The Hockey PDOcast - Episode 391: Market Adjustments

Episode Date: April 14, 2021

Rob Pizzola joins the show to discuss what we can learn from this weird season, how external factors like schedule and officiating can impact team performance, and the NHL's foray into the sports betting world. Topics include: Learning from this weird season What we can glean from matchup data  Gap in talent between top teams and the rest Quantifying the effect of fatigue on teams Transparency and accountability for officiating Pros and cons of NHL embracing gambling Broadcasts trying to talk about betting props Difference between starters and backup goalies How quickly the lines adjust to new information Teams that are under and overvalued by market Stanley Cup contender odds If you haven't yet, please go take a minute to leave a rating and review for the show. If you're busy and don't feel like writing anything, it's all good. Just hit the 5-star button. Each one counts, and helps us out. If you're feeling extra generous, you can also leave a note about why you recommend people check the show out. Thanks for the help! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices If you'd like to gain access to the two extra shows we're doing each week this season, you can subscribe to our Patreon page here: www.patreon.com/thehockeypdocast/membership If you'd like to participate in the conversation and join the community we're building over on Discord, you can do so by signing up for the Hockey PDOcast's server here: https://discord.gg/a2QGRpJc84 The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate.

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My name is Dimitri Filipovich. And joining me is my good buddy, Rob Bozola. Rob, what's going on, man? Not much. I mean, crazy, I want to say not crazy deadline that we had earlier this week. But anticipating what's coming, I guess, in the next month or so. Yeah. What's this part of the season like for you in terms of, in terms of the action on the lines and stuff? Because I remember when we were doing our preseason podcast, you were saying how like in the second half of the year, there's quite a bit of a discrepancy in terms of what, teams, you know, objectives or goals are depending on where they are in the playoff picture, especially they get mathematically eliminated. Are you like looking ahead to the playoffs already?

Or is this part of the regular season actually of interest to you? I mean, every part of seasons of interest to me, but I'll say that this year has been obviously an unprecedented season in what we've seen so far. So a lot of what is typically applied for me around trade deadline time in years past may not apply this year. and I'm kind of proceeding with caution because of that. Normally I'd always proceed with caution right after the deadline anyways, because I don't think it's as simple as just subtracting the value of a player with one team and adding it to the team that he's going to.

I truly think that there's something to stylistic fits and things of that nature. Like a guy like Anthony Mantha, for example, going to Washington, I think that's a great fit for him in general where he will produce at a much higher level than he did where he was in Detroit. But that's just purely a hypothesis. It's not something that I can back with data right away. So it is typically a time of year where I kind of slow down a little bit in terms of probably just playing my largest edges, seeing how things play out.

But yeah, this year is very different because normally in the past around trade deadline or right after trade deadline, you'd see what I call a motivational component in hockey, where there would be a much larger range between the, top teams and the bottom teams as the year progressed. We hit that range about a month ago this season, right, especially with a team like Buffalo, who just completely fell off the cliff and Colorado being, I think, the best team that I've, I've had in the history of my model, as long as I've been modeling hockey. So I don't know if that motivational aspect exists already this year or if if teams like

Buffalo and New Jersey and Ottawa and Detroit have kind of been mailing. get in for a while now knowing what's inevitable. Yeah. Well, I think there's two ways to look at it, right? Like, I think we both agree that I think from the player perspective, like, most guys are probably trying their hardest in the entire season because they're planning to stay in the lineup, especially on these bad teams or trying to earn another contract or, you know, try to show that they can be part of the future for them.

But I think from like the organizational perspective, we certainly saw it at the deadline where pretty much every team that's kind of on the fence. of the playoffs or like in the fourth spot for either the central or the west and staring down a round one match up against either Tampa Bay or Colorado or what have you was like we're just going to do nothing right now because I mean A there's no real financial incentive to do so because we're not benefiting from home playoff games but B like what's the point that the talent discrepancies is pretty clear between us and them so I think that's what kind of led to the slower trade deadline, but it was also very, like, I thought, noteworthy how teams like the stars, the predators,

you know, the coyotes, the wild, the blues, like they literally did absolutely nothing. And I think that speaks to that motivational component of it. Yeah, and part of it, I think, is playing the same teams over and over the course of the season and realizing, at least from a general manager point of view, that maybe that this gap is insurmountable in the playoffs, because we're going to play these teams again. you know, if St. Louis is an example, has been getting crushed against Vegas and Colorado this year, they're likely going to have to go through one, if not both of them,

to get to the final four this season. So you come to a point as a general manager where I think you have to be a realist and say, there's nothing I can really add here that's going to make that much of an impact in taking on these two teams. So whereas in previous years, you'd hope that potentially an eight seed or seven seed upsets one of those top two teams.

And you get in, you know, basically you get into the playoffs and you have a chance. This year, I think now that you're seeing these teams play each other eight, nine times, teams really know where they stand against the opponents that they're going to go up against. I mean, that's my belief. And I think that's kind of being shown as the season goes on because, you know, normally you don't play teams in your division five or six times. and now we're seeing just like a lot of common trends in maybe that certain opponents are a bad matchup for others. Right. There's, you know, the Leafs seem to, you know, just dominate certain teams. I say the Leafs, I'm sorry, I'm very Toronto-centric because I live just outside of Toronto. But, you know, and then they play Ottawa and they struggle against Ottawa for some reason and no one can really figure it out. And I think there's a lot of examples this year where you look around the league and you'll say, this team is really.

had success against one or two teams in their division and for some reason they can't beat the others. And I don't know if that's just small sample size and randomness. I've looked at it from an expected goal standpoint. And I think a lot of the results have been fair. It's not just been a lot of luck. Detroit loses, you know, Detroit beats Carolina in back-to-back games. I don't know.

Like, is there something there? This season just as a whole forces you to look at things in a completely different lens because we haven't seen a season like this before. Well, that's kind of why I wanted to have you on at this point, because I thought it was a good opportunity for us to sort of reflect on the preseason conversation yourself, me, and Dom had in terms of sort of trying to, you know, we were like posing questions at the time of what is this unique season with the scheduling and a divisional alignment's going to tell us in terms of matchup data in terms of head to heads in terms of how teams fit against each other and

so on and so forth. And I'm kind of curious, like, are you seeing anything? in terms of that because for me, and I struggle because I'm not sure how much of this is just reasoncy bias, but it feels like this year just looking at the league as a whole from a bigger picture point of view, the imbalance between the top teams and the bottom teams for me

is as great as it's ever been, maybe even greater. And I'm wondering if it's partly because we're just seeing Washington beat Buffalo and New Jersey, and I think they're 14-0-1 against them or something this season, and you're just seeing that time and time again. And if you see Colorado just playing, Arizona three, four times within a span of a week and just crushing them completely,

it really hammers that point home, whereas if it was spread out over a full 82 game season, it'll be kind of tougher to sort of latch on to that in terms of your expectations. So I'm wondering how much of that is actually reality and how much of it is just sort of like the schedule messing with our brains a little bit. It's really tough to say, like, you know, just being as transparent as I can possibly be, this has probably been the least confident that I've ever been betting on hockey since I started betting because of we don't have a precedent for a lot of these these things and I think your hypothesis is probably right. You see teams, you know, you typically wouldn't see teams play each

other three or four times over the course of a week in past seasons and when it's a good team against a bad team, it can make it really look like those teams are just like one as an an AHL team essentially playing against the other because of the short sample, whereas if it was drawn out over the course of the year, maybe not. I don't know. There's so much that can possibly be influencing these games. But I mean, the one thing for me that's, you know, is these rest situations. Right.

Right. Like, especially as the year has gone on, especially as COVID's taken its toll on probably like a third of the teams in the league that have missed time over the course this year and seeing or a condensed schedule, I would have thought that that would bring the gap closer together between these teams. Like everybody's playing in a limited time frame, everyone's playing four and six nights, you know, six and nine nights. We've seen some actual absurd situations that we haven't seen before, but it's actually

had the complete adverse effect where I really don't know how to, like, it's completely opposite of what I would have thought would have happened in this type of situation. Well, the reason why I'm surprised to hear you say that a little bit was I was under the impression that favorites were taking care of business this season for the most part. Isn't that how true? They are. So this is like it's been a bad year to be an underdog better for the most part. Well, I mean, yes and no. If you're taking underdogs plus one and a half seems like they're just losing close games or losing in overtime or shootouts or whatever. There's been a pretty high percentage of close games this year. But yeah, the favorites are taking care of business. And my, you know, my thought was as the year would go on and maybe, I mean, we still have a month left in the regular season. So maybe we do get a change in the in the sample here that, you know, things shift around in the last month here.

But my thought would be as the year goes on and all these teams are playing in these really tough spots, you would probably see more underdogs pulling upsets just on the nature that the favorites maybe don't have their legs. They can't separate themselves from a skill perspective. that much if both teams are tired, but it just hasn't happened for whatever reason. And it's caused me, like, I don't want to say grief. Grief isn't the right word, but like, there's been two or three times this year where I've been ready to just tear it down and be like, I need to really figure this out.

And sometimes things just correct themselves and sometimes they don't. But it's been one of the, of those where I like we talked you're talking about that podcast we had going into the season with me you and dom I mean I don't I don't think that anything I thought at that point still holds true at this point yeah it's funny I think I actually wasn't recorded on the air it was like after I ended the call or after I stopped recording you we kind of traded some awards picks back and forth between each other and I highlighted Ralph Krueger's first coach to get fired as my favorite bet and you highlighted Ralph Kruger's potential coach of the year's value and we were laughing about it.

And I think it was like 16-1 or something where first coach fired. Now, obviously, Claude Julian and Jeff Ward both got fired before him. But yeah, I mean, that's kind of what makes it fun, though, ultimately, like not knowing, but certainly when there's money involved in especially as a handicapper, I imagine it's difficult. I think it's interesting to hear you bring up the rest component because for me, it's a real question of whether we've properly calibrated for and quantified the effect of fatigue. I think when we think of tired teams from a gambling perspective, we're sort of like, oh, what are their chances of winning this game?

We tend to think of it from the goalie perspective, because usually on a back-to-back, it means the lesser goalie might be playing one of them. And so you want to lower their likelihood of winning. But in conversations that I've had with people who work for teams, I'm always blown away by like how much thought and energy they put into the actual scheduling logistics of like identifying periods of time where like this is going to be brutal. And even looking at other teams, like looking at their rivals and being like, wow, this team's going to really struggle in March because look at how many condensed games they have here. And those aren't necessarily conversations we have as fans or even as analysts because I think no one really wants to hear about how pro athletes might be tired. like we kind of expect them to just like be at peak efficiency at all times and maybe they'll get hurt.

But if they're in the lineup, we expect the best out of them. And I really do think, and I'm curiously if you feel like the actual lines themselves properly account for this because I feel like just from the outside point of view from our perspective as analysts, we probably don't do a good enough job of talking about it. Yeah. So a couple of comments on that. I mean, the first is that we're seeing home. I mean, home ice advantage is down in hockey and has consistently gone down. for the past decade. But this is a phenomenon that's happening across all major North American sports. The NFL pretty much had zero home field advantage last year, which is kind of unprecedented.

And this is including when there was fans and stadiums as well at points over the course of the season. Even the year prior, it was trending downwards. I think a lot of that is to do with the way that teams have really figured out travel, optimal times to travel to games. schedules for players and things of that nature. So I think from a team perspective, there's been huge advancements across all major North American sports there that are really mitigating the effects of those. In terms of from a betting perspective,

essentially what I would do if I was trying to model a specific game is I'm just looking at historical numbers, right? A team that's on an average rest situation, how they fare, and then looking at every single situation where a team plays three and four nights. specifically how those three and four nights shape up. Is it home, home, gap away, home away, gap away, things like all the possible combinations and I have sort of a numerical number for what I think that specific rest situation is worth. But that's like it works for me now.

I think there's potential to improve that down the road and gain a little bit more of an edge on the market. For example, I have no notion of if a team played an afternoon game or a night game the day before. and how that factors into the equation. Because if two teams are playing a back-to-back, and this can't happen this year, but in a previous year as an example, if one team played at 1 p.m. the day before

and the other team played at 7, theoretically, the team that played at 1 p.m. should not be given the same rest situation as the team that played at 7. I don't think anyone really is accounting for that yet. So there's still room for improvement from those points of view. But in this year, the real challenge is you get to situations that have never happened before.

You get to a team playing, you know, I actually don't know if this has happened. I'm just throwing it out there, but like a 14 games in 21 nights type of thing. I'm sure it's happened. Well, the Canucks are about to play 19 and 31, which is like, I mean, it's deplorable from a human element perspective,

but from a gambling perspective, it's like little or never happened. So, I mean, for me, I don't know how to quantify that. I can only look at at situations that if it happened historically and, and use those. But it's probably not right to treat a team that's played 14 and 21, the same as a team that's played 12 and 21, even though they're both playing four and six as an example.

Yeah. And I do wonder as we get into this final month of the season, because I do think there will be unique circumstances because of the makeup games that are being played around the league, there are going to be elements where I think like recently the Predators had a game against the Lightning. and then they play the stars the next day and now they're playing the lightning again and I don't think the lightning have had a game in between and I mean not that the lightning need any sort of other advantage but like that's clearly a situation where we need to adjust our expectations.

I think that the rested versus tired component of it is certainly something that probably has as much more significant effect than we like to believe. Yeah, I think for sure that's one of them. I had a hypothesis probably mid-February that as the year goes on, the older teams in the league would have more trouble with these rest situations. It's actually been the inverse. Don't ask me how.

It's a veteran experience. They know how to manage their bodies. I mean, that could be the narrative around it. Maybe I was just completely wrong. I mean, they're all professional athletes. Like we said, they should all be in peak physical condition. But, yeah, the older teams have not necessarily struggled more. Boston has, specifically with a lot of their aging veterans.

but, you know, it's hard, you know, they're down to third, third and fourth string goal either playing with the Tuka-Rasque and Yarrowelak. So that plays into it as well, although their peripherals have not been good. But, yeah, a lot of these things that logically, I kind of pride myself in being able to apply logic to sports. I'm not the best statistical modeler. I'm not the best mathematician. I'm just, you know, have a pretty broad skill set. And this year has certainly been difficult to do so.

because all the things that I would have thought really would have played a larger factor, have not. So, yeah, it's been very tricky to quantify a lot of this stuff. Well, it's tricky if your main strength is applying logic to the most illogical sport I can think of. Yeah, I mean, people always tell me I'm crazy when I bet on hockey. They used to tell me I was crazy when I bet on baseball, which I said, you know, I'm winning. And now I look back on that and they're probably right, considering you know, Major League Baseball just switched to baseball and didn't even tell people for an

entire season. Like imagine modeling a sport where you're modeling off data on one ball for decades and all of a sudden the ball changes and no one even knows. That's just like the definition of randomness. And that literally happened in hockey though, no, because they had to recall the pucks with the tracking chips in them because players were feeling like it was leading to weird bounces. They did. We had the situation to start last year where the expected goals or the shot locations weren't even being tracked properly for a month. So there's a lot of stuff that that goes into it. And then the randomness of officiating for an NHL game is don't even get me started. That's just like, I've really been digging deep into referees this season and officials.

And yeah, there's just there's so much randomness there as well. But I tell people the same thing all the time, right? betting into a sports betting market, you don't have to be able to assign perfect probabilities to every game. The goal is just to be able to do it better than everyone else who's doing it. Because it's not going to ever be a perfectly efficient market. You just have to create better numbers and get closer to the true probabilities than anyone else. So yeah, there's a lot of randomness, a lot of volatility. Sometimes it actually works in your favor. But this year, man, I got to tell you. It's been, it's taken, it's actually taken years off my life. Like I can, I can actually say I've probably lost two to three years of life expectancy from hockey this

season. Yeah, you're expecting hockey. Expected years lived is decreasing by the day. Yeah. I think that's a good way to view it, not being so preoccupied with being right, but just being like less wrong. I think it'll go a long way in this league. You said, don't get me started on officiating. I actually do want to get you started on officiating, though, because, you know, we're a bit obviously late on this. It's not as topical. It's been a couple weeks since the Tim Peel incident. And I am curious for your thoughts on it, though, from the gambling perspective, because especially when you see people like Elliott Friedman going on national TV and talking about how, you know, the consequences of this and the effect of it and kind of having a conversation about it from that lens,

I do think it's worth exploring more because it's similar to the rest of the rest of the thing. I think it's something that the casual fan probably, like they yell about how their team isn't getting calls, but they ultimately don't want to get too bogged out in the details of which officials hate their teams and, you know, the data that tells us that certain officials call certain things more so than others. But obviously, it does have a very big effect, especially because, you know, for the most part, you'd like to think that, all right, if something random is happening, we can kind of hope that over a long period of time, it's going to even out and everyone's going to be affected in it in the same way, right, if they are exposed to it enough times.

But in this case, I do think with the way the league goes about officiating, it's pretty clear that skill teams generally get the short end of the stick more often than the not because of what they're letting go. And so it's not necessarily an even playing field when you're incentivizing certain things versus punishing others. So I don't know. I think it really is an important topic. It is.

I mean, for one, especially with, you know, sports betting, regulation starting to happen. in Canada or being close to happening and it happening in the U.S. The biggest thing that's been talked about, and anyone who's against the legalization of sports betting would talk about the integrity of the game, right? The game needs to maintain its integrity. The reality is it's kind of a joke because none of the games are really at risk of losing integrity.

There's sufficient systems in place to catch anything that raises alarm bells. so to speak, but whenever you have someone like Tim Peel talking about specifically giving a penalty, wanting to give a penalty to one specific team, it then raises those questions. And the reality is, I think we kind of all knew that that happens in hockey just in general. I've always felt that the NHL kind of wants that in the product, things to be balanced, not to have this large discrepancy between teams in general and for the games to be officiated in that manner. I joked about this a couple weeks ago, but I can't remember who, again, I'll bring up a Leafs example, but I can't remember who Leifes were playing in overtime, but they had, they had just had a power play,

got killed off, and then Austin Matthews got crossed checked from behind into the board. It was the Jets game, ma'am. The Jets game, right? And that's like a clear-as-day penalty, but it's never going to be called. but the reality is that I think it's pretty consistent the way that like there's been consistency in the inconsistency of officiating for a long enough time now that you kind of know what you're going to get and you know that going into the playoffs the game's going to get called a lot tighter down the stretch and especially into the playoffs last year playoffs coming up this year so I you know

I'm not I didn't like seeing that a ref had like a predetermined outcome in his head and I'm sure a lot of people didn't like seeing that in general. But the reality is that this happens. Like, we all know what happens. It's, it's affecting the games, but it's, it's not like, I don't think there's anything happening in major North American sports right now where referee just has, like, a personal vendetta against the team and is really trying to sabotage the game all around. No, I completely agree with that. I mean, and it's clear that this isn't like a rogue referee deciding to take the outcome of a game into their own hands. Like this is something that they're empowered by the league to do

and probably told to officiate a certain way, especially come to postseason. I think the reason why I take issue with it is, and maybe this is just me being a nerd and I should just enjoy the entertainment and the drama of it. And I do in a sense, especially for the postseason, because I acknowledge that if you really wanted to properly determine

who the best team is, you would just hand out a regular season trophy after 82 games. You wouldn't roll the dice on a seven-game sample. And if a goalie gets hot, that team is all of a sudden better for some. reason and we place such an emphasis on it in North American sports, but it does bug me that there's two different, you know, circumstances basically between the regulars and the postseason, and I don't feel like we're doing a good enough job of actually trying to determine who the

best team is if you're incentivizing people to essentially break the rules as often as they can and punishing teams that have a lot of skilled, high offensively gifted players. I completely agree with that. I'll take it a step further, but And I completely understand why this is happening this year because of the COVID landscape. So don't get me wrong. I completely agree with what's happening here this year. But the North Division, as an example, gets their entire one set of referees that the rest of the league does not see. I don't really want to talk about how they specifically officiate the game just in general,

because there's a little bit of an edge I have there on betting totals and things that nature. but the reality is that the North Division is officiated very differently from the rest of the league this year. I'm not saying this as a Leafs fan. It's just a fact that the way that division is officiated is a lot different. And yeah, we're working towards trying to crown who the best team is in hockey is this year. One quarter of the league is playing essentially under their own rules. Yeah. I learned that very early on in the year.

And that was the biggest struggle for me, not only specifically related to officials, but essentially I've had to treat the league this season as if it's four different leagues instead of one. Because if you are using data across the entire league and having those be your kind of your averages, you're going to get into some real problems. Because these teams are only playing within their divisions up and down. if you think, for example, scoring is a certain average across the entire league, well, that's because the North Division is the only division in the league above average and the other three are below average as a total. So, and that's the same with officials. The realities, there's nothing really fair about sports.

Like, this could be a completely different rant for, but like, we're not trying to make things as fair as possible. You look at the schedule that gets released every single year. There's always going to be a team that gets screwed on back-to-backs. Like they're playing a lot more. There's been times where teams are playing double the amount of back-to-backs as another team in the league. I mean, that's not fair, but we have to figure out a way to fit things into schedule and the arenas are booked for concerts and things of that nature. So, and the same is going to happen with officiating. Like, we're never going to get to a standard that is completely consistent across the entire league. I think that's kind of what makes sports interesting in a sense as well.

So I've gone off on a complete tangent. I don't even remember what we were talking about. No, I do. I do think it is interesting. I think, you know, not that I, like someone like myself, for example, is necessarily invested because ultimately it doesn't, like, I can make a prediction on who I think is going to win a playoff series and that team can get jog and lose and lose. And the fans of the team that I picked to lose might, you know, tweet at me and be like, ha, ha, you're an idiot. Why did you pick against our team? But ultimately, it's like, in consequential. I think for people working for teams, though, if your job is on the line based on how far you advance in the postseason and you lose because of shenanigans, you know,

it's very rare that like a full playoff series is determined just based on officiating, because there's a lot of elements that go into play. But sometimes these series are so tight and there's a bunch of one-goal games, especially if you get into overtime. And it's like, yeah, the margin here or there could ultimately be the difference. And it could mean you either having a job next season or not. And that's a very, you know, that's something to take seriously. And I think that with the money involved, like it's about time the league does take it more seriously. I think it's the game within the game. I'll be lying to you if I said I haven't thought about being an NHL head coach or general manager in my head several times. But like one one example I think of is last year. I'm going to,

I'm going to point to another example of a Toronto Maple Leaf example because I mean, I live in and breathe the Leafs, but Leaves lost to Columbus in a five-game series last year in the playoffs. I personally thought that the Leafs got absolutely hosed in that series from an officiating point of view in that basically they let everything go. The series played on as if there was no holds barred. And that really favored Columbus, who is not necessarily a skill team. They're more of a scrappy team. They fit that prototypical mold of a playoff team, a lot of grinders in general, whereas the

Leafs are skill team and they require open ice to make things happen. And there's a lot of holding, a lot of clutching, grabbing, nothing happened. I think it was amiss by Sheldon Keefe not to address that post-game in any situation and bring it up. And we've seen this happen in sports in general, not just the NHL, but where coaches bring it up. And it tends to potentially, you know, turn the series in their favor every now and then. It could backfire and work against them. But, like, I, you know, it's, we know what we're going to get out of postseason hockey, right? At some point, team that takes the first couple penalties of the game, they're very likely going to get the next call in their favor.

To the point where, you know, if you do get too early power plays in a game, the coach has got to be on the bench and say, tell his guys, like, listen, we know what's going to happen here, right? You guys are really going to have to be careful finishing your checks. Like, don't finish anything up high. the next call is coming against us. And that's not to say that you can really influence the outcome, because maybe, yeah, maybe the ref has some sort of predetermined notion of I'm going to make the next call against this team. But if that happens and it's a weak call,

your post-game interview, your presser, you go off. You say, I told the guys on the bench. I knew this was coming. They were going to look for an excuse to do this. And you're going to get hit with a fine and the league's not going to like it. But, I mean, that would be me if I was in a coaching situation. another tangent. I'm sorry, Dimitri, for hijacking your podcast

here, but I'm just like, that's my thoughts on officiatings. We know what's going to happen for the most part. We just, it's just been widely accepted as, all right, this is the way it's going to be. No, well, that's, that's fair. I do think,

you know, when you put together the combination of the idea of makeup calls and the human element of referees having egos, I think it can sometimes be scary and maybe cause players and coaches to, you know, tread lightly or not voice their concerns because I know of countless examples I've heard of where, you know, not as obvious as like the Alex Burroughs one from back in the day

where he called, like the referee got pissed off that he caught him diving and he basically told him that he was going to screw him over. But there's countless examples of, I've heard, you know, real stories from personal accounts of, you know, player complaining about something to a referee. And then the next time down the ice, the referee is just like got tunnel vision for this player making one small little infraction and it's two minutes to the box. And, you know,

that would be technically as an even playing field because everyone is treated the same way. It's not like, oh, the referee just hates that one person. It's going to treat them differently. But it does probably make everyone kind of think carefully about, you know, voicing those concerns. There's always going to be inherent biases as well. You know, you ref a game where,

Brad Marchand dives as an example, that's going to stick in your head the next time you ref one of his games. And that's just going to happen across all of pro sports. But listen, officiating is a tough job. When I was younger, I used to officiate in a football league. No one's ever coming over to you after the game and say, you know, great job. You really ref that fairly. Like it doesn't happen. So I completely get it. The, the big, biggest issue I have with officiating in sports is there's really no accountability. Like, until the Tim Peel situation here, it's not like the refs have to sit at the podium after the game and answer questions from reporters.

Like, you look at Major League Baseball, the umpires union. Like, that's the best union on the planet. Like, they, they could, an umpire could literally just ring up guys, um, a game however they want to, and there is zero accountability. nothing will happen after the fact. Like Joe West, Angel Hernandez, these guys, they will die as umpires, essentially if they want to because there's,

and this is just the situation across major sports. And I think that's the biggest problem. It's like, as a fan, as a better, I'd like to hear answers from a referee. And if the referee sits there after the game and says, I made a mistake, this is what I saw when I was watching the play, I mean, I have a lot more respect for the difficulty of that, that drop, then I would if it's just like dead silence and I'm stewing for an entire night

because, you know, like, a guy missed a obvious penalty in overtime and I end up losing an overtime game. That's basically what the NBA does with their two-minute report or whatever, right? Yeah. Yes and no. Like, it's the two-minute report, but it still, it still feels like a cop-out, right? A little bit. At least at least-

It's coming from the league, right? It's kind of basically like a public performance. you in a way. Right. And I don't watch a ton of basketball anymore, but I'm sure, like, I'd feel fairly confident in saying that there's no dismissals coming to NBA referees based off those. Every deep playoff run starts with building an amazing team. Doing the same for your business doesn't take a room full of scouts. You just need Indeed. Don't spend hours on multiple job sites looking for candidates with the right skills when you can do it all with Indeed. hate waiting. Indeed's US data shows over 80% of Indeed employers find quality candidates

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for everyone need to hire you need indeed. It's it's more for a PR thing than it is referee performance I would say I could be wrong on that. I'm not educated enough to talk on that. But yeah, there's like every job has some sort of performance review. Like unless you're working for yourself, you're working for big companies. They hold annual performance reviews. I mean, if things aren't going, you know, properly and you're bad at your job, they're going to give you a few months to turn it around or else see you later.

You're out the door, but this just doesn't happen in professional sports for officiating. So, yeah, that's. All right. Well, let's take a quick break here, I mean, I hear it from a sponsor, and then we're going to finish up on the other end of things. All right. So that's enough about officiating. I don't know.

Is there any other stuff that we wanted to touch on in terms of the NHL embracing, gambling? It's been interesting to me watching these broadcasts because I remember like, you and I did a show while I was in Toronto a couple years ago, and it was like when the league really started partnering up with certain companies and really kind of dipping their toes into it. But now watching these like local broadcasts. And I think like the avalanche one is one of the more egregious ones for me.

I've obviously been watching a lot of avalanche games this year because they're remarkably fun to watch. But they're just like you've got these commentators just like talking about, oh, if, you know, the over under for this period on a Tuesday goal with goals coming from the left circle by players with numbers 22 to 35. If you hit that total, this is a good number. And it's like, I understand. they're like, you know, they're probably like contractually obligated because it's a sponsor. But it feels like we still have a long way to go in terms of intelligently talking about this stuff on broadcasts. I would go as far as calling it an epidemic from my point of view.

It infuriates me as a sports better to see a lot of this stuff on the broadcast. I think it's good. I mean, in general, that people are embracing sports gambling. And it's kind of like losing that taboo. feel, but oh, it's, it's infuriating. And, uh, you know, I saw this in the U.S. specifically, um, very quickly when New Jersey started legalizing sports wagering. And it just becomes a rush to market from everyone, right? Everyone needs to talk about it. It's the thing. Um, rather than going out and hiring professionals in the sports betting

space, a lot of media personalities who would just typically be covering their sport. have now been asked to talk about betting without really understanding things. And I think what compounds it even more is that there's so much misinformation out there by companies that are really good with search engine optimization. As an example, you know, you can't really Google answers to sports betting questions without getting a bunch of garbage right now because that space is dominated. Front page of Google is dominated by companies that do really well with search. It's a real problem. It's not a problem for the sports books. I'll tell you that because they're obviously getting a lot of publicity and they're attracting a lot of betters who are going to place wagers on things that, frankly, are just very poor expected value in the long run. I'll give an example. And this is no disrespect to Mike Johnson. I actually think he's a really good hockey analyst. I say that's great. Yeah. I say that in all sincerity. But he's been asked to,

do some sort of gambling segment for TSN whenever he's on the broadcast in Canada and give out picks. And the reality is that I'm fine with anyone giving out picks. I think it should just be painted in a recreational light by the media company, whereas this is just for fun, rather than selling people on why this is a good bet when it's not type of situation. Like I remember tuning into a pregame of a Leafs game where he took Zach Hyman to score a third period goal at five to one or something along those lines where like it should honestly be priced at like 20 to 1 something higher than that. But with like a one minute segment on why this is a good bet. And that's where I have an issue with it because there's going to be a lot of people that tune into that space and just will follow anyone, what anyone tells them on on TV. or radio or whatever it might be.

There's two things branching all that. So one, I kind of, I feel bad for analysts that are put in that position because, you know, I can't speak for MJ, but I'm sure he would tell you that he is under no circumstances telling people that they should go and bet on Zach Ivan to score a third period goal, even though like he's doing a segment on it. Like he's just, he's being asked to talk about it. I would frame it more in the perspective of like, this is, analysis. Like, why do you think Zach Hyman's going to score? But TV doesn't lend itself to that

as a medium because you have a 60 second hit and then it's like off the commercial, right? And I've done like when I was with sports and I'd be on TV and like, all right, let's talk about analytics for 90 seconds here. And it's like this is like a 60 minute podcast that I do. And you know, you could probably relate to this as someone who does like hour long periscopes about football games. It's like if you were asked to condense it into a one minute thing, you'd probably wind up looking like an idiot because stuff would get taken out of context because you can't properly explain the nuance of it. Yeah, I mean, I completely get the reasons for it, Dimitri. Like it's, I understand why it's happening. I mean, there's a lot of sponsorship dollars that are coming

from sports books in general. So obviously they want that they want that ad money to go, to be put to good use. And that's going to be to get people to bet on sports in this specific case, hockey. The reality is that problem gaming is a is a huge issue and will continue to be a huge issue for many years. And my issue is when the media companies will will pass someone off as an ex, you could be an expert in hockey and breaking down the game that's not the same as being an expert in betting on hockey. And it's a very slippery slope and dangerous situation where I'll use Bob McKenzie as an example because everyone in the world loves Bob McKenzie. like he's impossible to hate.

People really respect everything he says. He's an insider. He's viewed in that light. If all of a sudden Bob McKenzie starts giving out picks on people are going to follow those picks. We laugh about this as we can see each other right now. And there's going to be a small percentage of people that are going to follow those picks for more than they can afford to follow.

So this is where it becomes a slippery slope. And I think there needs to be more education in the space around Hawkeley betting rather than just firing out the odds that are available, giving out picks. And I don't know that anyone's going to want to do that because it's costly to run marketing campaigns around betting responsibly and things of that nature. But that's kind of where I see it headed. And if there's going to be any blowback to all this legalization of sports wagering, it's going to be from. stories about people losing their lives and their houses and their, you know, their kids' college funds and things of that nature because they watched a game and some guy was telling them that these were good odds or good picks and, um, and like, that's going to be a really

unfortunate scenario. Yeah. I was going to say, yeah, the reason I was laughing is because it's like so ridiculous to me that someone would do so. But then, yeah, your average show that's, you know, working a nine to five and comes home and turns on the TV and sees a full. he recognizes telling him to do something. It's like, it's why people buy stuff off of infomercials and stuff. It's like, I've done that before. Like, I can personally speak to experience, but when I was younger, I, you're using your shake weight right now. I can see you. I, I've bought picks from, like, snake oil salesman, essentially, um, touts. People who can't make a, make a living betting on sports. So they sell their picks to others and they pass themselves off

as long-term winners. I lost a lot of money when I was young. I mean, I built up gambling debts till I was in, you know, second year university that unfortunately I had to pay off over a course of time. But like, I've lived through that experience. So maybe it hits home with me a little bit more than others. And that was at a time where I was personally seeking that stuff out rather than it just being directly bombarded into my face on a daily basis. So I do think I if I could ask for one thing in the. in this sports betting merging into hockey, it would be for major networks to go after like real betters and try to turn them into media personalities rather than the opposite

way around. I don't know that'll ever happen because it's also going to come at a cost, right? Like it's very hard to get a professional better to go on TV and give their side of things and give valuable insight. It's you're not going to get a whole lot of that. Even the media that I do in general, you know, I told the line with what I say and what I don't because I don't want to give away my edge. But there is a happy medium there where you can give away enough good information to the public, not misinformed them. And I think most importantly, completely steer away from the just giving out picks.

Like that's not doing anybody any favors in general in the long run. Well, yeah, like I think I would hope people could tell from listening this. like you and I had, when we're talking about like matchup effects and fatigue, like, I think there's a certain level of intellectual curiosity where we're like, we just want to talk about it because we don't necessarily have an answer. We have a hypothesis about it. And now it's, yeah, right, entirely different. You should be asking yourself, like, what does this person have to gain from giving out these picks? Because if they're so good, why aren't they just exclusively making them themselves? And I think that that is a slippery slope. I guess what's, what do you feel like has been

the effect on on on the market in terms of uh you know i'd imagine more casual hockey betters like do you do you think it does create more of a competitive advantage for like the quote unquote early adopters who actually know what they're doing or does it lead to or like you're saying the amount of misinformation uh just kind of bugs you because it can you know the blowback but also it's just kind of like a dangerous thing to be walking into um my hypothesis on on this a couple years ago was very wrong as well, which is, I guess, a common theme of this pod today. But I thought that it would help me as an established sports better, getting a lot more casual betters into the space that don't really know what they're doing would be good for business. But the reality is that there are so

many eyes on the space now that, yes, there are a lot more recreational and casual sports betters, but it's attracted a lot of smarter people into the space as well. And what I've noticed, all major sports, including hockey, is how competitive the overnight markets are now. So just for someone who doesn't understand, I'll describe it really quickly. But a sports book will post odds in an NHL game, usually the day before the game. But they'll post it with very low limits, up to maybe 500 bucks at a high end sports book. Because they don't really have much confidence in the numbers that they're putting out. they're going to put out a number. They're going to wait for people to bet it. They've already

profiled people who are betting into their sportsbook over the course of time. And they know who their good bettors are and who their poor bettors are. And they're going to move the price based off of that early action. And as time goes on over the course of the day, they're going to start increasing their limits a little bit more and a little bit more to the point where usually overnight, you can probably get up to a thousand, maybe some sports books, a couple thousand dollars, depending on the book. For me, I'm making a living off of betting sports. That's not enough of a bet for me to be able to make a living. So I'm reliant on waking up the next morning to bet hockey. And at around nine o'clock, limits start to get raised at all the sports

books because they're now confident enough in their ability to set a number that they're willing to take a larger bet. That's typically when I would bet. Three or four years ago, I'd wake up in the morning. I could almost bet the entire board in some cases, or at least half of it, I would say, where I'd have an edge. Now what's happening is there's a flood of people into this space. Some of them are very good at what they're doing, but they're betting overnight. And they're giving the sports book a lot more information early on and allowing the sports book to sharpen their number. So limits come off in the morning at 9 a.m. And I might only have two or three plays on some days.

This morning I didn't have a single play. So it's kind of hurt by volume in general. And this is happening across all major sports right now. But it's interesting you bring that up because I would think like, you know, hockey is so subjected to the volatility of which goalie is. starting for a team. Like if you're getting in on a line for the avalanche thinking it's to be Philip Grubauer and then it turns out it's Jonas Johansson, you're kind of screwed. As our friend Dom who loves to tweet out his trials and tribulations was trying to pick which starting goal he's going to be like, I think like, what is it, Vegas this year that's

kind of publicly been like, we're not going to tell you who's starting until you see them coming out for the game. And L.A., the Kings as well are another one where you don't know if it's Peterson or quick until war bumps. Right. They're on a rotation. They're on a rotation. So, I mean, you kind of know. But the challenge with that, Dimitri, is that I can think back to, you know, three, four, five years ago. There was a lot more larger discrepancies between the starting goalie and backup goalie across the league.

Whereas now, there's still a few. I can think of a bunch off the top of my head. You pointed out a great one. Vasilevsky, McElan, he's obviously a huge one as well. But there is not enough. that warrant a difference to having to wait on a bet. And in some cases, you know, I know people who blend their goalie numbers. So they'll say this goalie has this, I'm giving this guy 75% chance to start.

I'm giving this guy 25% chance to start. And they'll just kind of blend it and wait one, three quarters, one, one quarter. I know guys that'll just wait completely and because they want to have all the information available to them. There's no right or wrong approach. But at those limits, it's really like. And then I guess one other thing I should point out as well, in theory, theoretically, even if you're betting early, the change in goalie should work in your favor just as often as it works against you. Right. So why? Do you feel like that line's being set with the, like leaving the door open to either goalie starting?

Yeah. In a lot of cases, I think like I said, it just, it doesn't matter anymore. You know, maybe Dom would disagree with me. I tend to notice that he has much larger discrepancies with his goalies. We've talked about how we do goalies, and I don't think anyone has the answer to how to do goalies just in general, whereas he'll have some much larger discrepancies between some of the guys. But yeah, just think about it across the league. There's only like a handful of situations right now where you'd be in a really rough spot,

if you bet on one team and the backup ended up starting. Or vice versa. You bet on the backup or bet against the team that you thought the starter was starting. The backup started. There's some situations where I actually have the backup as an upgrade over the starter. So the reality is because of the amount of competition in the space for early markets now, you're just not even afforded the ability to kind of wait. you could be one of those people that just is playing injury news.

I know guys like that in general, we're just monitoring every beat writer over the course of an entire day. As soon as they see something, they immediately bet. That's fine. It's really hard to do in general because the market is so quick now in NHL. If Vasilevsky is not starting and it's McElaney, you have about 15 seconds to make a bet.

Do you feel like that the tightening of those lines or the market being on top of it has also translated to evaluations of teams? Because I think hockey in general is so behind in terms of adapting to new information. Like we think of teams as being good or not or boring or exciting and it takes them so long to shed those labels, right? and especially for teams, especially in the case if like a team has been really good for a long time, I think generally you think of them as being better than they are for probably, definitely for like in season, but maybe even a year or two beyond just because of the rep of the players they have,

if those players still are on the team. I would wholeheartedly agree with that. I think almost everyone who bets hockey and is using larger samples and timeframes, I know Dom probably wanted to pull his hair out, betting the blues for about a month early on in the season, when it was pretty evident that their team metrics were just not as good as they had been. I mean, last year they kind of went downhill as well. It was really two years ago that they were an elite team. But it takes time for the models to kind of catch up to that.

So you can explore using a shorter time frame. That brings with it another set of. problems altogether. So it's kind of finding that sweet spot in general of how far back am I willing to go? Goleys is another situation where it's like you can clearly watch a goalie and say, I mean, this guy's like Pec Arena to start the year. I think Pecorina is a horrible goalie. He was playing really well to start the year and Soros was like, couldn't stop a beach ball to the point where, I guess depending on what sample of data you're using with your model, either you might have thought it's being very slow to react to Soros' dip in performance, or you might have got to a point

where I did, where you wake up one morning and you're running your numbers with René and Saros, and you're like, there's no way Nashville has a better chance to win this game with Peck Arena today. But maybe they did. Like it's very, very, very difficult to get those timeframes right. Well, so what, like, what are you doing with Mike Smith this season? That's a good question. I think generally most fans would brought, like, Mike Smith hasn't been good for a while, right? He has a rep of being good because he gets out and he plays the puck as if that's, like, a very important thing.

He's been much better than I gave him credit for this season. Like, just by Eddie metric, I expected him to be, like, he was like a sub-900 goalie, I think, last year. And he's been like league average, maybe even slug. lightly above, obviously prone to horrible performances as he had against Calgary the other night, but for the most part, significantly better than you would have expected. But you watch him and you're like, how is this happening for the guy who's almost 40 years old and has sucked for a few years now? I have 80 goalies in my database right now. And I have Mike Smith 26th out of the 80. Yeah. Just to put that in, like I have Miko Koskin in 32nd. So I actually don't view that

as much of a gap at all. Like it would, it was never, Edmonton games, I could pretty much always trust the number, like just go off of it because if,

if Koskinen gets confirmed to me, it's not even really a big difference at all. I think some Oilers fans, if they heard this right now, would actually call me insane based off the performance this year, right? Yeah.

Because Koskenen really struggled in the early going. And he was saying too much. And then Smith was out and then Smith had some good games. Yeah. So, I mean, that's one of the, the real challenges.

with hockey in general is, you know, I still watch games. I barely watch games that I bet on, but I still watch a lot of games. And it's, you, you see things with your eyes that maybe don't match what your model's telling you, and you don't know which of the two is right. And it's, you'll wrestle with that quite a bit. And believe me, I certainly have wrestled with that quite a bit at points this year, where I'm just watching something and I'm like, you know, either my model's not catching up to this quick enough or, you know, it's not right, but it's, it's weird to say this. It can be healthy and

unhealthy, but I think it's healthy to like constantly to look at these things, unhealthy if you agonize over them. Uh, you know, just for a functional aspect, I'm curious for your take here. Is there a team that you feel like he's either generally undervalued or overvalued right now, as we head towards the, uh, the final stages of the season? I can give you one to get us started. Go for it. So the Rangers are interesting because I would imagine they're probably a pretty public team. Like they're the New York Rangers. They have a massive fan base.

They're 1916 and 6 this year. They are of identical games played in points with the Philadelphia Flyers in their division. They have a plus 22 goal differential. The Philadelphia Flyers have a minus 23 goal differential. Now that's obviously inflated by a 9-0. in an 8-3 game that they played against each other recently. So both of those figures are probably slightly higher and slightly lower in Philadelphia's case

than is like a true talent evaluation. But, you know, good teams generally have these eruption performances more often than not, more than bad teams at least. And like I always think about, you know, like Bill Barnwell does his annual Pythagorean win projections for teams to identify regression candidates, right? And I'd imagine if you just compare the Rangers' statistical profile, you'd be like, how the hell is this a 1916 and 16?

Now, they're obviously not like a dominant 5-on-5 team by any means. Artemi Panera and missed 11 games there. I think Shisterkin has played 23 or 41 games I have them down for. So, you know, they've had a bumpy season. But it seems like when you compare those two things for me, that's a candidate where I'm like, what is what's going on here? Like it feels like they should have a better record than they do. Yes.

So I agree with you that they should have a better record than they do in general. I will say that the market does not undervalue the Rangers, though. So there's a site that I'll plug. I have no association with the site in general, but I think it's just generally good if you don't understand, like, how the market values teams in general. There's a site called Impredictable, which kind of is just an algorithm that shows how the market is projecting teams.

Now, this year is a little bit more difficult to do so, because we have these individual divisions. Teams don't play each other. So they've kind of separated it out by division. But last week, the betting market valued the New York Rangers higher than the Washington Capitals. So if the Rangers and Capitals played on neutral ice, the betting market would have made the Rangers favor.

A lot of people will scratch their heads at that in general. I have the Rangers as a borderline top 10 team in hockey right now. just looking at my numbers in general. But it goes to show like a team like that where the Rangers, you might have been able to find value on them like four or five weeks ago, but it's quickly snatched up to the point where I would almost make the argument now that maybe the market is overvaluing the Rangers just a little bit. Yeah, it's interesting.

I have them down for a stat that I really like. Obviously it's got contextual issues. but like percentage of time you spend leading, I think is a stat that people should be paying attention to more because I think, you know, if you sort by it, it seems like the top teams are Colorado, Tampa Bay, Toronto, Vegas in that order. It's like, all right, that makes sense. I think the top 15 teams are all playoff teams, except for New York who are ninth in that stat. And yeah, I don't know. I just, I wonder, you know, for them, it's a pretty tricky spot because they're four points. back of the Bruins, the Bruins have two games in hand on them. The Bruins have a ton of games here against the Sabres. They also got, I think, markedly better at the deadline by acquiring both Taylor Hall and Mike Riley. And so for the Rangers, I know they have two games left against the Bruins and they themselves have a bunch of games against the Devils and the Sabres. But it seems like a pretty uphill battle. And I'm kind of curious because I wish I think they're better than the record's been,

but I'm not sure like functionally how much that's going to matter in this final month. Yeah, I mean, it's funny you bring up the Bruins because to me, I don't want to say the Bruins are over undervalued right now, but the Bruins are like, they make, they make good deals at the deadline. They're going to get Tukarask back. They're going to get Charlie McAvoy back today, if not this week. They're going to be a pretty good team again on paper. And it's an interesting one because their peripherals have kind of just gone off a cliff over the last month and a half. Expected goals, coursey, whatever, you know, high danger scoring chances, whatever you want to look at, they're an older team. They're their best players, you know, Bergeron, Marchand, are older guys.

You wonder how much of that schedule is having an impact. You wonder how much of them not having played the Sabres much the season has had an impact on. what we think of Boston. But to me, down the stretch, I mean, I don't want to say I wish they hadn't traded

for Taylor Hall, but I think even without getting Taylor Hall back, they would probably be a team prime to make a run down the stretch. I wouldn't want to play Boston in the playoffs necessarily if you're anyone in that division.

So to me, I think you'll probably find some value on them going forwards. But just in general, if I can speak to what I see in the betting market is, there's been, this natural gravitation towards expected goals.

This is not something new. It's been happening over the course of years, but people talk with so much certainty around the public expected goals models. Washington is a fluke. Washington's so fluky. I can't believe they win games. I hear that quite a lot from my friends who bet on hockey and they're very immersed in.

I'm not convinced that Washington is a fluke in general. Because this is now going on, I don't know what, like five, six, seven years where their peripherals are just not great. And they end up being a really good team. And teams have so much more sophisticated data to work with with the sports logic data that they're using versus what's publicly available that I think teams like that in market are consistently getting undervalued. So Washington is one. and Winnipeg would be the other. Because if you look at Winnipeg in general, they get faded.

Like almost every time a Winnipeg line comes out, the other team gets a bet. And that's likely because whoever's betting it is looking at these public expected goals and bottles and they're like, Winnipeg, like this should be a bottom team in the league. But they have some pretty high-end talent at forward for one. And they have the second best goalie in the world.

Yep. which plays into it as well. So I think Washington and Winnipeg are teams for me that I consistently see the market fade and have pretty much been getting them wrong for the entire year. It's interesting that you bring that up because I do feel like on the one hand, publicly or generally hockey overvalues shooting ability because I do think you have to acknowledge that there's from one year to another a certain level of randomness where a great player can just have a 7% shooting season and it doesn't

necessarily mean they suck and the next year they're going to bounce back to let's say 13 14% right and that's obviously a huge swing over a 82 game sample on the other hand I do think we also underrate team-wide finishing ability like the the capitals are a great example and mostly because publicly we don't really unless you're looking at like Cory Snyder's work tracking this stuff we don't have like rush data for example and I think the capital are like they get the highest percentage of your offense off the rush. And when you combine that with elite shooters, you're going to score significantly more goals than we can probably account for with expected goals models because they're just not properly calibrating how

likely that shot actually was to go in from the player that was taking it. Yeah, I think I would agree with that in general. I, there's the realities we have so much more to learn. I mean, there's been advancements every year. Like we kind of get better and better. But yeah, I think just generally what I've seen is people will use the public expected goal stuff, evolving hockey, money puck, natural stat trick, as if it's just like, this is the be all and end all. We've kind of gone from one extreme where it's like these analytics don't matter.

Like, Corsi, like, what are you talking about this is garbage to complete opposite now where it's like the actual results don't matter anymore. It's like, let's just look at all this underlying data. And the reality is we should have settled somewhere in the middle. Right. I still think generally, if you're looking at expected goals over actual goals scored, you're probably going to be on a better path, like generally speaking. But I think there are specific examples of both players and teams that just annually

are on either end of extreme. And that's probably for a reason. I completely agree with that. like if you are just blindly betting expected goals, like you're pretty much going to always be betting on the same teams and against the same teams. And your season is going to come down to quite literally a half dozen teams performance because you're going to bet on Montreal every single game.

You're going to bet against Winnipeg every single game. You're going to bet against Washington every single game. Like there's just a number of teams that there for some reason or another, Carolina would have been another one for several years, where you would have just been betting on them all the time. And these aren't teams that, like you mentioned, it's just like out of nowhere this year that this is some sort of phenomenon that's happening with them.

This has been consistent for two seasons, three seasons, four seasons, even longer than that in some cases. So I think there's something there that's just being missed right now in the data that we have to work with, very likely the past before the shot, or the entire sequence before the shot. will lend some light to that because Montreal to me doesn't,

you know, they don't profile as a team when I watch them that is moving the puck laterally a whole lot, cross-ice, getting goalies in bad positions. Carolina was never that team either. A lot of it was get it to the net, hack away in front of the net. They'd have a lot of their chances in close, but the goalie was in position type of thing. So, yeah, I mean, that's where I see overvalued and undervalue teams. The team that's very interesting for me,

because they've been very good to me this year. Dom might proclaim himself as the number one Minnesota wild fan, but I might want to take that honor from him. But they've kind of fallen off a cliff in the last three or four weeks. But Felino was out, Bukstad's out, a Fiala missed. I think maybe only one game. There was some other, Parisé was a healthy scratch for a bit in there. So they've definitely had some issues.

choose with forward depth. I'm very interested to see if they're going to rebound off that or if that early start was just sort of a flash in the pan type of thing. But Cam Talbot has had a good year. Like, I look at them on paper. I don't love them, but they're deep. Like, they kind of remind me in Montreal a little bit and that they don't have like a lot of superb talent, but it's a pretty deep roster. That's a team I'm very interested in seeing for the last month of the year because if they do get back to the form that they were in, the wild could upset the knights in the first round. I think Carolina, you bringing them up was interesting to me because, you know, they seem like they're on a collision course with Tampa Bay probably in the second round of that Central Division

playoff schedule. And I don't know how many people are going to pick them to win that series. and I personally don't know that I would either, especially if Kucharov comes back and is healthy and you just plug him into that lineup and they stay healthy with the addition of David Savard now as well. But I, you know, for years, Carolina was that team where they wouldn't turn those shots into goals because I think there was a lack of offensive creativity

or even talent where they had kind of good grinding players, but they couldn't, you would, if you were just going based off expected goals, you would be led down a dangerous path because they weren't as likely to score as a team like Washington. But now they've got NCHS playing a big role. If Tara Bion comes back, they've got Aho, they legitimately have that lateral cross-ice passing more than they have in the past. I think, I wonder if they still have the top power play.

I know they did for a significant period of time by like significant measure. And obviously, some of the shooting percentage luck. But if you look at the personnel they have, I do think it is different than it's been in the past. and I wonder, I still think they have generally that label of kind of being a nerdy team that has great analytics but can't finish. And I don't think that's the case anymore. I'm not sure that the average casual fan really even realizes how great a player Dougie Hamilton is as an example. The Trocheck move was big for them as well.

Like, I mean, if you're asking me who pick who I think would win a Tampa Bay Carolina series, if Tampa Bay has Stamcoast back and Kutraoff for the playoffs, I'm picking Tampa Bay. I think they're just a little bit deeper. They do have the best goalie in the world, which offsets a lot of their limitations, I would say. But, I mean, Carolina is a great, like, if Carolina, let me put it this way. I think Carolina is a legitimate Stanley Cup final contender. Like Carolina can win the cup this year. And I don't know how many average hockey fans would say that they have a chance.

Yeah. Well, I was looking at Pinnacle today. I think they've got Tampa Bay at plus 620 or so. And they've got Carolina at plus 1360 to win the cup. I have some Carolina to win the division. I have some Carolina win the division from mid-year, not prior to the season. But they are. They're closer.

Like, I mean, I don't want to completely discredit Florida either, but the loss of Eklad was rough for them. And frankly, if they're going to ride Bobrovsky, which, I mean, they pay him a lot of money. He'll start the first playoff game for them. I think that's a questionable decision that might end up hurting them. But, yeah, Carolina's, they're deep, they're good. I mean, I'm obviously rooting for the Leafs.

If the Leafs don't win, I've got so, I loaded so many futures over the course of the year on Colorado at like plus 750 plus 800, which are great prices. Yeah, they're plus 430 now. So, yeah. Yep. All right. Well, I think that's, that's going to be it for today's show. Rob, where can people check you out? I'm not going to ask you to plug your work,

but people can check you out on Twitter for your musings and all this stuff. Yep. Follow me on Twitter, please. At Rob Pazola, for the Americans, that's double Z for the Canadians double Z. I tweet about all sports, focused mostly on the betting side of things. And I always do say when I plug my Twitter account,

I do keep my DMs open as well for anyone that has any questions just about betting in general. I'm not going to tell you how I build my bottles or give you the secret sauce, but I'm more than happy to answer any questions that you might have. So feel free to use that. I do respond to every DM unless you tell me to jump off a bridge or something. I do get some pretty rough ones here and there. But I respond to the ones that should be responded to.

So feel free to leverage that. Awesome, man. Well, I appreciate your transparency and just the, the good chat and we'll have you back on sometime on the road so enjoy the rest of the season and we'll we'll check in soon thanks for having me all right that's going to be it for today's episode of the hockeypedo cast hopefully you enjoyed my chat with rob as much as i did uh love having him on the show and just picking his brain about stuff because i uh i think the way he thinks about the game is really insightful and innovative and so uh always learn some stuff just talking about ideas

with him if you did enjoy the show uh you can help us out but rating and reviewing the Hockey Pagipedio cast. It is really easy to do. It only takes a minute of your time. You just go leave us to five stars. If you want to go above and beyond, you can leave a full review and let us know either why you love the show or why you recommend people check it out.

And all of those ratings and reviews are greatly appreciated. And thank you to all of you that have done so already. If you listen to the show and you're wondering why we didn't do a full trade deadline theme show instead, a peek behind the curtains actually did a full trade deadline winners and losers show the night of with shana goldman and andrew berkshire both of whom have been on the pedo cast before and unfortunately because of my fault entirely a show wasn't recorded properly and we couldn't salvage the audio and so it's just going to go down uh in the record books is the lost pdo cast and it's a shame because i really enjoy the conversation and it was a really fun one but hopefully we're going to have

more opportunities here down the road to reflect on the trades and the fits of the players on their new teams and all the decisions they were made and so on and so forth. If you are curious for my takes on all the trades, I did so in written form on EPRinkside. If you aren't subscribed yet, I get it. There's a ton of different websites and sports journalism to subscribe to these days, but you can check it out by using the promo code, I Love EP, and it'll give you two free months off of an annual subscription. And we've got tons of new content there pretty much every single day from a bunch of different voices. And I can't recommend it enough. If you are a hockey nerd, and I assume you are, if you're still listening to the Hockeypedo

guest at this point of the show, you are going to really vibe with the material we put out there. So I highly recommend checking that out. And we've got a ton of trade deadline coverage on there. And yeah, that's going to be it. For today's show, we're going to be back soon here, hopefully. plenty of stuff to talk about as we wind down towards the end of the regular season and the stretch run and head towards the postseason. So really looking forward to that. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the show. And we will be back soon.

Videocast with Dimitri Filipovich. Follow on Twitter at Dim Philipovich and on SoundCloud at SoundCloud.com slash hockey PDOCast.