and sort of making it difficult for the goalie to anticipate and get set

where the puck is coming from. I'd imagine that's probably more important than just like teeing off every single time and trying to shoot it as hard as you possibly can't. I'm sure it would too. I just have no idea how to measure deception from the data we've got right now. That's true. That is a great point. Well, do you want to get into now? I guess we already have started talking about the tracking data, but we can take this conversation wherever you want to take it. I want you as the guest to lead this dance here for a little bit. Fair enough.

So I can tell you, like, I, as part of, this was public knowledge, so I can share it freely, but, or at least Russo leaked it, that back in January, the NHL had an event for all the teams to come and see what the tracking data plan was by putting a system

in the T-Mobile stadium in Las Vegas for a couple of games in a particular week. And then later on, they used some of the same tech for the all our game. And the idea was that this company had come along called Jogmo, that the NHL had contracted to put

radio frequency chips in both in uniforms and in the puck. And they were going to use this as the system going forward to be able to track all manner of these different things to a high enough resolution that it was going to be useful for all these purposes. So most of my thoughts ever since this meeting have been, you know, how we're going to use this,

when's it coming? And I'll tell you that when I got hired by the Wild back in 2016, the promise was, I'm going to use air quotes here, the data would be here any day now. And it took until now for really to get some momentum on that. And a lot of that's just because it's a technically hard problem. Harder than working with basketball and cameras because the basketball doesn't go 100 miles an hour and is bigger than your head. So dealing with the puck in general has just been a tough problem and getting it down to a useful, trackable entity that is going to do some good for the league, both in terms of team production, but as well as, PR and data brokering has been, it's taken this long to really get to that point.

Right. Well, I think, well, it's obviously a very exciting development. And I'm really looking forward to playing around with that and see, to answer some of these questions that we've already brought up on this podcast. It will also be interesting to see, I mean, I don't even remember back during the days a decade ago or however long ago when we were fleshing out certain ideas about shot attempts and importance of certain things here or there. but I imagine there's going to be a lot of mistakes or a lot of like dead ends that are led to trying to answer the question of how important is chavolost.

You might realize, oh, it's an interesting broadcast tool that a casual fan at home might want to know about to see how fast their favorite player is shooting or how fast they're accelerating from the defensive zone to the offensive zone. But from a practical perspective as an analyst or someone running a team, it might not necessarily tell you that guy is going to be more effective because of it. No, but at the same time, that's why it's so exciting is there's so many different things to look at there. And a lot of them can be theory-driven. Like how far a player is skating during a game might give you an indication of effort. But how much they were able to get off the jump in the first period compared to the third is something that might tell you something about their training in a long term, whether or not it's they, you might be outing them a little bit medically speaking,

that maybe they're not in as good shape as they could be. Right. But you're already kind of getting a sense of that, just watching the players half the time. I mean, the exciting thing is we might theoretically just thinking about it, we probably will be able to actually identify, like, will and effort and energy instead of just having these nebulous definitions. And it's like, oh, a guy looks like he's working hard. So we think he is, you'll actually be able to tell based on, like, how many loose pucks he's recovering

and what's going on when he's on ice in terms of deflections and what he's happening. Like, I know, I know there's a lot of companies looking at that stuff already in SportLogic, was tweeting it out a lot during the postseason from their point hockey account. And it's really interesting. but obviously they're also like very nitpicked examples of like Ryan O'Reilly's good at doing deflecting the puck in the defense's own but you don't necessarily know what that number that he does how it relates to everyone else in the league how good it is what it actually means right and there's just a lot of context you got to be able to dig out of a lot of those but you reminded me that people are having the same debate about visual effort for decades but the one I remember most clearly was I think it was the it was either 2003 or 2007 it was the playoffs it was Scott Neenermeyer who he looks like an effortless skater. So people might accuse him of dogging it. But he's one of the smoothest, fastest skaters in the league at the time,

which is why he was so relied upon in that role, in that shutdown role to catch up with guys. There are other players in the league right now, who I'll refrain from naming, who definitely have those same characteristics. But it's unclear whether or not they actually could be stepping it up or whether we're just perceiving it differently because our eyes are telling us something different.

And now if we're looking at something like load management, like you're not going to be able to wear heart rate monitors during a game. Right. But you are able to do it during practice, and at the AHL level, you can do it in the game. So maybe that's when you actually start to dig in and figure out whether or not a player should be conserving energy by playing a slightly different style or whether or not they should be going all out.

And I think coaches are going to love to get their hands on that, whether or not they're going to use it the right way is more a matter of debate. Yeah, no, well, I'll kind of go build off of that for you. I feel comfortable saying a player's name. I remember years ago, I forget who brought this up or whether it was while he was still a prospect on his way up or whether it was someone talking about while he was already in the NHL. But this came up with Ryan Johansson where it was, and it comes up with that sort of prototype of player, usually like the longer, lankier types where it kind of looks like they're not trying as hard because they might be sort of more fluid in their skating stance or how they're going up and down the ice. and obviously if you're like a shorter, undersized guy, you constantly look like you're like jitterbug,

you're constantly moving back and forth, you're always frantically moving somewhere, and it's like, well, just naturally it's human reaction. I'll look at it and be like, wow, that guy, look how hard he's working. He really wants the puck. And so it'll be really fascinating to compare what's actually happening between those two types

of body types and different types of players. And then when you come down to some kind of an outcome like puck recovery or intersecting someone on a breakaway or any of those sorts of things, that's a better way of classifying it in the long term. although depending on the number of times that happens during a game, it might be, you know, good or bad. If they're having to stop 10 breakaways a game, maybe that's a problem. Yeah, it's like, why does this keep happening when this guy's always? He's constantly stopping breakways.

I got no idea what's going on here. I give up. Yeah. I think it's, I think I'm not worried about the volume of that. Obviously, like, if you're looking for like one very specific event on Wednesday nights at home against the Eastern Conference, this guy's doing this. But like, oh, my friend, Chris Long, from who I met years ago was a Twitter presence at Octonia called that statistical homeopathy. Yeah, the smaller down into the day, they reduce it, the more powerful it is to the listener. I love that, I love that. It's always, it's always like the most, like, niche specific stats.

It's like, oh, oh, what is that? What does that mean? Those are also the ones that every one of my family members would needle me about when I'm at a family party. But I think it happens a lot. And obviously, there's, it might be more descriptive, but I think there's a lot of, like, just how much the puck is bouncing around out there.

There's so many random, like, deflections and stuff like that. And that's something that, I guess, I guess the argument against all, of this would be in theory, we already know how valuable certain things are in terms of predictive value and how important, even just like simple stuff, just like shop metrics can be in terms of telling you when future goals are coming or who's doing what. So I guess I'm from a practical perspective as an analyst or as, you know, for coaches down the road, I'm curious if like you'll be able to take some of this information and then apply it to your system to get, like, it's an input

obviously and you're trying to get a better output and we'll see what you're I guess you have a recipe going and you're trying to figure out how much how much of each ingredient you need but I do think there's value there. I know I know there's going to be certain people there's like kind of waving it off and being like oh you know it's it's descriptive but it's not necessarily telling us anything but I do think from especially a coaching perspective and a system's perspective there's going to be a lot of like maybe identifying certain player types and then putting them in a position to succeed which will ultimately improve their numbers. Well, it's funny you put it that way because one of the things that I know I've talked to other people about is whether or not you can use this kind of data not just to classify player types, but to find substitutes, and also to find players who will work well in the system.

Right now, I have very little appreciation for how coaches, so I say appreciation. I get the coaches are able to figure out how players behave and whether they think they're going to work well together. Right. There's obviously personality elements, there's play elements, there's bits that I don't have data on, that I just can't measure. Right. One of the thoughts is that if you get more of this high, high frequency data, you're looking much more magnified at a player, that you're able to figure out things that they do at a micro level that will transplant. And maybe you shouldn't be playing, you know, three passers at the same time together. That's at least something we've already kind of, as a heuristic, that's something we already get.

Right. But at the same time, maybe there are players with similar passing ideas, but it turns out one of them is really good at getting to the front of the net, and the other one's really good at getting the puck to them. I mean, that's boiling it down to a comically obvious example. But at the same time, coaches still do things more complex than that all the time, if they know that the two players are going to work well together. And so if we've got this kind of resolution in the data now

where we can look at a player's performance here and thinking, well, they made a decision here with the puck that would have worked well if they had been with player A on their wing instead of player B. That's the kind of opportunity you really have to say, well, look, maybe you can even just take that to a coach, let alone everything else. If you're in management, that's the kind of thing where you might want to talk to other people with stronger hockey backgrounds and say, what do you think of these guys together? This player is making a million less than the target we're thinking of.

Let's consider that as an option. Well, and we're also thinking this from like a very like sort of, we're looking from a for like selfish perspective of like talking about your team or your players or or you're focused on that. But there's also the element of like just sizing up opponents or especially in the playoffs, I think, if you're like doing scouting for a playoff matchup or a certain opponent. And it's like obviously we know how different teams like the score from different areas or what they like to do or where their strengths and weaknesses are. And in terms of like isolating those and then pressing the right buttons to take advantage of them, maybe switching your lines, maybe switching your defense pairs, maybe switching the way you want to play to take advantage of that.

there's also that element as well beyond just like worrying about your team it's also there's another team on the other that you have to actually account for that's true in fact i've even thought a bunch about whether or not you want to change your goaltender based on the profile the team you're facing i don't know how much of this is measurable at this level but you're talking about if one team is better at making cross-ice passes and exposing a left-to-right goalie and one is just you're going to spray and pray and maybe you get someone there who's taking up the net and taking up size maybe there's an action to be made there the problem is you have to kind of figure that in advance because people tend to take it personally when you take him out of a game for one reason or another and don't explain it quite the right way. Yeah, no, I definitely agree with that. Yeah, no, it's fascinating, man. I'm really excited about all this stuff. Is there anything else from this angle or sort of,

from this topic that you think we need to touch on? Oh, I think there's plenty we're going to touch on the next couple of years already. There's just so much that's going to come based on stuff we haven't even thought of right now. But a lot of it's just that we're starting to have the conversation. we're able to, I mean, this is I think a point that I hop on a lot with whoever I talk to about this, but the idea that you have better data means that you get to have better conversations. You're able to find things in common with people who didn't necessarily speak the same technical language as you, and suddenly you're able to kind of get on the same page as invaluable if you didn't come from the same background. Let's take a quick little break in the show to talk about today's sponsor.

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And trust me, it's going to come in very handy this summer when you're enjoying your various travels. Now let's get back to the show. Okay, I have a question for you. So it's related to that. Right. I don't know. Do you listen to the Bill Simmons podcast at all? No, because I mostly listen to trivia podcasts and murder podcasts.

There we go. Well, okay, so I was recently on an episode of his a while back where he had Michael Lewis on. And they had this conversation about baseball mostly, and they tied it into basketball as well. But it was this idea that in baseball, you kind of can't have a very nuanced or a very kind of like old-school. school debate about something because stuff has been so, um, like, delicately defined that you can't really go like, oh, I think this player is better than this player because you could just go look at his war.

It'll go look at his defensive stats or, or whatever, and be like, well, you're an idiot because this guy clearly has better numbers. And obviously that's like a very sort of like a basic or bare bones kind of point to make. And I think you can always find entertainment and different stuff to focus on and debate, um, stylistically or what you favor. But do you worry about that at all as we do get, enter into this new era and we do get better numbers for hockey that it will?

Because obviously, I mean, you're luckily, you haven't had to have a huge online presence lately. But there is a lot of like, I would say, delicate. Oh, I still read. Nicely, I would say there's a lot of like sort of arrogance or hand waving towards nuanced conversations because everyone feels the need to be so black and white. And so like everything needs to be so. very obviously defined, I guess.

Well, it's funny just because you have three different varieties of war people can argue about. And people will still argue about plus minus today if they think it's going to make their point. And I wonder how much of that is. So let's get an example. If we're in the same room right now, it's a little easier to look each other in the eye and have this debate a little more calmly because we know we're having this discussion in good faith. If we think there are differences in the way something's being calculated, we can say, well, of course, this might be the, this might be preferable.

to these teams because fielding effects are done differently or something like that. The online debate definitely has not changed as far as I can tell over time. Maybe it's gotten duller or more exciting. Well, we're still having the same quality of competition debates. And we haven't had the resolution of data. No, I think there's people to think that it's an irrelevant thing. And then there's people to think it's the most important thing. And just like with everything to answer, probably somewhere in the middle.

Probably in the middle. And probably depending on the thing you're looking at. Yeah. Like on a game by game level, when you know that matchups are going to be a factor, of course it's going to do something. Right. I think like when you're talking about, let's actually, let's talk about quality of competition. Because if, I mean, I've built, I can still talk, I'm not going to talk about anything work related I did with the wild, but I can definitely talk about the work related stuff I did that got me hired by the wild. And one of the things that we would do with our own war model was to say, we think this player is making this contribution

that's going to elevate how the team is doing on the ice when they're there. And that's a simple enough definition for everything we're looking at. The same thing with any of the wowies or any other definition we've got here for a player ability. Well, baked into that is this idea that there's a multiplicative effect, that this player is going to make your team 5% better. When you phrase it that way, when you put it in those terms and you put it in the model that we've got, you are almost assuming away the quantity of interest that you're looking at in competition. I mean, you have the same players on the ice.

on both sides of the equation, but you're not, you're, you're assuming what that relationship is. If I think that competition is not just on a linear scale, that I think that there's some players who are going to do better against others. And that quality, it can be like a rock paper scissors thing.

You can have matchups that are very different and not on this scale. If I'm assuming away that problem, of course it's not going to look important. Yeah. I can't measure the things that do make it important, but there's still an aspect to it that I know that, like overall, I know that line matching makes a difference because I know that coat,

because coaches are not, are not stupid. They know that there are some skills that are going to be better with one group than another, that it makes it logical to put these people against each other. I want to be able to find out what those are.

And this, you know, someone said on Twitter the other day that a data scientist means signing your life away to all those irrelevant thoughts that come up, and this is one of them. How you, you know, why I wake at night thinking, well, how can I measure,

you know, entry defense or exit defense? Those are the kinds of things that I think we're going to get better at. I still think we're going to have those arguments 10 years from now because people aren't willing to, you know, meet on common ground a lot of these things if all we're doing is shouting at each other across the ether. Well, yeah, I don't think we need to relitigate how people treat each other in the internet. That's a separate body.

We've established that one pretty well. Yeah, that one's pretty good. But no, I do think, and, you know, we've sort of, in various different topics throughout this show, we've kind of talked about, like, the human element and stuff as well, and especially, like, how coaches have a better feel for this and sort of how the interplay between different personalities and stuff. But the thing that's always struck me that's interesting about the whole quality competition debate is like, I think people just sometimes get into the trouble of just assuming uniform human behavior across the board when clearly if you're a certain defenseman, for example, and you know you're going to play against a certain type of matchup most predominantly that night versus freeing yourself up to play against software competition. I imagine you might actually play a different style of game as well, which is something we don't account for. I think constantly we think. of like defensive defensemen that have tough usage and they have bad shot metrics and then we wonder

it's like oh if they were used in a in a softer role would they be better and and and the answer is probably yes but i'm kind of curious of like how much of that is who they're playing with and who they're playing against and how much of that is like an actual internal thing of the player choosing actively to be more aggressive or try certain stuff just because he knows that he's playing against different players not just internal external too i guarantee you a coach is going to give him that exact orders. Right. Like you can't do a certain thing because the other team's best player is on the ice, so you better not make a mistake. It's going to cost us that goal. You better play it safe. You better try to tamp it down that way. That's very nonlinear already. If you're

asking someone to change their style of play based on who they're facing, of course it's going to show up in a number like that. And we still look at things, like let's come back to the defensive defenseman. You're going to face the best competition. I don't know how someone else is going to face it in that position being put in there because coaches will almost never make that matchup. Right. You're not going to put your offensive talent, defensive liability in against those kinds of players, if that's your goal. And so any of those measures you're going to put in are not going to be accurate when you're trying to measure, when you're trying to make that comparison. And, I mean, that's the big challenge in the long run is, like, I think plenty of people who ever deal with experimental design in the stat community like I have in the past would dream of the idea where you can take a whole, the NHL's worth of players, deal them out every game to a whole bunch of different teams.

Play them together and see how they perform because then you're not going to get those matchup kinds of problems. You're just going to play whoever you're going to play against. We are probably not that lucky outside of the world of NHL 2K19 or whatever. I'm not a sheller, but I get it. We're not going to get that level of flexibility. We're constrained by the fact that coaches generally are making decisions that are going to be good in the long term for how they play, but not as good for learning how others might play. Yeah. No, I think that's very well said.

Yeah, that sort of interplay is kind of fascinating to me and sort of that, I guess, that human element and sort of how also, this is kind of like a very deep take for me. But it's like it's based on your stature as a player in terms of draft pedigree, prospect status, how you perform in the AHL, how you perform early in your career, it's very easy to kind of get like pigeonholed into a certain role. and be like, this is what this guy is, and so he's going to be that. And then because there is so much on the line, because if you're a coach and you have a bad season, you might get fired because you're a GM and you're out in short lease and you're waiting for an extension that might not come or might come, you're not willing to experiment. So we don't ever really get to see those kind of creative things at the NHL level because the margin for error does feel like it's so small and everything is so tight that no one's

really kind of like incentivized to think that outside the box because, unless the coaches already feel like they're on the way out. And even so, that might even change the way. So here's my question for you then, having work for a team. Do you think that the HL, as currently constituted, is an effective developmental model? That's an excellent question, because I'm always in the position where I want to do more experimentation. I want to figure more things out like this. I don't have a real appreciation for how difficult it is for those players on their way up.

I think a lot of players, if you ask them, if they would take more risks to try and make it through, especially on the younger side prospects who are more borderline, I think almost any player would be willing to take those chances if asked. Because there's just so much difficulty to get up there at that level, especially if we're talking about a third or a fourth round player compared to a first rounder who's just there to get seasoned and is going to be on their way up. Or the kind of a maybe a college free agent who's coming in is going to get signed to an NHL deal but still has to prove themselves in that way.

I think the teams have, it's more incentive for the players to do what they want to do to try and make it. But there's still incentive at NHL levels to win. You still want to be at those teams to make the playoffs. It's not going to be the same revenue level, but there's still a respect to it. And I know that in a few plays, like some organizations have been much more public

about willing to be more developmental and take more risks and do new things. That's usually been empowered at the coaches level from everything I've heard. I know that when you have that level of flexibility, if you trust the people who are there, and you know that in the long term, it's better for you to have players who turn out to be serviceable NHLers who they might not have

otherwise been, then if you're all on the same page with that, it's the way it should be. I don't know how many organizations actually do it that way. And more to the point there, I don't know what the play is between players who are those different types. If you're asking some players to just play their game and develop and you're asking other ones to take more chances, I don't know how that's going to work in the room. I don't know how players are going to respond to that incentive. Well, it is also because I think like with the European soccer model, for example, if you're a club, you're generally also affiliated with your junior club, for example,

and you're kind of, in theory, with most of the players you're working, they're a way up the system. So you are incentivized to, from the start, get the most out of them. Whereas in this case, whether it's like major junior or whether it's the NCAA or whether it's the HL, in the most part, it's everyone is kind of like looking out after their jobs. and they don't really care about what this young player is going to look like four years from now. They kind of care about getting the most out of them right now in this moment to get some Ws so that they can get an extension so they can get a pay raise so they can get a better job, right?

And so it's really tough. Like I always, I constantly look at the HL and I remember I honestly haven't followed it as closely as during the 2012, 2013 lockout. I was like all in on it. I was actually going to games here in Habitsford. I was really focused on it because there. there was nothing else going on. And a lot of the younger NHL players were actually playing, so it was kind of cool to be able to see them in that environment.

And that's obviously different than it is now, now that those young players, at least the better ones, can just be at the NHL level. But it was the lack of, like, you'd think that in theory, an NHL team would be motivated or incentivized to try out some of these wacky ideas that we constantly have that we can easily spew online because we're not actually financially invested in it.

They are financially invested, but in a way, it does behoove them in the big picture to try, flesh some of this stuff out. I guess maybe if it is such a good idea, you don't want to actually expose it to the world in such a low upside setting because if it takes off, everyone's going to be like, oh, we should just do this. And then you kind of lost your competitive advantage. But certain things, just like, well, let's use three forwards on the power play. Let's just play five forwards at five on five. Let's do this and that. It's like, in theory, if it doesn't work out and you give up seven goals in a game, every game for a month, It's like, you'll know.

You'll be a tell from there. Yeah. Well, it's fine. I was thinking about the story I heard about a while ago that Bill Belichick had something like three either high school or college coaches at his disposal, either because they were friends or he was paying him. I'm not sure which. Can be a little bit of both.

It could be a little bit of a little bit of. He was paying him to be his friend. I think you easily pay someone to be Bill Bolich's friend. You might even be able to pay me and I'm not a huge Patriots fan. But the idea was that that was their developmental ground, that they would be able to take plays and study what worked and what didn't. and because it was so secretive, there was no risk of any of that kind of exposure. Right.

So that might work at the college level here as well if you felt like there was a coach you had a good relationship with. And, you know, their job was secure and they were maybe not the most successful team. Obviously, you know, wins pay wherever you are. Right. So he had at least that little bit of deniability there that stopped it from being kind of an embarrassing thing. And we as human beings are conditioned not to make fools of ourselves either. even though there's a gain to be had in these things. It's just, I, you know, I can take, I can take chances on, you know, new ways to try something on my workout routine. It's not going to matter because, you know, I'll do it in private or no one will know me at the gym.

If you're doing this at the, if a coach is doing this at the HL level, they have to be, they have to know they've got the support of whoever is above them. And at every level, people are worried about making mistakes and looking bad just because we're conditioned that way. I think to the point that you have new things that do work. Like maybe you do come up with the five, you know, you're playing five forwards at the very end of a period. Right. As opposed to pulling the goalie earlier. Yeah. I think, you know, I think it'd be wonderful to try and I have no, you know, no shame about it.

Right. So if I were coaching a team, I'd probably, I'm not doing it for life. I'd say, hey, let's try this. If it works great. If not, we gave it a shot. Well, and let's be frank. I mean, I wouldn't say that the NHL in its circles are the most forgiving to new ideas that kind of rock the vote, right? Like, it is generally a pretty conservative

space as much as we've evolved over the past, however many years. It still is like certain topics. It's like, whoa, that's absolutely crazy. There was pushback to the idea of having four defensemen on, four forwards on a power play because it's like, that's not how we used to do it for those years. And so, I mean, it's not exactly an environment that lends itself to a lot of

creativity that's going to be lauded. I mean, if it works, obviously people, we always talk about how it's a copycat league. People will be like, oh, that's a great idea. Yeah, I'm just going to start doing that myself. But if it fails, then you're going to be like, ah, that was the idiot that tried that stupid thing that went completely counterintuitive

to what we've been doing for hundreds of years. We're looking at that in every sport. I mean, not just Bill Belichick and everything, but I'm thinking about the shift being done to its extreme. And there, as much as anything,

there's an obvious hole to it. Like, if you, and, well, this was just beaten the other day, by, who was it? One of the Cardinals, I think it was Matt Carpenter, got a double bunt

by bunting against the shift. And ever since this started being done, I mean, it was done in the 1940s, with some players. It was like Lou Boudreau was I think the manager who put it on then. And then it happened to David Ortiz in the 2000s. But then the team started doing it more regularly, starting about 10 years ago. And the idea being, well, you know, they're going to hit it over there more often.

Then you should put your players there. Seems reasonable. But if it doesn't work, if you get that hit going the other way, you look foolish. Yeah. And the pitcher is pissed off about it. Massively so, which is one reason it took so long for it to get adopted was the pitcher couldn't believe. They were not prepared for this to happen. So even that had to be built in. knowing that the data was supporting it in some ways. But here you've got kind of an obvious-ish flaw.

What if they bunt it to the other side, right into the hole and get a double off that? And a lot of players, I mean, that's an extreme example. I think a lot of people will even just say, well, why don't you just try hitting it the other way until you realize that almost every hitter is conditioned to hit their swing a particular way. And if you get them to change that even a little bit,

it'll throw them off entirely. So, I mean, that's an extreme example based on... Well, can you imagine how pissed off a goalie would be if you sent five forwards out there for a shift then you gave up an oddman rush that resulted in a goal against. Like, I feel like your goalie would probably be like, what the hell, man?

Like, you're not, you're hanging me out to try here. I think a few goalies will probably be pissed off if they're on their bench when they've been pulled and they get scored upon. It's like, well, I wouldn't just leave me in there. They're like,

that doesn't count against my stats, doesn't? No. Oh, I still, by the way, still cannot believe that, uh,

empty net goals against counting and plus minus. I know. That's, which is, yeah, which is why we just kind of circumvent that issue entirely and do things the way we do it. Yeah. when contract bonuses come up with these plus minus numbers on them.

It's a little dice here. But that's part of those incentives that you just have to be washed out of it. And if you have people you trust around you. If the goaltender knows, hey, we've got to win this game, I can, you know, I'll do what I can, but I'm not going to blame you for this. That's a level of trust that has to be built up between players and coaches in order to get those sorts of risks to get taken. I mean, in theory, you probably do need to start doing a lot of this stuff at the lower

our developmental levels just to get. Because if you've been doing something a certain way for, whatever, 10, 15, 20 years by the time you're a Ben, H.L veteran, and you clearly are playing in the best league at the highest level, it's clearly whatever you've been doing has made you successful and gotten you to this point. It must work. If someone comes and tells you, like, no, we're going to do something different. I completely, like, sympathize with it because I can put myself in their headspace,

and I would also be like, I'm not going to do anything different. Are you kidding? You're just trying to take money out of my pocket, of course. It takes a certain kind of desperation at times to be able to reach that point, too. Like, it's teams that are already out of the playoffs. They think, you know, maybe they're playing, maybe they know they're a little more loose because they can play the role of spoiler or whatever. But I think once you take that worry about, you know, what happens if I fail,

it's like, no, you've already failed. You're out. You're eliminated. That kind of pressure being taken off can allow you to do things that you wouldn't have done otherwise, if that's the case. Maybe you get the chance to experiment. That's half the reason why you're going to play rookies more. later is just to see how they're going to do, break them in, because it's less, the goal of the

championship's out of the window. Now you're thinking for the future. It gives you permission to those kinds of things. Right, but that's a very, like, playing your rookies more than in the season, that's a very, like, common, relatable idea where it's like, no one's going to be like, whoa, this team is playing their rookies more. Not today. What do I, what can I, what can I, how can I incorporate that? If it's like a really outside the box, either structural or, or personnel idea, I get the idea that if it's end in the season, you don't necessarily, and you're convinced. I guess you would need to try at different levels

to have any sort of confidence in it, but I can see why you'd be like, why are we going to give this away to the rest of the league? Although, like, most of these ideas, realistically, are any of us going to think of something that no one else has ever thought of? Like, it's, it's probably not. So I'll tell you a story that just came to mind.

As you know, and as your listeners may know from, this is all I tweet about these days, is that on a game show, aficionado. And I've tried to project. pretty a few times. And I was on Millionaire recently, and it was fun. And you can go watch it. But one of the things that they ask you, at every game show appearance is, what would you do with

the money if you won? And I decided one year, I was going to, you know, stick to my heart and my job and say, if I won a million, you know, Ken Jennings, kiss my ass money. Yeah. And they actually put it that way, too. Then I would buy, like, I'd buy a developmental hockey league. Right. Like something at the low scale, you know, get college players, get something fun going.

Like, what was the example? There's some stuff like this in baseball and other sports where you get to play around with the rules a bit. Like this game, we're going to make the blue line three feet wide. This game, I don't know, we're not going to do multi-puck, but I'd still want to do multi-puck. But this is the idea that you have the freedom and the fun with players who are really just out there for the sake of enjoyment or also maybe getting notice and getting some higher

up reputation, that you'd be able to go and have that kind of a product there happen. And I look at a lot of the leagues that happen in Minnesota over time. So the one that happens on an annual basis right now is De Beauty League. I don't know if you've heard of that one. Yeah, let's just say hockey players aren't the most creatively gifted people with names. Not so much. But they are pretty good about doing good. Yeah.

And De Beauty League profits go to charity. It's a training ground largely for college players in the off season. They've got a bunch of pros who live in the city. It's four-on-four whale shit hockey. but it's a lot of fun you get the kids out there who might not be able to pay for a big game like this

and I think what if I were to kick in X amount of dollars and say okay for the first three weeks of this game we're going to play with wide blue lines or I tell the coaches no more defensemen

or something like that like geek me really enjoys that stuff and I think you know there's an opportunity where people might be willing to have fun if they knew it was going to go to a good cause like that and so I guess if I did have

Ken Jennings kiss my ass money that might be the way I try to take it is kick in a little bit to the charity and say, you know, for this game, you know, let's play with three bucks. I mean, that's great. You're satisfying your own personal needs and your help and charity for good cause. I mean, that's a win-win. That's a massive win-win.

All right. Well, normally I end the show by telling my guests, do you want to plug some stuff, I guess, you don't really want to plug anything. You just want to plug, I guess your appearance on a millionaire. I guess I just did. But I put it up on my website because Millionaire is not going to be running anymore. So you can watch me giddily embarrass myself in front of Chris Harrison, who is a very handsome man. But also, I don't know, as long as we're talking about plugables, just in general,

one of the things that I did with some of my winnings from the show was donate to some cancer-related charities. Lord knows that in the last few years, there have been a few personal and other high-profile cancer cases in my life. So one of the things that I did with that was do a match to anybody who wanted to give. And I gave quite a bit more than the people ended up matching. So if you want to give money to cancer research or cancer treatment or any of the family, things that are out there. Institutions like Ronald McDonald's House, I know, has been very useful to a number of people, the children who have had cancer treatment. If you want to give to a little of that, I've already matched in advance for you. So please do. Well, that's beautiful, man. That is

the best plug that anyone has ever gone on the show. It's usually like, oh, please go check all this blog post that I wrote and it's very meaningless in the grand scheme of things. And that's helping others. And that's great. I highly recommend people do that. Well, please do. Andrew, this was a blast, man. I'm glad we finally got to do this. It was good. It's only been four years. It was glad to be here last. It was fun, right? Just hanging out to, yeah, just chatting about hockey.

All right, man. This was a blast. Hopefully we're paths across sometime down the road and we can maybe publicly, maybe privately have conversations, and we'll see where it goes. Well, I'm allowed to be public now, so that's at least one step in that direction.

All right, man. Enjoy the rest of your summer. Cheers, you too. The hockey PDOCast with Dimitri Filipovich. Follow on Twitter at Dim Philipovich and on SoundCloud. com slash hockey PDOCast. You know,