The Hockey PDOcast - Horvat, the Canucks, and team building

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

Dimitri is rejoined by Canucks Talk host Thomas Drance for a one-hour deep dive on the Vancouver Canucks, Bo Horvat, and team-buildingThis podcast is produced by Dominic Sramaty. 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. 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.

Lessing to the Mean since 2015. It's the Hockey PEDEOCast with your host, Dmitri Filipovich. Welcome to the HockeyPEDEOCast. My name is Dimitri Philpovich. And joining me is my good buddy, Thomas Trans, Thomas. What's going on, man? I'm doing well, bud. How are you?

I'm doing really well. Let's set the scene for the listener. Yeah, sure. We're sitting intimately in a Seattle hotel room. On separate beds in a Seattle hotel room. We're here to watch Brock Purdy, live and in person. That's what we just want here to do. Yeah, and maybe, maybe a sprinkling of Christian McCaffrey.

Sprinkling of Christian McCaffrey. That's not what we're going to talk about here today. No. We're going to focus on the hockey part of things. We'll try hard not to focus on the good football game this evening and instead talk hockey. All right. So here, I'm going to give you a question from a listener. Okay.

That I got the other day. From fine lumber. Fine lumber. All right. Is it possible to rebuild this team, this team being the Vancouver Canucks, with J.T. Miller on his current contract and playing on the wing. I mean, I think yes. I just think it's a way more difficult trick to pull off. You know, at the end of the day, there is still a lot of value that J.T. Miller brings.

First of all, despite all the hand-wringing in the Vancouver market about J.T. Miller's defensive jobs, the fact is that he's an impact two-way player as a winger. Like, as a winger, you can throw J.T. Miller out against Tufts, and he's going to help you. win that matchup. We've seen this repeatedly, right? It wasn't until the second half of last year when he became a full-time center. And yeah, he had more of the puck.

Yeah, he produced more offense. But there are elements of J.T. Miller's game that just play better on the wing. He's a better F1 than he is as an F3. He's better along the wall. He also has this natural instinct to retain possession, which I think is common in centermen and deeply uncommon in wingers.

And I think that adds a lot of value to his game when he's on the wing. Now, is J.T. Miller today at the age of 29, with his extension not having kicked in yet? Right. The same player that J.T. Miller is going to be at 33. The same player that J.T. Miller is going to be at 36. No. No. But can he be an effective piece? I mean, here's the problem. The Canucks are so far away from contending, in my view, that by the time you've built up a good enough base around him, I think J.T. Miller is going to be. a guy who you can't put into a matchup role the way you can today and probably for the next few years. I still think he's going to be one of the smartest guys running a power play in the NHL.

But, you know, at what point does it become awfully difficult to reset the books or reset the team around him when you've got, you know, an aging guy who's likely to eventually grow into being a power play specialist? you know, taking up $8 million of your cap. It's really tough. Could J.T. Miller be part of the next great connects team? Sure. But is it likely that it'll be, you know, J.T. Miller is having a rebound season all la Jamie Ben with the Dallas stars this year. Like, yeah, I think that's probably it.

And so what did Dallas have to get right in order to get to this point? Well, they had to take a high-end starting goaltender, a franchise defenseman, and a franchise winger in. one draft class. Yes. To sort of offset just how inefficient their books are around Sagan and Ben. And I just worry that like the Canucks have locked themselves into a position where they're sealing. If they like absolutely historically nail a draft class, for example, is the Dallas Stars who, you know, they've made a finals once.

But like they haven't even won the division. You know, to me, to me, like small picture, could you find a way to do it? yes, what I bet on it, is it going to be difficult structurally for reasons that actually have nothing to do with J.T. Miller, the player or J.T. Miller himself? Yeah, I think so. I think they've inhibited their pathways to improving as quickly as they should. And it's not just J.T. Miller, right? I think you could survive with just the Miller contract. It's Miller compounded with all of Reckman-Larsen. Like, that to me, that $15.26 million block through the year 2027, I mean, that to me is where things get crunchy in terms of leveling up this franchise quickly enough to get to the level

of being a contending team while Miller is still a positive contributor. Welcome to the Hockey Oaks. We should have ran that as a cold open. The reason why I wanted to tee up with that one, this is actually a two-parter from a final one, but part B is, and I knew you were going to get into it, so I wanted to save this as the kicker. I thought I was being fair, though. If you could trade J.T. Miller for no return today, would you make that trade? I think unequivocally as.

Everyone would say so. The problem is where the team is at in terms of their performance to this point in this season. They've won nine of their last 13 games, which has elevated them to 22nd in the NHL by point percentage, right? No, but it's a negative. The seams are showing, though. It's a negative value asset at this point. I don't know. I think it's, I would disagree with that.

I think you could get a return on a J.T. Miller trade today so long as you were taking bad money back. I do, I think there are teams that have. If J.T. Miller hit the open market after this season, do you think any other team would have given him the contract that he got? Yeah, I mean, I don't think it would have been, I think he would have, I think he would have done well. Yeah, he would have done well. In a world where, like, I think he would have. have at least matched. Making $8 million until age 37, though, is...

But I mean, Nazim Cadry got the seven times seven. Now, he's a center. He had just, and he had just won a cup. But, um, but, you know, I don't think, I don't think it's like, I don't think it's outside by more than 20%. Put it that way. And, and I do think that Miller probably, uh, still has, like, the way to think about negative value for me is, would they clear waivers?

And today, probably the answer is yes. But would there be some teams? figuring out can we shed enough cap space to do this? I think there is. And so if it's not a slam dunk, if you have to think about would the player clear waivers, then they don't have negative value in my opinion. Yeah, I, the reason why I wanted to start this podcast with these questions

was because I want to talk about Bull Hor at that, right? And I think those two are kind of an extra goal, even though it's not necessarily an either or. Like, you think it's fair to say the, the Connoxive kind of box themselves in, here where like you kind of the fact that they gave miller the contract it did almost means that they can't well it doesn't mean that they can't but it definitely gets difficult right you look you look at the canucks cap situation and you know they've got 69 million committed to next season uh for next season uh committed to 15 players only one of those players is a right-handed defenseman in tyler meyers

i mean there's i assume another one or i presume another one in tucker pullman but i think his status is pretty far up in the air, considering the amount of repetitive head injuries that he's had over the course of the past two years. So can you, you know, assuming an $83.5 million upper limit, you're talking about $13 million, maybe plus or minus two and a half, depending on Tucker Pullman's status, can you extend Bohrubat, which is going to cost you what, seven and a half minimum, maybe more, plus extend Andre Kuzmanko, who's, you know, on pace for an outrage. just number of points, right?

Like, is definitely going to be a $4.5 million player on the low end, on the low end. That's assuming he doesn't score 30 goals and put up 70 points, which is absolutely in play, considering his scoring rates and its role on this dynamic Canucks power play. And then you've got some key RFAs, including Ethan Baer, who's playing major minutes for this team, plus Niels Hoaglander, who's really good, despite how this market sometimes talks about him and how Bruce Boudreau reflexively scratches him whenever the team loses. Yeah. Can you do all of that and improve the right side of your defense?

And if the answer is no, and I think realistically it's no, then how do you improve? Like, how do you improve on a team that more than a third end of the season is 22nd in the NHL and point percentage? Well, it's interesting what you said there about what Horvats' realistic figure would be. And we've heard kind of like some rumblings about a contract that may or may not have been offered to him and what he termed out. No, it was offered to him. That much we know. No, but here's the thing. After the season, like currently, as of today,

maybe the calculus might have been different heading into the season. Sure. But as of right now, what we know based on the first 29 games has always played so far the season. If you were a bull horvat, could you in good conscience come back to this team making less than what J.T. Miller just got paid? Like, I think that's the crazy part to me.

They kind of box themselves in the sense that they give J.T. Miller this $8 million annual salary. for less valuable seasons, which are his age 30 to 37 seasons, basically, right? Mm-hmm. Bull Horvatt is 27 right now. He'll be 28 at the start of his next deal. Yeah. Playing an inherently more valuable position in the fact that he actually is a true center.

Yeah. Although I'm sure the organization still thinks that J.T. Miller can play center. I'm sure they think a lot of things that aren't actually true, though. I know that J.T. Miller wants to play center. Right. So, you know, I don't know that we're never going to see J.T. Miller play center again. I think the fact that you have a defensive driver in Ilya Mikhail might help. Okay, but this is like one of those things when like a bad defenseman plays,

he plays 25 minutes and someone's like he's a top pair of defense and it's like, technically he's playing top pair of minutes. Yeah, but that doesn't mean. If you want to win hockey games, he should not be. Yeah. Look, I don't know, I don't know that you can play J.T. Miller as a centerman in a matchup role, like at the top of your lineup. But I do think he can help you as a winger.

Look, I think the industry expectation the moment Miller signed was that's not good news for the Canucks's efforts to keep Bo Horvatt. And I do think unless you move out a fair bit of other commitments first and those commitments, now we're getting into guys with real negative value. I think it would be really difficult to both extend those guys and be better next year than you are this year. And frankly, I don't think the team's all that good this year. which sort of poses the big picture problem that this team's going to be grappling with for years to come. Well, sticking with Horat here, and then I want to talk about the bigger picture stuff as well, because you and I did a show a couple weeks ago. A mailbag question from a listener came in about Horbat and kind of most interesting landing spots for them,

and that segued into a little conversation we had on it. But I'm kind of curious to build off of it because in preparation for this, I went back and watched every single one of Bull Horvats' 21 goals so far this season. And you joke that the cumulative distance has been 45 feet from the net. I might be underselling it. By my count, four of those 21 were not like a tip, deflection, rebound, tap in, or empty netter. Yeah. Like, four of them, and of those four, I think two or three of them were like a two-on-one

where he was coming down the wing and it was basically him versus a goalie one-on-one. But it's, or like, I think only one or two were like legitimate, like, he was standing in the middle of ice on the power player or whatever. and they got it to him and then he shot it through traffic and scored. People are taking Bo Horvats shot away from him on the power play. Right. So like, you know, but I mean, for example, the deflection that he had against Calgary on.

Oh, that's unstoppable because you look at the defenseman. I don't know. I forget who it was, but they like, they played it well in the sense that they pushed them out of the way and they like got a body on him. Yeah. It's just that he stuck his stick out and basically tipped it back against the grain.

And it's like, without taking a penalty, realistically, you can't stop that. You cannot. Or you hope that he misses the tip. Well, and there's a skill to what he's doing in terms of the deflections. But obviously, there's also some good fortune, right? You can't rely on those every time. The thing is, is that most nights I'm watching Bo Horvap play, you know, there is an element to which, you know, he's shooting this overheated percentage and you expect it to regress. But then, you know, for every goal he's had, there's been like three glorious operas.

that haven't quite gone in. Like the volume of in tight chances that he's generating at the moment is through the roof. And, you know, one of the goals that's a deflection, for example, is this play against Arizona. And McBain completely blows the coverage up high. Pedersen has it and looks like he's going to shoot. It's actually Troy Stetcher, which is funny because Troy Stetcher obviously knows the tendencies. And you see him sort of cheat suddenly to Andre Kuzmenko backdoor. all seen Andre Kuzmanko just feast, like, you know, put on a bib and just eat at the back door

against goaltenders. And you see Stetscher have this moment where he takes the step toward Kuzmenko then realizes his forwards way out of position and Horvats completely alone. And in that moment, it's like a deft tip pass like Patterson to Horvatt back of the net. No chance for our boy, Carill of the thrill. And, you know, that to me is not like a deflection like, oh, well, that. that's not going to last. That to me is how do you stop that?

Like, how do you stop that? So I'm buying, I'm buying the Bo Horvac goal scorer glow up. Yeah. I'm not necessarily buying the 20% shooting clip, but I think he, I mean, first of all, with the pace he's already established for himself, like 40 goals at this point would be like a pedestrian pace the rest of the way, right? He only has to score like a 30 goal scorer or a fringe 30 goal score to hit 40 on this season. I think he at least does that.

and I think there's more going on in terms of exactly how he's creating offense and the work behind the scenes to do it. Some work that I hope to shed some light on. Oh, I'm looking forward to it. I have no idea what you're speaking about. I'm looking for it. It'll be a real mystery. No, okay, I'm going to give you my comp right now that I've been working on. There's some flaws in it, so it's not perfect.

But, you know, each season is unique. I'm open-minded, you know. You're never going to find the right what Chris Kreider did last year. Yeah, I think that's a great comp, particularly because they're both. shooters, like real shooters. If you look at, but even if you look like, Kreider's a couple years older, right, and plays on the wing. Statistically, though, it's kind of eerie in terms of

both the goal scoring and efficiency in like the five years prior, where they were like good, good scores, right, in the 20s. And then last year, Chris Kreider goes off for 52 goals. And he shoots 21%. And if you go back and watch the goals, it's a carbon copy of what Bo Horvats doing this year. It's a lot of like standing around the net and then in the last second kind of opening up his body and either like redirecting a puck in or just like, you know, opportunistic but creating his own luck, especially on that lethal ranger's power play.

This year, Crider expectedly regresses a little bit. No, I think no one realistically expected him to be a 52 goal score of the rest of the way. Yeah. He's down to 14.4%, which is still above average, which still good, kind of more in line with his career prior to last year. he's on pace for 38 goals. Still really good. Really good. And honestly, I would expect a very similar trajectory for Bohrara out here

where he's probably not going to shoot 22% or whatever the way he is now. No. And he's not going to score 21 goals every 29 games he plays. But it's a clear, I think using his career rates prior to this point eliminates very important context. So it's not necessarily representative of what I'd expect from him moving forward. I'm trying to say. He's gone nuclear, but he's also sustainably leveled up.

And then he's going to, he's going to, he's going to, he's going to, he's going to, still higher than what he was before. That's exactly right. And I love that comp. I think that comp makes sense in a lot of ways, particularly. Which is funny, though, because Crider's season this year has been framed as a disappointment so far, right? Like, there's been a lot of things, but they haven't gone the same way for the Rangers as they

did last year. And part of that's been like, well, Crider is just not the same player. But it's also team context. Right. Last season, everything, every day was a snow day at MSG for the New York Rangers. Right. This season, they're, you know, stuck in the mud a little bit. They're spinning their wheels.

You know, the Vancouver Canucks live in that sort of muck where you're always spinning your wheels. So I think the team contacts, too, will change for Horvett. You know, I would say that J.T. Miller, having hit a new sustainable level since arriving in Vancouver, right? Like he's been a super reliable point producer for three years now. But he goes nuclear last season. And then this year what?

He's just over point per game, right? So it's like it's not like he's gone back to being the 70 point guy that he's been for most of his career. But is he the 100 point guy that we saw last season on a sustainable basis? I would say no. Right. And that's been met with disappointment. Yes. Yeah.

It's all expectations, I guess, are the way you want to frame it. Okay. So you hit on something a bit there earlier. and this is what I want to touch on now before we go to break. This idea, and this came up in a conversation I had with our pal Harmon on Monday's show. And it was the willingness of organizations to properly rebuild and instead kind of trying to take shortcuts by trying to stay relevant and afloat. And I don't want to say necessarily half-assing it. But I guess you could say it that way in terms of like instead of doing the right thing and being like, listen, realistically, we're not going to win with this roster.

instead of trying to patch it together and just kind of tread water, let's take an informed step back, multiple steps back. Let's send the, let's say their letter, let's do the Montreal Canadiens. Yeah, let's have one regulation win in 30 games like the,

and I don't know. Geniuses. I mean, they've kind of stumbled into that. It's not even intentional. Let's go full verbiq. Yes. And so I had a,

I had a listener reach out and at, or, kind of pose a question following up on that, building up on that, which was, A, are player salaries the biggest expenditure for an NHL team? The answer is yes, for sure. Right. No question. So building off on that, then, you have to hit a salary floor to be cap compliant.

You do. But no one says that you have to spend beyond that. And in fact, in some cases, you're actually the real dollars you're spending are below. what the actual capits are, right? If the contract is structured accordingly, if you're doing the Ottawa Senators and Arizona Coyote's team building process for many years, which is acquiring players who have already had the brunt of their contracts paid out. Yeah.

So what I don't understand is why teams view it through that lens, I guess. You know what I mean? Like if you're really worried about, okay, we cannot afford to properly rebuild because it eliminates any chance for playoff revenue. It's going to hurt us in terms of ticket sales and merch and fan interest. Sure. Is that really such a big deal compared to the money you could save if you're properly rebuilding by just not paying up to the cap, which is what this Canucks team almost pretty much is?

And you save that money. They're over the cap. Right. So think about how much money they're spending in terms of player contracts. Oh, yeah. You take that 20, 30 million that you could be saving. doesn't that cover most of the money that you'd theoretically lose if you'd fully rebuild properly? So my pushback there would be if you go look at the Montreal Canadiens cap-friendly page today.

Yeah. You will see the cap number is like, you know, really high. It's like 93 million because of some of the dead money that they have on, the LTI deals, right? Yes. Carry price alone. Yeah. But their estimated salary expenditure is almost $100 million. Right?

So we're talking 20 million over the cap. Now, some of that's, I'm sure, insured. But, you know, the fact is that you can't use the word properly rebuild and spend to the floor in the same breath in my view. Like, if you want to take 10 years to rebuild, a laud the Ottawa senators or the Arizona Coyotes, that's the way to do it. If you want to rebuild fast, a laud the New York Rangers of the Toronto Maple Leafs, you need to spend. You need to use cap space wisely. You need to do the Sean Monaghan trade, where you get paid, to take the player, the player helps you, and then you get paid again.

Yep. You need to do the Colin Greening deal. You need to take back bad money. No, like that's such a crucial part of what the leash did. That's such a remembering a guy. Yeah, they soared their books. Yeah. They sort, you know, my first, one of my first games with credentials was a playoff game in Ottawa.

And Colin Greening scored the double overtime winner. And then he took a while to come out to talk to the media. He comes out, he's got two, like after, you know, he's played 30 minutes a hundred. hockey, right? Like over, over the course of two overtime periods. He's got two pieces of pizza sandwich together. Yeah. And he just like quickly eats them while bleeding out of his face because he had like a fiberglass, like a piece of plexiglass stuck in his cheek after the overtime winner. And I was just like, this is cool. Yeah. This guy's cool. This guy plays hockey. Good vibes by Colin Greening here. Anyway, you need to, you need to sewer your books. You need to

intentionally lose deals. You need to take bad money and get paid to take bad money. Yeah. So I don't think you can spend to the floor and rebuild properly, particularly when you're talking in the context of like what a Canucks rebuild should look like. You know, part of the issue, I think, is that you have to chase bad money. You have to spend to be bad if you're going to mine full value. If you're really going to take advantage of the NHL system and all that it allows you to accumulate if you are losing, you need to be willing to spend. And I think that's difficult. Like we're entering a new phase, I think, slowly for NHL teams. Increasingly, we're going to see more corporate ownership, I think.

You're already seeing with, you know, hedge funds buying into stakes of the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Minnesota Wild. You're seeing it with the John Henry group buying the Pittsburgh Penguins. We'll see exactly how things shake out in Ottawa. But, you know, it certainly feels like we're moving towards some sort of corporate entity partnered with Ryan Reynolds. Right. I mean, that's, you know, partnered with Disney Plus to like own the Ottawa Senators. I mean, that's where we're going. That's where we're going.

Obviously, we see it with MLSC. You know, those organizations are perhaps going to be able to rebuild more easily. Like, it's not a coincidence that the model rebuilds we talk about are like the model quick rebuilds are Toronto, Montreal, New York. Like, that's a built-in advantage. Chicago now is doing something similar. That's a built-in advantage that the big revenue teams have. Can a privately owned, like family-owned, you know, for lack of a better term, mom-and-pop, operation hockey team do the same thing hey let's throw the LA Kings in there too owned by of course

the Antus group right I mean those teams are able to do these big budget rebuilds and guess what they're great they're way better than the than the strip it down pinch every penny rebuild so I think the idea of saving on player salary as a way to offset the cost of being bad For me, anyway, that's like a false dichotomy just because, in my view, if you're going to be bad, spend on it. Because that's how you'll net full value for the pain that it'll inflict on your fans. Well, you know what those ownership groups are going to do and have in common? What? They're going to treat their hockey teams like a business.

Right. And you know what that's going to set up those teams for? Success. Yeah, like, and sustain success. I mean, I think also, you know, part of the fear is year-over-year budgets take a hit when you're bad. But if you're willing to be bad with purpose, you can set up these like 15 year windows where, you know, the team levels up in the culture, like becomes a destination event for a fan base where you get, you know, certainly in a market like Vancouver waiting lists to be a season ticket member. That's sort of what I think organizations should pursue. and yet when it comes to Vancouver, there's been a real reluctance to avail themselves of the cyclical

nature of success in a hard-capped league where all contracts are guaranteed. Like, I don't think you can pursue being the New England Patriots or the New York Yankees in the NHL. Like, I think you have to really be selective about building for the present or building for the future. And I think it makes sense to be extreme in either direction. Like, I've talked about this a lot. Like, one thing I like about Jim Rutherford's tenure in Pittsburgh is they never made

a first round pick good right good they shouldn't have yeah i think that shows incredible situational awareness right i think i think teams need to be all in when they're all in and all out when they're all when they're when they're not good like for me in my view anyway um the marginal value of of improving a little bit when you're great yeah um is well worth paying firsts prospects whatever yeah And the, you know, marginal value of getting five extra points when you're an 80-point team is worth nothing. Like there's no purpose to it. And almost all of the money that you're spending on, you know, selling a little bit of false hope to your season ticket members for that one year is misspent. Well, you mentioned that dichotomy.

That's the thing that's always driven me crazy where you have, first off, there are significant expenses to owning and running an NHL team beyond just the player contracts. Of course, right? Like we kind of, because it's not our money, it's very easy to. to frame it as like, oh, like, this is insignificant. It's huge. The stick budget. But here's a thing. If you're going to do it right and acknowledge how much is at stake, which is significant,

how do you justify handing over the car keys to your organization to individuals who don't really have like business sense or acumen or ability to actually make those decisions? Like that's what's always just absolutely befuddled me. Well, this is also where I suspect we're going to go. Like, in talking about a new era of corporate ownership of NHL teams, I do think what is going to change to is, like, how comfortable is your general manager talking to a group, like a board of directors quality group of technocrats and presenting a quarterly report? Yeah. You know, like, that's going to start to matter. And that's when you get, you know, the MLB, NBA, NFL style executive leaders.

where an NBA is sort of a minimum requirement as opposed to, you know, used to play in the league. An impressive hockey DB page. Yeah. All right, Tom, we're going to take a break here. And then when we come back, we're going to keep chatting about a variety of topics. So looking forward to that, you are listening to the HockeyPedio cast streaming on the Sportsnet Radio Network. guest here with Thomas Trans.

Tom, before we move on to a different topic, I just wanted to kind of close the loop on this. We were talking before we went to break about, you know, team building and owners. and how you act during a rebuild and kind of what the most prudent course of action is. And I mentioned how we had a listener who was actually my buddy Harrison Brown, who had reached out to me with an idea. I kind of wanted to flesh this out fully because he actually put together this blueprint or this business plan that he had texted me. Okay. And I wanted to do it justice because it's really well articulated and clearly well thought out. and as a very sad Canucks fan.

I think he's given this a lot of thought over the year, so it's coming from a really informed place. So his pushback to the idea that teams, quote-unquote, can't afford a rebuild. Why don't they just use an internal salary cap that's like 10 to 15 million below the cap ceiling for a few years? Teams do do this. No, they do do this.

But listen, let me lay out the full plan for you before you jump in. So those two or three years coincide theoretically with the years that you have left on the existing big money contracts that you currently have in place with aging veterans who probably aren't as good as they're being paid to be. And then in that meantime, you use those years

to not spend on big money and big term on unrestricted free agents, but instead use that two or three year window to focus on A, acquiring draft capital, B, acquiring young players and see using that flexibility to take on one year reclamation deals and projects to build players back up and then theoretically be able to flip them for more draft capital young players and then eventually you can start to actually loosen up the purse strings a little bit and use that cap flexibility that you have after two or three years or not spending to a cap to basically

kind of shrewdly like pick your spots and get good players from other teams that can't afford them all of a sudden like a when Pittsburgh decides they don't want John Marino anymore, all of a sudden you jump in. Oh, yeah, we'll take John Marino from you, Oliver Burkstraint. Yeah, we could use all of your own friends. And you supplement the young players that you spend two or three years accruing with these types of players. And so he points out like, a team like Nashville, for example, the example we keep using for this. Well, this is the Nashville model. But here, Nashville is willing to spend $81 million this year. Now they are. They're actually spending $84.5 according to cap-friendly in terms of actual salary expenditure for

an outside shot of making the playoffs I don't know what Don's model has them at right now but they gotta be below 50%. They are well below 50%. So they have an outside shot of making the playoffs so we're still willing to spend over $80 million. Would it be that much worse from a profit perspective if they're spending say $65 million on a team that's not going to make the playoffs

but with like an actual plan of two or three years and then we're going to recoup whatever playoff revenue we might have lost in that time which probably would have been minimal because it's first round exit so it's two or three games worth. with like five to ten years of legitimate incoming revenue because you've spent these two or three years

putting together a roster that all of a sudden can actually help you benefit from that. So this reminds me of the Winnipeg Jets in the early part of the last decade where they returned to Winnipeg and they were like, you know, sort of a playoff also ran, but they also ran an internal budget,

budget team as opposed to a cap team. Right. And, you know, the true North fans, the Winnipeg fans would always tell you, excuse me, tell you, when you say, hey, I don't know that they're going to be in the market for this player or whatever. You know, ownership's going to spend when the team's ready. And then when they hit that, you know, two or three year window, that's exactly what happened. Right.

They did spend. Yeah. Dave Poyle in Nashville also ran his budget team for a long, long time. And then they got tired of losing players. They got tired of doing the team home, the chemo team in. in Scott Hartnell's style trades and pushed hard to keep all of Souter, Weber, and Peck Arena and managed to do so. And really since then, they've been a cap team.

And that was almost 10 years ago. Right. So, you know, we have seen teams do the gradual, the slow burn, the slow burn build. We have seen teams go with that, try that, do that. We've even seen them pull it off successfully. I mean, Nashville made the Stanley Cup final. The Winnipeg Jets didn't, but that series against that they had against. that they had against Nashville the year that Nashville went to the final.

You know, I mean, sorry, that was the year after. Those were the two best teams in the league. And they lost to Vegas in the walk-on and they were just spent after that series. And, but that was the best team in the league. I don't care what anyone says. Like those two teams that year were the best teams in the league. It just didn't crumble in their favor. So, you know, one of those, it's one of those things.

Like there's lots of ways to do it right, I think. I don't think there's one route to necessarily building a team or managing your budget during rebuild. I just think the big money rebuild, I think the Leafs model, honestly, the Leafs model, they haven't had playoff success, but they've been, what, third in the NHL by point percentage in the last six years, made the playoffs every season. You know, they haven't got out of the first round, but I don't think that's, you know, a strategy flaw, or certainly not a strategy flaw dating back to their rebuild. Yeah. That to me is that to me is the one you want to aim. That's like the fastest way to accumulate the most talent. And on top of it, it starts from a spot where they had all this bad money on the books,

where they doubled down on Dave Clarkson, where they tried to resign Dave Boland, where they literally had made every mistake imaginable. And what? It was two or three years of pain, and they had a direction, and they've made the last seven straight years. I think the New York example, you know, they got extremely lucky with how Truba and Adam Fox crumbled, like in terms of how that. Yeah, and Panarin wanted to come there. Right.

how that all sort of siphoned talent to them. That's the advantage of being the New York Rangers. But, you know, nonetheless, a couple of years of discipline. I think L.A. is another good example, right? It was only three years, three years worth of just selling off everyone outside of quick, Brown, Doughty, and Kopitar, the legacy core. And, like, they retooled amazingly. You know, for me, there's way more examples that work well when you're willing to spend on being bad.

And so that's sort of the route that, you know, certainly in this market, I tend to point to and say, like, that would be amazing. I'd love to see this team try that. Right. Well, of course, being able to spend more money would give you, in theory, more of those advantages. I think, I think that, like, this argument is from the perspective of, like, kind of pouring water on the idea of... The idea that, oh, we can't afford to take a step back because it's going to hurt us in terms of our pockets. I guess for me, the best argument against it, though, is you can't afford not to. What you really can't afford is to just have like a lost decade or a decade of disappointment or eight an eight year stretch where you

miss the playoff seven of eight and you know there are examples of rebuilding teams that failed but for me it's not that they failed because they were rebuilding they failed at rebuilding right um well here okay so here's the thing when people say they can't afford it right i think there's like the literal definition of that which is like the financial which we've spent a lot of time talking about and then there's the insinuation that you can't afford it from like a fan currency perspective, right? That if we become irrelevant in this market, we're going to lose fans,

maybe even like young ones who could have developed into being paying customers, and they're not going to gravitate away from the sport, and then they're not going to come back. And I just don't buy that. I really don't. I think it depends on the market. But here's the thing.

Is this really, like being like mediocre, hovering around the playoff line, having an aging team that isn't very particularly exciting or give you reason to tune in a nightly basis? Is that a superior alternative? Because I think for the most part, an intelligent fan can see right through that and be like, well, you're just trying to pass off this mediocre product as something I should be paying my hard-earned dollars for.

If it becomes really bad and untenable for a couple years, especially if it's by design, yeah, there's going to be a certain segment of the fan base that just tunes it out and says, I'm going to go watch my local NBA team or NFL team or whatever else. But in three years, if you have a fun, young, exciting team that's winning games and everyone's talking about, guess what? 99% of those people will probably come back because that's human nature. Look at any social media or internet trend, right? Something cool and exciting happens or whatever.

Everyone just wants to be part of that. Like you want to feel included. And so people in the local market are not going to disappear and never come back if you give them a reason to come back. So a lot of my experience with this or a lot of my perspective is shaped by my time with the Florida Panthers. Right. And, you know, last year the Florida Panthers, we label them as a playoff disappointment.

But here's the thing. they won their first playoff series since 1996. Right? And that's a huge deal because especially in a market like South Florida where, you know, you lose in Vancouver, you lose in Calgary. You still get the same amount of attention. It's just that attention is pointed, negative. Okay.

Right? You lose in South Florida, you disappear. Especially when Mike McDaniel and the Miami Dolphins are cool as hell. Yeah. And so, you know, the system, the NHL system, rewards failure. It's not really set up to permit a team to fail for like a generation in that manner. And I think the consideration in that in those types of marketplaces and some of the Sunbelt marketplaces has to be different than it has to be in Canada or certainly in, you know,

one of the legacy American markets. That's a different equation for me. I think if you're a team in Canada, the arguments you're making hold water. You're, you're, you're better. off having a plan even if you're taking you know even if you're 10 points worse for a three year stretch if it sets you up to be really exciting and really good for you know a stretch thereafter even if it's five years as opposed to like 15 we don't even have to hyperboise yeah I think that's good business but if you're a sunbelt team I do think the considerations are different well the market dynamics are different but ultimately if the panthers had been a 92 point team that had sprinkled in an occasional first round playoff victory, would their current reality be any different?

I really, I don't think that necessarily. Like maybe if they'd been a jugger, not this entire time that was like winning Stanley Cups every year. Or even, or even just for like a few years. But that's not what we're debating. We're not debating whether you should be a Stanley Cup winner or rebuild. We're saying like if you're going to be kind of on that line and treading water and being mediocre for seven years, if that's your like end game, that seems. It's not, it's not.

I don't think that's going to keep people around. The thing is too is like it's so cool to be a really good hockey team. It's so fun to watch one of those really good hockey teams that just like knows how to win and does it year after. Like I guarantee you it's a lot of fun to be a Boston Bruins fan. Like a lot of fun. Yeah. You know, 10 years of just watching Patrice Bergeron pick his teeth with the opposition's best players. It's fun to be a Caps fan, right?

And like you have disappointments, you have peaks, you have valleys. but it's fun to root for a really good team. The Caps fans who send messages in to this podcast are generally. Miserable? Very. Well, DC Sports, like, you know, that's pretty unlucky. Yeah. That's a pretty unlucky sports history.

But they broke through. They won. And now they get to, you know, watch the team celebrate empty net goals like their playoff series wins. It's beautiful. Okay. Let's kind of, let's pivot here to end the show on a different topic, but kind of still a big picture one.

I'm going to run something by you here. Okay. So we had a question from a listener named Ben, which is a really thoughtful question. And it was about regression and the concept of PDO, which the show is named after. So Ben says, the issue I have with PDO is that it seems to be blind to the quality of shots for and against. It's a pure quantity calculation with no real accounting for quality. And the example he uses is, should we really expect a team like the New Jersey Devils to negatively regress with a PDO of 101.6?

when they're also sporting an expected goal share of near 60. In other words, shouldn't a team that has more high danger chances for and fewer high danger chances against than your average team be expected to also sport a higher shooting percentage and save percentage? Yeah, I mean, like, I think to some extent, to some extent, I always used to say as a general rule, like when the Canucks had Luongo, their baseline wasn't 100, it was 102, right? Because he was reliably worth that extra two points in five-on-five save percentage. I said the same about the Boston Bruins with, you know, the heyday of Tim Thomas

and Tuka-Rasks. So, you know, there's no question that some teams are going to be more efficient and some teams are going to have better goal-tending than their opposition and their sort of baseline is going to be higher. I think with the, you know, the thing about allowing fewer high danger, chances are out shooting opponents 40 to 20 on a regular basis. Yep. Is like, you know, on some level, you'd expect your number to be higher. But if your volume advantage is that significant, that means it takes a lot less to dent your save percentage numbers.

Yes. And it takes a lot more goals to live up to your shooting percentage numbers. So it's like on some level, it has its own gravity. Because if you're controlling volume to that big and extent, fewer bounces against you, lower your save percentage more than it does for a team that gets pelted. And likewise, you need to score, you know, you need to score more raw goals to be as efficient as a team, you know, like this is obvious, right? Like, you need to score three goals if you're getting 20 to beat four goals at 40, right? Hockey fundamentally isn't a game of raw numbers. It's a game of ratios. And I think that's what

is cool about the PDO number is that it sort of captures that dynamic too. in this shorthand measure that we take to be luck right and if you're controlling that volume you're generally better situated to survive and navigate those fluctuations and percentages which will happen to every team over the course in 82 games season i think there's a couple things of way one i know we kind of differ philosophically on this i'm much more staunch believer that like despite the name of this show pdo is not a real thing like like shooting percentage and say percentage should be in terms of evaluations be treated as isolated measures because... Well, I agree with that.

They shouldn't... They're not necessarily correlated. I think the repeatability, especially, of being able to drive both either shooting percentage or save percentage and then even scoring chances in terms of where you're consistently getting shots on the ice from is up for debate, right? Much more so than being able to consistently out shoot the other team or, like, control possession of the puck when on an ice. Like, certainly the best players get to better spot.

on the ice more often and converted a higher rate from them. But I think the number of players who can meaningfully do that year over year is probably shorter of a list than we'd like to admit. And we like talk ourselves into certain guys being capable of being outliers every year. And in reality they're not. Do you remember David Johnston's wonderful hockey site? Stats.hockeyanalyst.com. RIP to a legend.

That was one of my favorite databases of all time. and that had the ability you could like sort by like on ice results over like 10 years right like you had this massive data set and I remember doing that every now and then and just like sorting by on ice on a slow Tuesday night on a slow Friday night and I'd sort and I'd go look at shooting percentage and it was like over over a large enough sample back in the day I suspect it's a little bit different now that shooters have the edge over goal tenders but back in the day back in the day It was like almost everybody, like, you know, at least 85% of guys who'd played over a thousand minutes fell within the fat part of the bell curve in terms of shooting percentage, right? 7.5 to 9.5. And there was, you know, I don't think there was like much, there wasn't much rhyme or reason to who fell within that. Like, it was just your average players.

But at the very top end, like number one with a bullet was Sidney Crosby, highest on ice shooting percentage. Cindy Crosby drove shooting percentage. I don't think that's like that's not a hot take to say, right? We all understand how he did it. Number two was like Stamco's. Number three and four were the twins, right? Like it made sense to me immediately.

But it wasn't a long, it wasn't a list of 40 guys. It was a list of 15. And vis-versa, you know, at the bottom end was Travis Mowen. And it's like, well, why did Travis Mowen didn't have a ton of finishing skill? But also, what was his game? Yeah. Right? Allow no goals, score no goals.

Right? Like how many times do you think he saw a three on two and dumped it in in his career? Probably a lot. Yeah. Probably a lot. And conversely, there was less sort of demonstrable signal if you sorted by on-ice save percentage. And again, I'm talking about data like 0-7 to 2017 or something like that. Maybe it was an eight-year stretch. But I remember looking at the guy with the highest on-ice save percentage.

Do you know what it was? Probably some random guy. No, it makes a ton of sense. It actually makes perfect sense. Who is it? Is Dano Char? Okay. And, you know, it's like long stick, can't beat him back door, one of the great

defensive defenders of all time. That made sense to me. But, like, number two was like Jason Garrison. You know, like you go down the list and it's chicken and egg. Right. You know, who's driving this, who's not? There wasn't much discernible signal outside of one guy. Yeah.

And that, to me, always felt real. Like, an offensive player, I buy has more ability to, meaningfully drive shooting percentage, even though it's rare, or certainly did in an era where percentages in hockey were more fixed. But there's so much that can go wrong on any given defensive shift. There's so many goals against that are just going to be the product of raw luck. I just, I think the ability to sustainably drive, shoot, say, percentage as an individual player. I think it's team effects. I buy more. Of course. Yeah. An individual player effects. I think it requires someone really special.

Well, here's, I'm going to just. This is my intuitive take on that. I'm going to tease a little nugget for you here, and we don't have time to fully suss it out, but like think about it. I'm sure we'll have plenty of time to talk about it down the road. This year, 5-1-5 league-wide, there have been 1854 goals scored.

There have been 1,918 expected goals score. And this, the fact that there's, goals are undershooting expected goals is a significant change in dynamic from the past where it was actually the opposite right like i think last year there was a while so we're having we have more unexpected goals we have more unexpected goals i have two working theories one teams are generally getting smarter in terms of um refining their offensive approach and trying to instead of littering with point shots generally trying to get the puck into the slot going behind and then passing it out all that good stuff and be on

individual level we're seeing players outsource their skill development to resources outside of the team environment and go to these big name trainers del belfry et cetera atomotes yeah working with other fellow stars throughout the off season learning from each other kind of trading tricks of the trade and coming back better and we're seeing more skill development in that regard and i think that is partly what's happening yeah i also wonder to um you know we've talked about this before but the accessibility to the goal highlight, the accessibility of like, you see someone try something cool,

everyone in hockey sees it on their phone, as opposed to in the old days where it was like... Word of mouth. Well, word of mouth or like, you'd have to see, you know, maybe if you were in your hotel room quickly enough and sports center actually showed hockey highlights, you might see it, but it was almost by accident.

Yeah. You know, it's just different. Like, someone does something amazing now, you can bet that the whole hockey world's seen it. Yeah. I'm really interesting. in this phenomenon of how much this dynamic has changed because it's like it's pretty significant from the past

and I think it it's pretty instructive of kind of the changes that are happening in the NHL and I think we're going to see more of that I think it's going to be for the better but it's definitely something to keep an eye on all right Tom we're going to get out of here this is a blast I'll let you quickly plug some stuff where can people check you out the athletic always and then Canucks Talk which aired just before your show so on SportsNet 650 and of course you can download that at wherever you get your

podcast and we're going to go watch Brock Purdy now in action looking forward to that that's that's what we're here for bro the brock purdy show uh okay this is a blast man we're going to certainly have you back on um people that listen to the show if you enjoyed it you can help us out by smashing that five star button wherever you listen to the pedocast we're going to be back tomorrow with more so until then thank you for listening to the hockey pdio cast streaming on the sports net radio network