The Hockey PDOcast - Postseason Coin Flips

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

Rob Pizzola joins Dimitri to talk about what went wrong for the Leafs in round 2 against the Panthers, how we talk about process vs. results in the postseason, and how the way you win or lose influences our perception of things.This 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.

dressing to the mean since 2015. It's the Hockey PEDEOCast with your host, Dmitri Filippovich. Welcome to the HockeyPedioCast. My name is Dimitri Filippovich and joining me is my buddy Rob Pizola. Rob, what's going on in? Still depressed after that, Leif's exit in game five. I love the hockey playoff so much. I'll continue watching the remainder of them.

But when you actually have a team in the mix, it just hits different, right? You're looking forward to that game all day. The tension, the vibe. vibes everything about it. So really, really disappointed right now. Yeah, I was going to ask you how you're feeling after a couple days now we had the weekend to recuperate a little bit. It really is a monkey paw situation, right? Where I'm sure you were like, I just wanted to win around finally. And then as soon as it happens, I guess you didn't, you didn't consider the fallout of what would happen after that. It's the manner in which the things happened and how it unfolded, starting

from the We Want Florida chance by the fans that are obviously going to be used against the fan base for a long time when a select few people decided that that would be a good idea. And also the fact that I understand the randomness of hockey and random variants and so on and so forth. I bet on hockey for a living. I've done this for a long time. And sometimes you play well and things just don't go your way. And for me, it's easy to accept that.

For most fan bases, it's just not. It's like a results-driven business. And, you know, I thought the Leafs were lucky to win round one against Tampa Bay. Three overtime wins. I thought Tampa Bay was pretty good in that series. Toronto didn't generate a whole ton. And then they win. And everyone's celebrating and got over the hump.

Then I thought they actually played a pretty decent series against Florida, but they lose 4-1. Sergei Birovsky, nine goals saved above expected in five games in the series. What are you going to do? I mean, that's, that's just sports for me personally. Well, that's not the way people receive it, though. It's kind of, yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this and having conversations with people for a while now, but especially this postseason where, I mean, the league maybe not itself, but in terms of, I guess it doesn't do itself any favors in this regard.

And then fans take it as such, like it demeans the regular season so much, right? It almost, it just doesn't matter. It's like, it's kind of viewed as just a. stepping stone to get to the playoffs. And then we always talk about how, oh, playoff hockey is so different than regular season hockey. Well, that also means that your accomplishments from those first 82 games are almost thrown out the window. And in fact, if you wind up either having a historic regular season in terms of success or winning the president's trophy and then falling short in round one, it's almost viewed as an even worse fate than if you had been a mediocre regular season team and

then you lost in round one because that's what you were supposed to do. And so it's bizarre. And it extends beyond that as well, where if you win a round or two, I remember last year, you know, the Oilers finally get over a bit of a hump themselves, right? They win that series against the Kings. Then they throttle the flames in four straight games to win round two. And then they wind up getting swept by a clearly and objectively superior avalanche team, which went on to win the cup. And at that point, I mean, it was tough to hold it against Connor McDavid himself, just because he had performed so admirably. But for the most part, it was viewed as like, oh, well, they got swept by the abs. So who cares? And almost everything they had done prior to.

at that point was nullified or kind of overshadowed in a way. The challenge is these regular seasons that these teams have create this expectation that we can win it. And that's what the fan base sees. And anything short of actually winning it is a failure in everyone's eyes. But when you look at the betting markets, right, use a betting markets as an example heading into the playoffs. There's like a pretty, you know, decent dispersion of teams that are.

in this probability range of 5 to 10% to win it, and one of them is going to do it, the rest they're going to fail. I think the average fan views their chance of winning the Stanley Cup when they get into the playoffs as much higher than it actually is in reality. Like if you were to pull a fan of every single fan base when their team gets into the playoffs and ask them, what percentage chance do you give your team of winning the cup? It's always going to come in higher than the betting market. And that creates this expectation, this, this fight.

false expectation, which leads to this disappointment and then to the chatter afterwards of, you know, we got to blow it up. We got to make this change. You got to get a goalie, trade our star players, do this, do that. And it's pretty overreactionary when you just consider the fact that like it's a, it's a pretty even league. You know, the disparity between these teams is not a whole lot. A few breaks one way or another over the course of five games or six games or seven games. It's nothing. That's like, that's variance to the highest level. So, I mean, it's still disappointing. Like, I'm a diehard Leaves fan.

I've lived through the disappointment. I've seen, you know, years and years of the struggles. I would love nothing more than for the Leifes to win the cup, but they get into the playoffs and I give them like a 9% chance of winning the cup. They're going to lose the 91% of the time. And I know that going in. And I can reconcile with that. Most people can't.

Well, you kind of mentioned those sort of expectations and maybe perception of versus what the actual reality is. curious for your take on, you know, we've had conversations in the past about betting like individual games or individual series versus taking a more longer term futures look and just going for purely Stanley Cup picks. As a postseason goes along, we know kind of like a style makes a fight, right? Depending on which opponent you play and it's going to come up as we talk more about the Leafs and sort of their two matchups in this postseason, you're going to face different

challenges, right? Stylistically, certain teams are going to have different strengths and weaknesses. accordingly. So that's going to dictate maybe how you fare. But do you think that we should be putting more stock into what's happened previously in in the postseason as it's happening in terms of results or kind of process in a round one and then boiling that more into expectations for round two and then round three and so on and so forth? Or do you kind of view them as isolated events in a way barring some sort of catastrophic injury where a star player gets hurt? And And obviously we should adjust our expectations.

But do you like, how do you kind of track that progress throughout a postseason for a team as they face different opponents and, and sort of trying to keep in mind like how they looked along the way. Because obviously all the matters is that you win in advance, right? But I still think we like to kind of, you know, look, take a bigger picture of you of the process and be like, oh, well, you know, they outshot this team. They outchanced them. They certainly looked apart. And that gives you more confidence that they actually deserve to win. And so when they get into the next round, we say, all right.

Now we should factor that into our decision as opposed to if you squeak by and around and you maybe don't look the best, whether that should impact how we feel about your next matchup. This one's one that I've wrestled with for a long time because you don't get this happening in the regular season, where you play the same team five, six times in a row. And potentially that team could be a bad stylistic matchup for you and make you look worse than you really are. So I approach each series more independently of one another. I don't know that that's right or wrong. I've done a lot of experimentation with the playoffs,

but typically speaking, I think it's the right way to go about it. But then you do get into scenarios. And I hate to turn this into the Leafs PDO cast. But essentially, I thought Florida would be a great matchup for the Leafs. Because you know, you watch a couple games against Tampa. You're like, there's no open ice here, right? Tampa's clogging the neutral zone.

Leaves can't figure out a way to get any zone entries. You're going to get Florida. It's going to be much more open. Florida takes a ton of penalties in the regular season. Leaves will get to work on the power play. Toronto has a goaltending advantage. We can get to that in a second. Going into the series as well with Samsonov against Bobrovsky.

And I'm like, you know, I was pretty excited for that. Game one, 50-50. Game two, Leaves take it to them. They can't, you know, they can't score, can't win. and all of a sudden you're down to nothing going out on the road and the series is, you know, is pretty challenging. But I,

you know, again, I always bring it back to small samples, right? Like, if the Leafs played Florida in a best of 31, I'd be very confident that the Leafs would win that series. Best of seven,

different story. And there is so much more randomness in the postseason, especially once we start to get into like games five, five, six, seven, fewer penalties, less open ice. And people who watch the games, like this is no, you know, no excuse for the Leafs, but like interference in the regular season gets called in the playoffs. You dump it in from center ice, guys taking you out of the play and riding you in the boards for five seconds before you can get in the zone.

It's just not going to get called. It's a different game. And it makes it, it tightens the disparity between the teams in the postseason and makes everything more of a crapshoot than in the regular. season. So that's why you tend to see these runs in the playoffs. But I try to treat each of these series individually because I do think that there is something to Stiles making fights in the playoffs, but there are also outside elements and how it's officiated and just the luck factor as well. Yeah, the reason why I asked that, I was very curious for your take on it is because I think it

does apply to the situation where I can, you know, we made a lot in the media throughout the season of well, Leifes lightning is locked into a round one matchup since, what, early November, essentially, after the start the Bruins got off to. And while we made a lot of that, I feel pretty confident in saying that the Leafs themselves knew that that's all that mattered, right? It was like, okay, we have to beat the lightning in round one. And then everything else after, like, we'll deal with it. And, you know, baking in the Bruins as well in terms of a potential round two matchup to kind of decide the Atlantic. And so I do think they legitimately spent the past, what, four or five months, just investing

every single resource they had from how they remade their roster at the trade deadline to their actual game planning. And we made a lot of sort of how they totally changed stylistically in round one, right, where they started funneling shots from the point and trying to get traffic in front of Vasilevsky and had success doing so. And that ran so counter to everything we've seen them do in the past four or five years as a team. And so it worked in that sense. it was mission accomplished, right?

Kind of back to the monkey paw thing where it's like, all we wanted to do was beat this one team and we did it. And then you come into a matchup where I don't think they expected to play a team like the Panthers, not that this excuses it, of course. And there's a lot of other variables as well. But I don't really think they like left themselves with the right kind of auxiliary pieces, I guess, as a team to prepare for whatever challenges a team like the Panthers might

provide because stylistically, it's just such a different matchup than the lightning were, as you mentioned. and even what a round two matchup against the Bruins would have been like. And that's not an excuse. I think that's actually a failure on their part of that's the case because if you plan on going on an extended playoff run, you're certainly going to bump into different kinds of opponents with different strengths and weaknesses and you need to be prepared for a side.

You can't just necessarily be like, well, we're going to craft a team to beat one specific type of team and hope to win a cup that way because that's just not how that NHL postseason works. So I'll take issue with one thing that you said there because he said it worked against Tampa. And see, that's where I challenge it. Because it worked in the sense that they won the series, right? And they prepared all this time.

Kyle Dubus makes all the trades. Ryan O'Reilly, Nolichari, Luke Shen, like beefing up the lineup, Sam Lafferty, playing, you know, tougher brand of hockey. But I actually think that was counterintuitive for them, honestly. And really, I think they just won a coin flip against Tampa Bay, right? They won three overtime games. And you see what happens when they lose two overtime games in the next round.

just lost a couple coin flips in that situation. I thought the Leafs played a hell of a lot better in round one last year against Tampa Bay playing the type of game that they play consistently. And they went into the playoffs saying, you know what? Work for us in the regular season. We're going balls to the wall. Same type of play. And they ultimately lose the series.

But they outplay Tampa. You look at even Stephen Stamcoast's post-series. you know, post series comments this year. It was like, yeah, you know, a great team. They got over the hump, but like I thought we played better against them this year than we did last year. And I didn't,

I don't think he was wrong. I mean, I was very uncomfortable watching that series as a Leafs fan this year, um, relative to last season, but they win. And like now it's like, okay,

they, they did it right. It's like there's some sort of acknowledgement that they did it right. And that was my biggest issue for the Leafs this post season. Because I found that they, they played and, and catered to their opponent a little bit too much. And I don't think that they were quick enough to adjust.

You look at game four against the Panthers, right? That game four against the Panthers, which the Leafs won, by the way, people will call it their best effort of the playoffs, a game where they lost expected goals. Essentially, they just blocked a ton of shots and really, really collapsed in front of the net. And in the offensive zone,

they played a lot of two, three, with one of the forwards always staying, high so that they could prevent these odd man rushes. That's not Leifes hockey at all. They won that game, but I found that this series in particular, once they went down 02 playing that style of play where their regular season style of play, they're like, this is not working for us. And I think that was very results based analysis rather than just keep going with it.

I think they would have been best off to trade chances with Florida as much as possible, play their brand of hockey, up-tempo. You know, there's other things I could call into question for the entire series and in particular the way Sheldon Keith handled some things. But I don't know what the path forward is for this team now because adding all the grit in theory, a lot of people say this worked for, you know, they won around. I'm not sure that they necessarily needed to do that, honestly.

And I think when you're the better team, you have to impose your will and your brand of hockey on the other team rather than conforming to what the other team is going to do and trying to counter that. Well, I feel like especially when you are a favorite heading in, right, whether it is based on the regular season or the betting market or just how the perception is of the series, right? I think everyone would have both for round one, but certainly in round two, would have positioned the Leafs as a favorite in that matchup. And I'm right there with you where I did a preview with Thomas Stranz before the series. And I was noting like I think this is a much better stylistic matchup for the Leafs than a Bruins team would have been beyond just the fact that they were so much better in the regular season. I just feel like there's going to be so much more space here. The Leafs top players are finally going to be able to really just break out offensively and capitalize on these chances. And we can talk more about how that didn't happen and why that's probably why we got to this outcome.

But I don't know. I kind of regret a little bit not being higher on Florida heading into the series, acknowledging that it was essentially whatever, four or five coin flips in this series and they happened to win four of them. That's kind of how the playoffs go, right? Could have easily said Lightning were the better team in four or five games in round one as well, and they lost four of them. And that's just how it works.

I had major concerns pretty much since the deadline about the direction the Leafs had gravitated towards from a roster construction perspective and sort of the way they were choosing to play. And in round one, I think it reinforced that in all the wrong ways because they did get those results. And so we celebrated it, right? It was like, oh, they're finally creating goals through net front traffic and tips and all this stuff that they haven't been able to do in the past. And this is paying dividends. This is why they made these moves.

And then in this matchup against Florida, the fact that they were able to kind of, you know, get stuck in the mud sometimes lacked in particular left wing talent, right? That stuff hurt them here. And I think that was a massive mistake and miscalculation on their part. I imagine, you know, they thought, all right, well, Matthew Nyes is going to come in and he's going to solve that whole, that problem for us. And he certainly looked excellent when he played. Like, don't get me wrong. But, and it stinks that he got hurt and especially the way he did. But if your entire plan hinges completely on a 20-year-old jumping straight from the NCAA and being like, all right, as long as there's no injuries to anyone else, we're going to be fine, that's a poorly conceived plan, right?

That's not how the postseason works, especially if you are going to go on an extended run. And so, I don't know, you can talk about the kind of oversight, not leveraging that Bruins first round or they got for Sandine into arming themselves another player and instead having to rely on bunting and yarn croak and curfoot as their top left wingers. All of that kind of came back to hurt them here. And it was, while it was a bit fluky from they probably shouldn't have lost four or five games, it also wasn't like, whoa, this is totally out of left field as well. and that's been bugging me since personally because I feel like I should have been a bit harder on that. And instead I got I kind of like a lost track of the plot a little bit in terms of trying to prognosticate kind of how this would work out. Well, it's definitely not a perfect roster construction. I do think that if you look at Leafs on paper this year relative to last, I like the roster a lot more going into the playoffs.

But there's certain things like it's really hard to say because I was not a big fan of a lot of these trades at the deadline. but I was one of those fans that definitely was of the opinion of, well, you know what? A lot of the things we've done in the past with this group of players hasn't worked. Shake it up a little bit. Let's see what happens. I'm fine with that. A guy like Luke Chen, for example,

I thought he was fantastic in the first round against Tampa Bay. I thought he was a liability against Florida. You know, guy like Ryan O'Reilly didn't, you know, he had some big goals in the playoffs, you know, that tying goal in round one against Tampa as well. but just never really imposed himself fully. Sam Lafferty, few goals here and there, but he was on the ice for the overtime goal

that the Panthers scored in game three where basically player just blew by him at the blue line. So a lot of these didn't really work out overall. And to your point about Nyes, like if you're banking on that, you're just gambling at that point, right? If you're banking on Nize is going to come in the lineup and be the guy that we saw, it's just a pure gamble, right?

No one knew that for sure. I do think that injury was massive for the Leafs though because frankly, outside of Martner and Nylander, I think he was their best winger afterwards, probably on the bunting level at that point and not having him in the lineup just really threw things off. But there were some questionable things too, like a guy like Rasmus Sandine, right, unloading him for a first rounder, bringing Gustafsson in. I'm not sure that that trade needed to happen. And I question why it even did.

Is Sandin not a guy that he thought he could rely on going into the play? playoffs undersized. I look at this series against Florida, and I'm like, Sandine would have been a huge asset in this type of series, right? Being able to move the puck quickly against the forecheck like that. And too many times the Leafs decode just like fumbled it up. You could see Giordano was, you know, he's guys, what, 40 years old now is he's lacking in terms of pace.

DJ Brody uncharacteristic. DJ Brody didn't give the puck away in the regular season. In the playoffs, you put any pressure on the guy, all of a sudden, you know, he's a walking turnover machine as well. And definitely, you know, at its core, I can see, they definitely have some roster flaws. With that said, they played well enough to win the second round. They were the favorites to win the Stanley Cup after round one. As a solid team top to bottom, maybe we're just nitpicking is what it comes down to, in my opinion. Yes.

Yeah. I mean, I think the Sandin one kind of embodies a lot of their issues, though, not the necessarily having him would have swung the outcome of a series like this, but just the logic that got them there, right? Because I do think they didn't trust them in a matchup against the lightning, right? And they felt similarly about Lilligridden essentially had to get to like a real boiling point to finally insert him into that just because of how poorly Justin Hall had been playing. And so they're like, all right, well, we're not going to need him for this. We're going to move them. I think they also, you know, wanted to do right by the player, right, in terms of the first.

of like just finally getting him into a spa where you can play after all of these kind of in and out of the lineup playing less than he probably should based on his underlying numbers and all of that. And but then the problem was you get back that first. And instead of turning around and spinning that into a player that could actually help you now, they just kind of hold on to that. And everything about this year was positioned on, well, we have to not only win around, but finally have some playoff success.

And I don't understand really how the logic of how that helps you accomplish that this year if you just hold on to that first, right? You know, for all of the quibbles, though, about like the lack of left-wing talent, I think you mentioned O'Reilly there, how slow their centers are right now. All of those personnel flaws, all of my issues with the direction the team gravitated in stylistically, they still had enough opportunities to overcome it and have a different result in the series if their top players had been able to convert on those opportunities. And I guess this is a good segue for us to talk about that here.

And I want to frame it to you through this. I think the state of Leafs analysis right now is incredibly rough. I think this team is legitimately fascinating to cover from the sense of they built a team in a certain direction with flaws, with strengths, of course, as well, and they chose to do so for a specific reason, right? And instead of unpacking what that tells us about team building and where hockey's at in 2023, all we get is the same thousand people covering this team on a day to day basis, just choosing to appeal to like the lowest common denominator of analysis in this sport in

just like regurgitating headlines from four years ago that might have applied then that don't really have anything to do with what's going on right now. And I'm speaking specifically about like, oh, of course, they're, they're just poor defensively, right? It's, it's, this is the issue. This is why they can't get over the hump in the postseason. and instead, how many years now have we gotten to a point where there are seasons on the line and they can't score more than two goals? And you certainly have to be able to win two one games in the postseason if you want to win a Stanley Cup. But it feels like just seeing what's happened to the Leafs over the past four or five years,

I just don't understand how we're still at this point where it's being positioned as a defensive failure as opposed to, and not even just blaming the top players, but just, all right, the reason why they're not winning is because they actually can't score enough when it matters most. There's this notion in sports that defense wins championships. It's not just in the NHL. It's across sport. And it's like when the playoffs come, you got to have a good defense. And that's really not the case, generally speaking.

You see teams that have offensive firepower just win the stand. Look at Colorado last year. Colorado's not winning with team defense, right? Like Colorado's winning because they can put the puck in the back of the net. and they can move. You know, I really wrestle with this one a lot because you've had the same core for a while now, for a while now for the Leafs. And to your point, there's been times where they just can't score.

They can't put the puck in the net. This series bothered me because I thought they generated a lot, a lot of good opportunities and they didn't score. And yes, ultimately you have to hold those players accountable for not scoring at the end of the day. But can we not just say that the other goalie stole a series? or stood on his head. You know, why can we not go to that point? Like, these are absurd numbers, right?

Bobrovsky's 9.08 goal saved above expected, according to evolving hockey in the Well, okay, okay, let's talk about that. Sure. I have a big issue with the way stats are being tracked right now in hockey, and we can talk about like specific shot locations and data because I've been tracking every single shot attempt and scoring chance myself and every one of these games. And my totals are wildly. different every single game from what the NHL is putting out in terms of that.

Like I had in a in game five of devil's hurricanes right, the close out game in that series. There was one point where I had Brent Burns with like 16 shot attempts. And I looked and natural stature at like 11 that he'd been recorded for by the NHL. And I was like, that's that's a pretty massive disparity between the two. Right. Like I, five shots there is is a lot.

And I think for. goal save above expected right now, I get it. It's certainly better than, you know, going with wins as a goalie stat or even goals against average or save percentage. There's no chance Sergey Bobrovsky saved nine or ten goals save above expected in that series because Rob, that would imply that the Leafs scored 10 in the five games, right? And let's say he saved another nine. The Leafs were generating a lot of chances.

I find it hard to believe that they were generating four expected goals worth of offense per game because that is that's a pretty massive amount to think about game two alone probably really swung it pretty heavily because they had a ton of chances in that game and probably game five the one that they lost as well there was a lot of good opportunities and close looks in tight they fell to the wrong guy sometimes like callie yarn croak for example late in the game as well maybe it's exaggerated a little bit yeah i mean he had a 943 say percentage like he was obviously very, very good. I just wanted to, I just think I saw that goal save about expected number reference. And I just thought that didn't really pass like further scrutiny in my opinion.

No, fair enough. I get there's very, it's very possibly way overstated. Let's say that. But I, I thought Bobrovsky was great in the series overall. And, you know, you let's say both teams had a Bobrovsky in Ned in that series. I think the Leafs would have won that series quite handily, right? And sometimes that's just the randomness. So like, who would have expected that over the regular season, right? You talk about all the, you know, the people are like, Leafs, Leaves Decor, Defense is an issue. How many times do we get to the offseason after every year? And it's the Leap Leaps, go out and get yourself a goalie. Like, we haven't had a goalie since Ed Belfour and Curtis Joseph. Let's find ourselves a goalie. And last year was everyone wanted Mark Andre Fleury in the

off season. Mark Andre Fleury doesn't even finish as a starting goalie for his team, plays one playoff game, gets shelled. I mean, that wasn't the end. Now let's look at the goalies that are left in the postseason now, right? And the regular seasons that they had. Sergey Beroski has been horrible for five years. He's been a well below average starting goalie for five years. He turns it on in this series. The Seattle Cracken are a game away from making the conference finals with Gru Bauer in net.

Even Carolina, okay, you can say Freddie Anderson's a good goalie. They have depth there, anti-Ranta, Kachetkov. But none of those guys had like a great year. They were okay. They were fine. Freddie Anderson had a huge down year, didn't play a ton this season as well. Vegas, Aidan Hill and Laurent Broussa.

It's not like these teams are going and getting out these big name goalies that are riding them to the conference finals. They're just getting goaltending when it matters. Or the opposing team, you know, the goalie kind of gets, falls apart in the case of like Stuart Skinner in game six or something like that. But I don't know, you know, Demetri, it's really hard because I don't, I don't want to be like.

that fan of like, oh, run it back, run it back, run it back. You get to a point where you got the same similar roster construction. It doesn't work. But I'm not sure there's great alternatives. Like the people who just want to go out and Marner, trade them for whatever you can. If you get 60 cents on the dollar, go and trade him because he's not a playoff performer. Well, I don't agree. I mean, the guy had, what, 13, 14 points in the playoffs.

They just happened to come in a shorter span in round one and not in round two. you could you could like you can sequence those a lot differently and it would look like a completely different postseason for him right are people going to get on Leon dry saddle because he didn't score the last few games in that series like how does this how does this work if you just go dry for a small period of time and ultimately I think these are good hockey I think Austin Matthews Mitch Martyr William Nielander to a John Tavars is overpaid but he's a good hockey player. And I think to some extent, you just kind of got to give these guys the leash and keep going and just continue to bring in a few new faces here and there. I'm kind of at a loss,

but I just don't get the whole blowing everything up type of angle. No. And to the Bobrowski point, I like, I just wanted to have, be able to do a bit of a rant there on goal sale, but I'm expected just because I think, and if you compare like the regular season, like there was something really wonky going on this season. If you compared the regular season numbers on any site you want to use publicly to even some of the privately tracked stuff, it was just completely different. Like, it was night and day. And a lot of it was wildly exaggerated, right? It was like, this goalie stopped 40 goals save above expected this season. And then the private stuff had him at like 17, which was still amongst the league leaders. And it just like, I think that distorts perception maybe sometimes,

right? And it bugs me as well when you see people cite natural statics scoring chance total. And it's like this team at 45 scoring chances today. And it's like, I have never seen a game where a team had 45 scoring chances. If you get into the 20s, you're doing something really well. And the Leafs had that a couple times in the series. You're never getting that high. And I think that distorts perception of what's happening in these games and how we describe that. But Bobrovsky, I mean, not only that whatever his goals they expected was,

9, 43, say percentage, the mind-blowing thing to me, if we want to talk a little bit about trends this postseason, I don't know what was going on in round two. And maybe it speaks to the quality of goalies that were kind of, kind of left around after everyone that got eliminated in round one. But 22 round two games in NHL poll season this year, in 12 of them, a goalie was replaced. Now, two of them were injuries, right? Samsonov got hurt and Lauren Braswell got hurt early in the game as well. But 10 times the team switched goalies, partly because they were playing poorly,

maybe partly as a motivation tactic to try to get their team back in the game or whatever. And the one goalie that never got pulled was Sergey Bobrovsky, who, when this Panthers team you know, season was on the line in the regular season, right? They were on the brink of complete failure of winning the president's trophy and then completely missing the playoffs. The penguins certainly collapsed and that helped them a little bit, but they also relied on a third stringer to play all these games, even when Wabowski was healthy and ready to play for them.

And then now he comes back and does this. And that kind of, I guess, brings us back to the point of not only luck and randomness, but also goalies and putting too much stock into it and kind of how that, whether they save the puck or not, I guess, distorts our perception of how the teams played or who was deserving of the result. Yeah, I mean, it's the NHL, the playoffs in particular, right? I used to be very dismissive of a lot of these things because the math guy in me is like, these are all small samples, right?

22 games, you got 10 goalie pulls due to actual performance rather than injury. Well, I mean, there's going to be some small percentage, you know, probability where that's just going to happen. a 22-game sample. And it might have just happened now. But as time has gone on, I start to think about it a little bit more and more. And, I mean, it does feel like it's been pretty hectic,

like condensed schedule for, for playoffs and the regular season this year. And, you know, guys could potentially just be beat down at this point. With a lot of these, especially in the end of the year, like playoff races actually mattering for a lot of these teams and positioning actually mattering for a lot of these teams.

I don't know necessarily what it is in particular, but, you know, what really bothers me is just like a lot of the narrative-based stuff that's really not supported by fact in the postseason or people that just run with these little small samples and say, oh, you got to do this. And it's like, well, you know, the recipe you're talking about here didn't work last season or the year before that or the year before that. it's working now and you're reacting to the fact that it's working now, but that hasn't been the case. And that type of stuff kills me. But to go out and get a goalie, it's like, okay, Bobrovsky is not a goalie. Like if you ask, like if you're doing a draft right at the beginning of the playoffs with all the teams that are in the playoffs, where's Bobrovsky getting drafted amongst the goalies? Well, not high by the Panthers because they didn't even play them in the first, what, three games?

But not high by anyone, really. Yeah. This is what I'm talking about. So it's like, you know, it's everything is so reactionary, right? It's, it's, okay, we get stonewalled by a goalie. Our goaltending is not good enough. It's like, well, guess what? Florida did not think their goaltending was good enough coming into the playoffs either.

And it just happened to work out. Now, is it the quality of shots? Is it something the Leafs are doing? I'll say as watching, watching the games, right? I thought what Bobrovsky did really well was he got out of his crease and he really cut down angles. And the Leafs for some reason, I don't know if this was coached. I've never coached in the NHL or worked for a team. But it looked often like they were shooting at his pads intentionally with the hope of generating a rebound or a second look.

And it worked for them in some games. And in others, he was able to direct those rebounds to save spots or the defense would clear him. but in the regular season, the Leafs were passing a lot more laterally where they would try to pass around a goalie like this and into the net, and you didn't see that a lot in the postseason. Maybe it's because the space is condensed,

the middle of the ice is more condensed. And maybe there's playoff, goaltending styles that are more conducive to the playoffs. I'm just throwing random stuff out there now. And the Panthers to their credit defensively did a good job of boxing out, right? Especially after all the success the Leafs had and in generating that kind of net front traffic

and rebounds and tips in front of Vasilevsky, even when Bobrovsky did let up bad rebounds in this series, the Panthers were generally tying up sticks, boxing out, kind of clearing the puck. I can think of very few times where the Leafs were able to, you know, sustain sort of second and third opportunities in front of the net meaningfully. And that looked much different than in round one. Rob, there's a bunch of other topics I want to get to with you.

Let's take our break quickly here while we still can. And then when we come back, we'll get into those. You're listening to the HockeyoCat streaming on the Sportsnet Radio Network. Breaking down the top stories in hockey and Elliot Friedman every day. The Jeff Merrick Show. Subscribe and download the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. We're back here in the PDO cast with Rob Pazola. Rob, let's do.

I'm going to limit you to five more minutes on the Leafs here. And then we're going to do some league-wide trends to close out the show. I don't know. Do you want to talk a bit about Sheldon Keith and the coaching? Do you want to talk about Willie Nealander? I think both are sort of interesting topics here as we kind of put a bow on that series. I think they're kind of intertwined for me. So if I was going to make a move for the Leafs, the Sun Ride Fire Sheldon Keith,

I think he's been given enough leeway at this point with this core to get results that he hasn't gotten. Particularly with me, the things that bother me with Keith is that there's certain guys that he obviously just trusts over others. And Nielander to me is a guy that I don't think he supremely trusts. And I think he should have a lot more trust. Nealander's been the most consistent playoff performer for the Leafs, in my opinion. Especially when you consider he gets paid closer to the amount that Alex Kerfoot gets paid than he does to Austin Matthews and Mitch Martyr. People need to put that into perspective when they talk about the core four. It's really a core three when you're talking about salary.

Neelander's a little bit less, but I call him core four because of his play. But taking William Neelander off Power Play 1, I don't know what the Leafs saw within that organization where they thought it was better. to have O'Reilly, Tavares, Matthews, three centermen all on the ice at once. But this created a lot of situations in the playoffs where that power play one stays out for a minute and a half, minute 45, sometimes even the full two minutes. They do not have another center afterwards except for David Camp. So David Camp is getting the next shift after that power play. Guess who gets sent out on the wing with David Camp?

William Neelander. Well, that's great. I mean, you're putting them with guys that can't really produce offensively in Camp and Lafferty. Most of the time, that shift is going to get, that line's going to get hemmed in their own zone, which is exactly where you don't want Nylander playing. Put him on the first power play. Like, if you want to ride that three centermen, put Neelander out there, move Marner to power play too. Because Neelander will do the same stuff as Marner on that power play.

Buddy has a better shot. And on top of it, if Marner gets stuck on the ice after that power play too, he's fine. with the fourth liners or anything like that. So I don't get that from the Nielander usage perspective. But for Sheldon Keith, the thing that really bothered me over the course of the playoffs is we have it etched in our brain, the Paul Maurice, you know, five two or five one, the penalty calls from game one. And that's very subtle.

But it went a long way in this series because I'm not going to be the Leafs fan that says, oh, you know, the officials didn't do their job or anything like that. But you took a Florida Panthers team who committed a ton of penalties in the regular season and they got called for barely anything, games three, four, and five. Game five, Mark Stahl hit Mitch Marner so hard in the face with an elbow that he did like a 360 before hitting the ice in front of everyone and didn't even get called for that. And at some point, if you're Sheldon Keefe and, you know, good coaches do this. John Cooper does this a lot. Lots of guys around the league, even when things are going. their way early in a series from a penalty perspective, they can still swing it as, you know, we should have had more calls. Well, you want to complain about the lopsidedness of the penalties.

We should have had even more calls. It should have been even more lopsided. And I think Sheldon Keith took the high road in a lot of the post game situations this year. We've seen him in the past go off at times on refs after the game. He went, you know, no comment. I'll let the league address that. And to me, there's a game within a game that can really swing things, even if it's marginal, one extra penalty, two extra penalties. You can't tell me the Panthers are going to go an entire game without committing a penalty. Like this is 2023, playoff hockey, clutching and grabbing everywhere. The winning goal, I mean, Radical Grudis literally grabbed Callie Yarncrook's stick and drag them to the net with him. I mean, if there was ever a time, even after the game, just go off.

Like, I'd like to see something, just something. There's some passion there and like trying to get your team an extra call, bunting high stick, two minutes, you know, bleeding. The can't even give them. So I think that I was very disappointed in the Keefe off the ice postseason this year. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I wanted to build up.

off the willy point you make because I do think it is important like he gets lumped in with with the top forwards in this discussion for various reasons he makes about 60% of what the other three do and was also just so far and away their best player in the series even you know he scored the two goals or whatever but the big one uh to keep their season alive and send it to overtime certainly but you're just watching that like he's got so much dog in him rob uh like he was so dominant in these five games it felt like every time out he was out there something good was going to happen every time he over the boards. He had, at the very least, you know, all this talk about like, oh, these guys don't want it

enough. They're choking in the postseason and all this stuff. And, you know, that's obviously flawed for, for various reasons. But in this case, with Nylander, it's like he visibly wanted the puck every single time he was on the ice. And sometimes we would just go and just take it even from like a teammate. Like, there was one time in the Tampa Bay series where Luke Shen was carrying the fuck up to ice and he just went and he's like, this is mine.

I'm going to do something better with it. I just took it from Luke Shen. And so he's been there consistently their most. productive playoff performer during this era. He's also, I think, and tying this back to our conversation earlier in the show, clearly got a quality to his game that none of the other guys really do in terms of his ability to create with speed and carry the puck up the ice. And it's one that this team desperately needs more of. And I think would have helped benefited a guy like Austin Matthews a lot because for all the talk about he didn't score goals in this series, but he had a lot of chances.

Well, his life certainly would have been easier with getting even more of those chances if he had a guy who could set the table for him in advantageous positions more often than he already had. And I don't know, I just, I wanted to praise Willie and not lump him in with whatever failures or shortcomings, the other top players didn't produce in this series because it's just they're two entirely different conversations. I completely agree with you. I mean, Keith was very glued to Marner Matthews for the majority of the series. I don't know why in particular if they want to play with each other.

So, you know, but Matthews, Nielander were very electric together in the regular season. And I thought that there should have been times when they were out there together. But I agree with you. I mean, the thing with Neelander is a lot of the diehards just don't like him because he plays like a softer style where he's not going to go in and try to win the puck in the corner by delivering a hit and pinning you in there. He's going to do with stick work. But it works for him. And he's able to recover a lot of pucks like that. He's going to back away from a hit. He's going to do things like that that are going to drive like the old school hockey fans insane. but he's constantly around the net.

People complain, oh, you know, he plays soft. He's in and around the net a ton in front, nonstop. Like, this is what he does. And I, you know, it'll be a shame if he's the guy that gets moved to just for the sake of moving a guy. Because I think he's been their most consistent playoff performer for years. Well, I wouldn't be remotely surprised if that were the case because, and he is the first Dominoor to fall because it's a path of least resistance, he's going to command a huge pay raise next summer that they probably can't accommodate long term. If Kyle Dubos is gone, he was his

biggest fan and defender within the organization. And you really can't move the other guys, right? And so it's, it's tricky because while acknowledging that, it's just difficult to envision a scenario where they're able to move them and be a better team for it next season. And in Austin Matthews' final year before he's a UFA as well. That's a very slippery slope to be trying to navigate. And so I think we're going to move on here because I think we're going to have a lot of time for these conversations, right, especially after the postseason's over and we get into all the offseason movement and speculation and stuff like that.

So we'll save that for another day. But, okay, I've got a few trends here that I wanted to bounce off you because you mentioned before I went to break about, you know, small sample sizes and post seasons and how much it bugs you and all that. What are we doing with the home road splits this season? a lot's been made of that, right? 31 and 41 record for home teams this postseason. You're shaking your head here.

How are you feeling about it? Yeah, I feel like it's noise. Yeah. I do. I mean, so I model the NHL because I bet on it. I'm still including a home ice advantage and I'm just doing it over a longer period of time. I'm using a larger sample than just this year. There's a lot of articles written this, you know, year about, oh, there is no home ice

advantage. It's like, okay, let me bet every home team at plus 100 then if you really feel that way. and nobody wants to take that bet because they know there's a home home ice advantage deep down. Yeah, just random. Although, you know, I did see that the Leafs before game five slept in a hotel to mimic the road environment where they thought that they played better this year, which I mean, I don't necessarily agree.

They won games in Tampa. I don't know that they played all that well in the games that they won. But hey, no, I just, I don't get carried away with that stuff. I think that's just random. You'd have to prove to me over many years that it's not a thing before I would agree with that or believe it. Yeah, one thing that really bugs me is the lionizing of pulling out victories and close games. Like, I certainly think, well, first off, a better team is probably more likely to win

a higher percentage of those games anyways, but also I'm sure there are some qualities about your roster composition and your big player is stepping up and all. of that and being tied to goaltending in particular that might swing things in your favor in that regard. But, you know, when we're closing the loop on this Panthers conversation for now, this postseason, there's six and one in one goal games. They're four and oh in overtime, right? And I've already seen some of that being attributed to them having this specific quality that allows them to buckle down and pull those types of games out. Should also note that in the regular season, they were 14 and 13 in one goal games.

pretty much as close to a coin flip as you're going to get. In games of one pass regulation, they were six and eight, four and seven in actual overtime. Now, you know, that's a five minute format three on three. It's certainly a different game schematically than playoff overtime. Like there's no doubt about that and all the pressures and everything between regulations and postseason. Like there are different scenarios, right? But I think the point I'm trying to make is there's such a big element of luck in

determining the outcomes of these games, especially, you know, there's been a lot of blowouts in round two, but for the most part, the postseason, it's no. for shrinking margins of errors, kind of bringing everything back to the board, that idea of parity and how we get a lot of these coin flips. And I get why we lionize it, right? Because it makes for cool playoff stories. But unless you're suddenly just suggesting

that the Panthers in particular just suddenly discovered how to win these types of games over the past couple weeks, I mean, that would be awfully convenient timing on their part. But I just think it's pretty much as close to a coin flip as you mentioned as you're going to get.

when in doubt use the betting markets as an indicator. The betting markets are the best indicator we have of the probabilities of things unfolding in a game because a lot of these markets have very high limits. Lots of people bet into them. It's just like any other market where sports books profile players, they move lines based off of bets. And if you look at going into these overtimes, what the odds are, they're as close to a coin flip as possible.

No matter who the teams are playing, you might. get shaded towards, you know, game five overtime. The Leafs are minus 120 going into overtime. And the Panthers are minus 110. There's a built in Vig there that the sports book is keeping. But that's very close to a coin flip. And you see those odds very consistently over the course of the playoffs when games go into overtime. So, you know, do it at home, right? Like flip six coins. And how many times you're going to get lots of times where you're going to get six heads or five heads. It happens. It's within the realm of possibility that that's going to happen. But we don't, we don't like to explain sports in randomness. Nobody likes to do that.

They like to feel like there's something that this team is doing that's causing it to happen. And I'm just wired differently. I think differently. It's probably because of the betting side of things for me. And you just have to learn to think probabilistically. Yeah. Well, and the playoffs are such a small sample size, right? Where if you do go four and oh and overtime games, you're going to make it to the conference finals. That's how it works, right? And you certainly shouldn't be apologizing for it. It's good timing.

But yeah, we do like to attribute that to a certain like kind of inherent quality as opposed to what it actually is. I don't know. Is there anything, any other sort of trends that have kind of caught your eye or interesting? We have a couple more minutes here, whether it can be prices. You know, something I was messaging you throughout this postseason was like it felt the market was so high on the Oilers and we're not going to talk about that series here. I'll save it for for the show tomorrow.

every game they were being priced as pretty heavy favorites, even on the road against teams that in theory were, you know, fair counterparts for them should have been a coin flip, but the market was favoring them that way. And, you know, after the, after round one, I believe them and the Leafs were the two Stanley Cup favorites, right?

I had a very good round two of the playoffs, and from a betting perspective, and it was all counterintuitive to what I actually thought would happen. Because I thought the Leafs would win. I thought the devils would win. I thought the Oilers would win. But when you get into the playoffs, exactly like you said,

Dimitri, you look at the odds for Edmonton and Toronto going into those series. And they're essentially in the range of expecting those teams to win 65% of the time, if not more. And I just think that there's so much randomness in these series that when you start to actually model that, you just don't get anywhere near those numbers. And on a per game basis,

you watch the first couple games of the series. You're like, oh, these underdogs can play with these teams as well. and you never really saw the market fully adjust to that. So I'm with you there. I painfully, I'll just tell a random story really quickly. But when Vegas was an expansion team, I made a bet with a friend of mine in Vegas, $10,000 bet that the Leafs would win a Stanley Cup before the Vegas Golden Knights would win a Stanley Cup.

And every year, I'm just sweating that bet. And I was in the prime position with young Matthews, Marner, Nylander, Rye. Like this couldn't have got better than that. And here I am again, another year, another sweat, just fingers crossed that Vegas doesn't win the cup. I love that. All right, Rob, this was a blast. I'm going to let you go here.

Quickly let the listeners know, whatever you want to promote, whatever you want to plug where they can check you out. Just let them know whatever. Yeah. So I run a content platform called the Hammer Betting Network. If you're into betting, check it out. You can visit the website.

It's thehammer. or you can just check us out on YouTube at the Hammer HQ. We do live watchalongs of games from a live betting perspective. And we do cover all sports. And I do have an app as well called BetStamp. If you're into sports betting, you always want to find the best available line in the market. Download BetStamp on Android or iOS or you can check out the site betstamp. All right, buddy.

Well, this is fun. Good luck with the rest of the postseason. We'll have you back on. Hopefully once we get to the Stanley Cup final, maybe we'll have some stuff to to Paras and kick around. We'll be back tomorrow with more of the PDO cast, as always streaming on the Sports Night Radio Network.