The Hockey PDOcast - Your Mailbag Questions

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

Dimitri Filipovic is joined by John Matisz to answer your mailbag questions about All-Star weekend, utilization of private stats companies, and aging curves for players. 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.

Progressing to the mean since 2015, it's the Hockey P.D.O.cast with your host, Dmitri Filipovich. Welcome to the Hockey Pee-Ocast. My name is Dimitri Philipovich. And joining me is my good buddy, John Mattis. John, what's going on, man? Dimitri, fresh off All-Star weekend, trying to catch up on sleep and get back into the normal swing of things. But I'm thrilled to join you, as usual. Yeah, I must have been a busy, busy weekend for you with the entire league converging in your backyard. there basically. So you had a lot of kissing babies and shaking hands, I'm sure. So here's a plan for today. We're going to take some mailbag questions. We didn't get to do one at the end of last week. I typically try to mix in one mailbag per week just because I think it's fun and it also gets people in the Discord server involved and they always

provide the goods with really thoughtful questions. But we had a couple trades last week, right? And I think that was a nice diversion that I'll gladly take if the league's going to provide us with fun trades to break down every week. I will certainly gladly do so. But we've got a bit of time here now since there's been a few days since we've actually had NHL games to talk about for us to kind of get into some bigger picture topics and sort of just talk about whatever the listeners want us to get into.

So here's a fun one, and it's from Intelligent Dice, and they state it's a topical mailback question. What's your ideal All-Star game format? If you could do the event from scratch, what would you do? So you were there for all the festivities over the weekend. Give us the scoop in terms of not only how it all unfold. Obviously, I think, you know, I watched it from the comfort of my couch. And I'm sure a lot of the listeners partook in various parts of the three-day experience as well.

But what were kind of people talking about and also can get into some of the conversations you might have been having there with your boots on the ground or kind of just what some of the takeaways, I guess, were from interacting with everyone that was there. Yeah, so I guess where I'll start is, I think it's fashionable and fair to rip the NHL at times. Like I think that they shoot themselves in the foot a lot. I think they overthink things a lot. But in this case, I thought All-Star Weekend was very good, borderline excellent. I think the way that they've really constructed it, that's player-centric, makes it be in a really good place.

if we can just start with the draft. I mean, I thought it was fine this year. It wasn't good. It wasn't bad. But one tweak I would do to that is make it more of a made-for-TV event where there's no media, there's no crowd. It's in a studio instead of the rink. And maybe you have ex-players like, you know, Kevin BXA, Paul Bissonet, as the host, and just make it completely, you know, casual and, you know, just kind of the less complicated, the better. and because the draft itself, having teams made up of, you know, players that have been chosen by a captain versus using divisions, I think makes a ton of sense.

I think it's great as an event, as an idea, but there could be some tweaks there. And then if you look at the skills, I thought it was a huge success, way more competitive than in the past. That's probably driven by, you know, the winner getting a million dollars and the best goalie getting $100,000. That's pretty good money for these guys, you know. Like McDavid, for example, makes $12.5 million right now. One million, even for one of the top earners in the league, is a fair amount of money. I think having fewer players participate really help drive the competition too, because in the past it's been, hey, I'm going to go do the hardest shot,

and that's all I have to contribute, or maybe I'll participate in the shootout, and that's it. So they're just sitting around the whole time. The crowd got into it obviously more than usual when you have a guy like Nikita Kutrov dogging it a little bit and it was easy to boo him. But I just thought the skills was, they got away from the gimmicks of it. And we just saw the incredible skill that is around the league in these little events. And then just to touch on the game, I mean, pretty uptempo. I think you have to keep it three on three. I think if we're looking at sort of ways to blue sky this.

five on five wouldn't be the way to go. It promotes too much coasting. So I think you have to keep that at three and three. I guess you could go four and four, but what would be the point? So, I mean, the game is always the tough one because it's like last event of the weekend, these guys don't want to go full out,

but you also don't want it to be, you know, shinny in the middle of the summer for these guys. So all in all, I don't know about you, Dimitri, but I thought it was a pretty successful weekend as far as the product. as far as the entertainment value. And we got to get props to Connor McDavid for being heavily involved this time

and for guys like Austin Matthews and David Pasternak and just showing off their personalities. Like I think this generation of player is really not afraid of being themselves. And not all them are going to be outgoing, not all them are going to be extroverted, but some of them are and it helps provide some entertaining moments.

Yeah, I think the key is to create or cultivate an environment where it can be kind of, more organic and they can feel comfortable and forget that they're on display in a sense, right? And I think that's where the opening night with the draft did itself a bit of a disservice. I think everyone was excited to have the draft back because we have such all fond memories from the last time we saw it. But then just having everyone out there on the ice in front of the crowd and then like interviewing them in between picks and stuff, you could see they're so programmed to in that setting giving the stog answers. I'm surprised one of them didn't accidentally slip in

a Pucks in Deep because it was essentially that cookie cutter in terms of the interviews, right? So I think there's interesting elements to it's no surprise that I thought the best part of the draft night was when they got Connor McDavid talking and then he accidentally called Sergey Bobrovsky Sam. And it was like that that's the sort of stuff that you want to bring out, right? So I'll say that. I think the skills competition was really fun. And listen, I know a lot of this stuff in this entire event essentially is for kids and for suits, right? Like, it's not necessarily for us. It's not some sort of hard hitting analysis by any means. But it is always cool to see the top players in the game kind of converge and interact with each other and see how they line up next to each other in that setting.

And you're not going to certainly get max effort or intensity. But I think, like, novelty is important in terms of what you're asking them to do. because I think every one of the players wants to look cool, right? And that's understandable. At the same time, though, I think it's in their core to be Uber competitive. And so when you get them to do some of these obstacle courses that they're not used to doing, you can almost see them trying to figure it out on the fly, right? And I think that's an actual net positive or an advantage,

even if it leads to stuff like the Matt Barzell incident at the end where he's struggling with tossing the puck into the mini-nets, right? obviously that was incredibly frustrating for him, I'm sure, and you could painfully see the $1 million or the possibility of it, like slipping from his grasp. But that's kind of what I think we want to see, right? We don't want to see sort of cookie cutter and the usual. And I think if they already kind of know, it's much like coaches when we talk about it, right? Like if they kind of figure it out already and they know exactly what they can get away with or what the bare minimum to do is to kind work around it, they're going to exploit that.

And that's going to limit experimentation and the organic outcomes we're looking for. And so in that sense, I think the skills competition this year actually did help accomplish that to a degree. Yeah, a lot of it is about making this appealing to the players. And that sounds like, oh, you know, these guys are selfish. They make so much money. You're just asking them to come and be praised for a weekend. Oh, their lives must be so tough.

But when you put yourself in their shoes, you know, for a little bit. the longest time, the All-Star game, trying in the All-Star game was just not cool, right? It was just, look at this guy over here. What's he doing? He's actually trying. Whereas now, you could argue it's the other way around where Kutrov was too cool for school, and he gets booed. And it was obviously great that there was a heel, that there was a villain, and it was all fun in games.

But it was kind of one of those things where, you know, everyone else had bought into it, and he hadn't. And he became kind of the outlier. So I thought that was interesting. And talking to a few players about what they thought of the weekend, Sebastian Aho made the point that it was kind of, I guess, not ideal for the bulk of the players to be doing nothing on the Friday, on the skills day, because there was only 12 players in the skills, which I think is the right way to do it. I think you limit that number. But what do the other guys do? I mean, they did obviously the usual autograph sessions, you know, sponsor stuff, media responsibilities.

But, you know, some guys didn't even come to. the rink to watch it. They would rather do something else. So a bit weird to ask them to come to a city on their break and then they don't really do anything that day. And then another piece of feedback from Cam Talbot was, you know, getting the goalies into the skills competition earlier would have helped. Whether that's they continue to just be involved in one event or they're involved in multiple. But the fact that they were sitting around getting a little tight for a long period of time there was an ideal, especially. When you envision a GM watching that shootout challenge,

one minute straight of a goalie going into his butterfly and trying to make these stops. Not ideal in that sense. But that's kind of nitpicking. And again, it's kind of personalized to the players, which I'm sure some people listening don't care much for. But that was some of the feedback.

And it's ironic because in that one minute exercise, I guess, with the players going one-on-one against the goalies, It was actually the players who were struggling in it because you could really see the gas tank really running on empty and fading towards the final 10, 15 seconds, right? It was interesting to see that. Yeah, I mean, there's obvious limitations, especially for the game on the Saturday, I guess, now is it's a contact sport, right? And so especially if you're going to go 5-15, you're just going to see guys kind of doing laps around. And it's going to look like an exhibition game. And so I think no one wants to see that.

The final few minutes of each of the games, and there were three of them, right? I think you could see them kind of buckling down and going for it and actually giving it their all, at least in terms of the team trying to catch up with scoring. And so that was really fun to see. And so I think for the most part, it hit the right notes. I had a few takeaways from it that I jotted down as I was watching that they'll pitch you on here. One was David Pasternak in the shootout in one of the games, hitting his own goalie with his patent and move was a great theater.

and I did a show with Woodley a couple weeks ago and I was telling you about this and I was trying to describe it because he actually hadn't seen it and he had done it previously to UC Soros and Ilya Sorokin, I believe. And Woody was saying like, yeah, it's obviously an impossible move to try to stop or defend because he's not showing you the puck so you can't really read it off the blade. You just have to guess where he's going to go.

And he's like, I guess the one saving grace is he's so much more likely to go far aside with the shot. So you can almost just try to cheat for a little bit. And then if you go back and watch that, you could almost see Jeremy Swateman do that. And so he dropped the blocker, and then Pasternak hits him going the other direction across the body. And so just seeing that actually play out was,

was I think, highly amusing. And I really enjoyed that. And Pasternak probably is one of the big winners of the event from showing that personality you're talking about perspective, right, from kind of playing up the booze, much like Kuturob did as well, and just sort of the flare that he approaches everything with. I think you could certainly see that and it was a good showcase for it. My other one, and I DM'd you about this, and I know that there's limitations to how many players

can go and you're trying to make it make sense from like having the right amount of goalies and all of that. How the heck was Rupa Hansenna out of this event? And I, it's a showcase of the league's best and most fun talent. And he is, he is offense. And I think this is a showcase for that specifically. And so I just would have loved to see him flying around particularly in the three on three, but even in the skills competition today before,

because I think he would have excelled at. And it would have been really cool to see him do so. And I know it's kind of a played out topic of like, oh, he's so underrated and all that. But just watching that event unfold and him not being there, I was like, man, he might actually be because he's a player that I'm really missing right now. Yeah, I think that's spot on. and I know you and I believe it was Pete Blackburn talked about how Krill Marchenko

would have been a way better pick than Boone Jennifer, the Blue Jackets as this team that's pretty much in disarray. And it's like, oh, who should we pick? Let's pick the, you know, the captain, you know, who plays a 200-foot game. Or do we pick the Russian who has this fantastic personality, scores a bunch of goals?

And they obviously chose the former. So I think, yeah, and then circle back on him. I mean, Jake Ottinger isn't even having a good year. So I don't know exactly how they came down on that decision. I assume they looked across the league and didn't see a ton of goalies that they could invite. So they default to Daughtinger, who obviously is deserving generally of being an all-star, just year to year. But yeah, it's when you have this whole we need a player from each team format, it complicates things as far as who's actually going to be invited at the end of the day.

because when they open up the fan voting, it's rarely, rarely a guy who's in a smaller market or a southern market like Dallas. So that's unfortunate. But, you know, what I love about this event is that a guy like, say, Philip Forsberg really gets to display his personality, obviously display his mustache.

And display just how skilled he is. And then, you know, playing in Nashville, you don't get love as much as you would elsewhere. Same with a Frank Vitrano, who, hey, you know, maybe he's tailed off since an absolutely blazing hot start. But good personality, skilled player from a small market. Nice to see him put on display as well. Yeah, I was going to say certainly not his first go in terms of being an all-star.

And I think he is a star by definition because of the highlight real plays he generates and all of that, even if he hasn't necessarily had the point total in previous seasons. But like watching Matt Barzell, he certainly belongs, right? I always, one thing I like about this event is, is to your point on Foresburg, you get to see players who, especially if they're on a team where they're so far in a way the biggest star on the team from like a skill perspective. And you don't really get to see that interplay that often because they don't have like running mates with all due respectable Horvat, who's obviously a phenomenal player.

And I think he's done wonders for Barsall this season, but just seeing him interact with some of those guys and play with them and how that skill sort of meshes, I guess. was really fun to see and I think that's what kind of the event is all about. So yeah, it was pretty cool. Any other sort of takeaways on All Star? Did you get to ask anyone about Saxo and Squirtle? Because I gave you that as an assignment and I'm not sure if you followed. I actually did not.

I didn't, unfortunately. I was going to ask how Connor about it, but just the way that the media availability worked, I didn't get that chance. But there's still time in the season to circle back on that one. All right. Well, that's deeply disappointing, John. And this might be your last appearance on the show.

But we'll see how the rest of today's episode goes. Okay, let's do some other mailback questions. That was the first one. I thought it was a good sort of launching point for us to talk about the all-star festivities. J.R. Jersey asks, how do we feel about NHL Edge? And what about it in relation to clear site analytics and sport logic? Now, I think there's a number of ways to take this, but I'm kind of curious for your take on it, especially as someone who gets to use sport logic for a lot of your work.

I certainly think it provides an added layer of context. or, you know, quantitative reinforcement you can use to tell a story. I think NHL Edge has its purpose in that regard as well. I think it's much more descriptive in that way, though, right? Like, for me, I used it last week, for example, when I did the Matt Barzell episode, speaking of him, with Daryl Belfrey, and I thought it's interesting to kind of note how he's so good in transition and carrying the puck into the zone

and he flies up the ice, but compared to some of the other top speedsters in the league, he's not necessarily going at max speed nearly as often because he incorporates so many more changes of pace and stop and starts to his game and he's elusive and maneuvering in that way as opposed to just blazing speed. And so I think that's a cool anecdote to mix into a point you're trying to make. But I don't think from an analysis perspective, it's necessarily nearly as useful. Where do you kind of land on this? And we can talk about any of the companies or sort of just the idea of utilizing them

beyond the publicly available metrics. Yeah, so I'll use an example of a story I recently did as well. So I profiled JJ Petirko of the Buffalo Sabres. And it was a mix of, hey, this is what this guy's off the like off the ice. This is his background as far as being from Germany. And then also like this player is pretty unique as this, you know, essentially a power forward who just has this lightning quick skating ability. And just the ceiling seems quite high on him.

So just breaking all that down. And so I used NHL Edge to reference his skating speed because anytime you watch JJ Peturka, you go, this guy's got wheels, he's fast, but okay, how fast? So it was kind of similar to what you're saying with Barzell. He didn't have a ton of super high, super elite speed bursts, but he had a ton that was in, I believe, 18 to 20 miles per hour, which is like the third tier. He was in the 97 percentile. So I referenced that because it's one thing to say guys fast or quick.

It's another to actually use the data. And then I use sport logic to one lay out how he impacts the expected goals when he's on the ice and when when he's not playing how the Sabres fare. And also how much of an impact he has on the Sabres rush game because he's just so deadly off the rush. And again, it's one thing to say that. It's one thing for your eyes to catch that. But to actually add some data to it, I think is very valuable. And then I don't have access to clear-side analytics. and obviously with a profile on a skater,

it would probably not be very useful, but I did use evolving hockey for penalty differential. So I find that at this point in time, we'll call it the evolution of hockey analytics or getting all this extra data, you can pull from many different places. I think sport logic, at least based on my experience, and as you alluded to, Dmitra,

I have a contract with them, for lack of a way to put it, I use their data. I think that tour logic probably has the best offering as far as kind of the full scope and the amount of stuff they track and how useful it is. Whereas NHL Edge, a lot of it can be kind of, oh, that's a fun fact, but then not super useful in isolation. Sure, if you, you know, it depends on what you're working on. It depends, you know, even if you're a fan, what you want to know about a player,

there might be a nugget in there. But there's less, you know, stuff that you can really use to pair with the video like sport logic has. I'll use an example. Okay, so Sam Reinhardt's contract year,

you know, a lot of people like to reference is high shooting percentage. That's fair. A lot of people like to reference that a lot of his production has been on the power plate. That's fair. You have one more player. It's easier to score. But then, if you look at his sport logic data, I mean, this is a guy that's super high in the league and cycle chances,

super good off the rebound. Like, he just, he's, he's appearing on these leaderboards and it's showing that while some of this contract year production is certainly percentage driven, a lot of it is process driven. So I find it's super

useful sport logic for that as far as I guess testing narratives and just looking under the hood and going you know, is this guy just kind of riding it or is a part of what he's doing sustainable?

And just one last thing. My biggest gripe with NHL Edge is the fact that they use below 50th percentile for anyone that's poor in a certain metric. So for skating speed, if you're not particularly fast, we don't know how bad you are at skating, you're just below 50th percentile. So that's a bit annoying and hopefully they fix that over time. But I also get it when they're negotiating with the PA and trying to get this thing off the ground. So yeah, I don't know. I kind of rambled there. No, I don't have a lot of experience like you with ClearSight Analytics. My sort of interactions with it or whatever I have Woodley Aud and he's dropping nuggets from

it on me or when you see Steve Aliquette tweeting out stuff from the back end, especially as it relates to the Rangers. I find their ability to break down into more minute details. Very appealing, right? Like you can get the expected goals. The team's given up specifically off the rush or on passes below the, below the the slot line, for example, right? Like, there's really interesting elements to it.

I do find that whenever I get a peek behind the curtain, their numbers are very extreme, and that's not necessarily good or bad. It's just very different than a lot of the stuff that I think we're seeing publicly. The thing that I enjoy about Sport Logic, and I'll give you a practical example of this from last week, so when the Kings fire Todd McClellan, there was a lot of conversation about how much of it was his fault, how much of it was just percentage driven, whether they're due to regress, all that stuff. A lot of the conversation that comes up whenever a coach of a team with aspirations gets fired, right? And on one hand, during the streak they've been on of losing,

they're shooting like 6% or something as a team. And no matter what I think of your offensive profile or tactics, no one is going to shoot that over the long term, especially with the type of players they have. And so regardless of what they're doing, there's going to be some regression. And I imagine that it probably will conveniently be timed with a different voice behind the bench, right? And they're going to start winning more games. That's just how this works. But it is interesting that by the public metrics, evolving hockey has the Kings at 5th. It expect the goals generated.

Money puck has them 5th. Natural Stadrick has them 4th. And as anyone that's watched the Kings this season for any extended period of time probably knows, that's not true. Like there is no way that they are 5th in terms of quality of offensive. generated the season. It's just not the reality of the situation based on the way they play. And Sportologic has them in 19. And that I think is much more in line. I think they're probably middle of the pack, right? And then considering how good they are defensively, that's good enough to win a lot of games in the regular season. But I have a lot of concerns about that in terms of

Stanley Cup aspirations. And I think a lot of that is systemic issues in terms of the way they're playing because I think they have the personnel to be better than that. And so, yeah, I don't think Tom McCle necessarily should have been fired during this 6% shooting streak because that seems a bit unfair. But also, if they're really swinging for the fences and trying to win a Stanley Cup and do so this season, I do think they probably need to make some extreme changes to the way they play it because it's very similar to a lot of the sort of speed bumps they bumped into the past couple seasons, right?

And so I think that added layer of context is very important in evaluating the way the Kings are playing. And my final note on that is, and I think it relates to the league as a whole, we're sort of entering uncharted waters here right now in terms of the way teams are playing, right? I think we're reaching some serious extremes in terms of tactics and sort of what teams are trying to accomplish both offensively and defensively. And so using historical comps or norms or expectations of the way things were five years ago isn't really applicable. And so an example of that, I think, is, you know, the Kings, the Jets and the Bruins right now all have like historically inflated PDOs at 5-1-5. And we're at 50 games now. And I'm curious to see at the end of the season whether that can keep up, whether they do wind up progressing back to something more normal or not, because it would make sense to me that with shooting percentages, getting so low now with teams optimizing their offensive approaches so much, we might see some more frequent.

occurrences about liars like that. And so I think that's something to kind of keep in mind and think about in terms of evaluating what our expectations are of the way teams are performing. Absolutely. I mean, it's quite interesting to get a peek behind the curtain, as you put it before, where the sport logic data can really paint a more nuanced picture, whether it's at the player or team level. I mean, even I find, you know, it sounds so simple.

People probably listening go, you guys always talk about the slot, the slot, this, lot that. But I think it's just that's how teams are winning, or at least how teams are trying to win these days, is by absolutely prioritizing the slot on offense as far as getting the puck off in that slot, inner slot, right in front of the goalie, prime scoring areas. And then the reverse on defense,

where you're really trying to insulate your goalie and get everything away from the slot, keep it to the perimeter. And the fact that Sporologic tracks that in such a detailed way, I think it really goes a long way in showing you which teams are headed in the right direction over the course of the season. Like, for example, to use the Panthers again, their defensive metrics have been very high all season. And it's not like they're leading their division. it's not like they're, you know, I don't know where they are right now,

second or third in their division. And their offensive underlying numbers are also very strong. And you look at their lineup and, yeah, sure, there's some stars there, but you don't necessarily look at it and go, you know, we'll see them in the cup final again. But I do really think that they're a bit of a sleeping giant, if you will, because there's sort of a well-oiled machine at this point. And, you know, obviously you can come to that conclusion of watching them,

but you can also come to that conclusion by looking under the hood and seeing that they're top five and a lot of these metrics that seem to drive success now. So, you know, even, you know, not to ramble on too much about sport logic and what they provide, but even from a player level, it's been cool to see the way that some defensemen impact the game beyond, you know, offense.

So, you know, who's really good at breaking up plays? They track that. Who's good at stick checks? They track that. Who's good at denying zone? entries. They tracked that. So I think that we're headed in a really good direction as far as starting to quantify defense a lot better. And as you mentioned, you and I don't have access to ClearSight Analytics. We kind of just know, know it from what Kevin Woodley and some others put out

there. But they're doing some really important stuff as far as, you know, the expected goals of the expected goals rate of screenshots, of deflected shots, because we all know there's way more nuance to what's going on for a goalie saving a puck when there's traffic, when there's a deflection halfway through to the net. So the fact that they're starting to quantify that and really like, you know, getting these models right and getting a large sample, I think that's, that's, fantastic. Well, I'll take it a step further. We'll put a ball on this before we go to break. There's a listener of the show. Their Twitter handle is at CBJ P-O-C-K-E. That's a frequent poster in the Pneocast Discord server,

and they put out this very detailed summary, I guess, essentially, of what a lot of the concept we've spoken about on this show that I've done with Belfrey and that you and I have spoken about kind of tying together all these concepts of what the Panthers are doing defensively, like the fact that they have names playing big roles and big minutes that I don't think anyone would necessarily equate with strong defensive metrics,

especially in the back end, and yet they're top three in everything, and they're doing such a phenomenal job of tactically insulating them with the way they play and the way their forwards control the pace. And so if you're interested in that and really just getting a good summary of it,

go on their Twitter account, look up this story. They wrote up on their substack because I think it's really cool and I wanted to shout it out because it's phenomenal work. And it's also fun when you see this show helping sort of inspire stuff like that, right?

And then get conversation on it, but also get people curious about learning more about it. So check that out. John, let's go to break here real quick. And then when we come back, we'll take some more listener questions to close out the show. You're listening to the Hockey P.D.O. I'm streaming on the Sportsnet Radio Network.

Catch up on what happened in Vancouver Sports with Halford & Brough in the morning. Be sure to subscribe and download the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back here in the Hockey P.D.O.cast joined by John Mattis as we do our mailbag questions taken from the P.D.O.cast Discord server. not in there. Invite Lake is in the show notes. Hop in there. I'll plug something at the end of the show about why you need to be in there. Okay. Dr. Sanchez asks, aging curves. What type of player profiles are most likely and least likely to defy father time? Now, there's an addendum to the

question where Dr. Sanchez notes about, you know, specific types of minutes being played and what and kind of the way they play and all that stuff. I think it's a really interesting conversation because obviously our understanding of aging curves and how players decline over time has certainly advanced quite a bit over the years. I remember when I first started working in this field, the general consensus was like, yeah, mid to late 20s to early 30s, right? It was like that 28 to 32 range. And then often you'd see a UFA get paid big money at 28, 29 years old and immediately fall off the map.

And you'd be like, hey, wait a second. I thought this was supposed to be their prime. And there's been a lot of good work done in the meantime. Michael McCurdy in particular, if you're curious about learning more about this, put out a really good study in terms of showing that impact, splitting it up by various states, right? Offense, defense, power play, penalty kill, all that sort of stuff by age and the way it declines. And so, yeah, I think there's like very definitive stuff. Now, obviously, there's going to be exceptions to the rule, right, in players who find a way to buck that trend, players who, whether it's by injury or whatever, decline more quickly than we would have expected. I think there's obviously a ton of moving parts here.

It's far from an exact science. But I think it's a really interesting conversation because I think despite our advancement and understanding of it, I think there's still quite a few differing opinions in the industry in terms of what the real answer is to it. I mean, I think most likely to age poorly is the physical big defenseman who eats up a bunch of minutes. And part of that is because once they're skating starts deteriorating, it's really an issue. Shea Weber comes to mind here, P.K. Suban, Seth Jones, guys who were real titans on the back end, but then things fell off a cliff pretty quickly.

As far as least likely to age poorly, and this is a bit of a cheat of an answer because it involves, you know, the player himself adjusting. But I think a two-way winger who can move up and down the lineup and doesn't need to score. goals to remain in the lineup is the least likely to kind of age out of the league before you would expect. So Sam Gagne comes to mind there where he's really adjusted. Nick Fulino, Andrew Cogliano, David Puran. These aren't guys where you're going, they need to score 25, 30 goals or they're useless. Like they bring a certain versatility. They can be on your, well, maybe not Gagne on your first line, but the other three, or maybe not Cogliano either at this point, but Bron and Falino, sure, you could put them on your first second line and then

they're more likely to be in your bottom six probably. So that came to mind and like I said, it's a bit of a cheat because I feel like it's a position where you can hide and where you can be good at one or two things and be very valuable to your team. And, you know, goalies I find super interesting in this sense because, or I should say with this topic, because we know that they develop slower. We know that they can have a ton of success in their 30s, but wear and tear is such a major factor.

And that means that some guys will fall off a cliff suddenly. I mean, Corey Schneider really comes to mind in this sense where he was on this really, you know, promising trajectory. And then next thing you know, he's, you know, shelled for long periods of time, ends up in the HL, retires, etc. So I don't know if I answer the question right to, to what was asked, but at least I got the conversation going here. No, certainly.

I think that's good. It's relative as well. A lot of those names you mentioned, I wouldn't say they're necessarily avoided declining or hitting the agent curve. They just sort of found a way to maintain utility or ways to contribute. And it's generally lower down the lineup, right? It's interesting because I think it's been proven that defensive impact ages more gracefully and generally peaks later than offensive impact.

And I think that sort of makes sense, right? Because a lot of offensive creation, especially with the way the game is played today, requires immense physical skills, right? Particularly to create off the rush, whereas I think through experience and understanding and, you know, there's general smarts, there's ways to still provide defensive value, even if you aren't necessarily moving as quickly as you once used to, right? Or ways to shelter that. And there's also, and I think it makes sense intuitively that passing ages more gracefully than finishing ability, right? And you see that, especially in terms of like being able to create your own shot and then how efficient it is, you see that kind of fall off a cliff generally pretty quickly.

Now I will say, you know, Sam Reinhardt is a player you mentioned earlier and he is going to be 29 at the start of next year. And obviously, I don't think anyone is arguing that he's a 28% shooter who's going to be a 60 goal score ever again. But for a lot of the reasons you mentioned in terms of the process and also just generally the way he's played for years now, even before this type of breakout season offensively, I think he's a player who profiles as someone who's going to age pretty well, especially over the next couple of years, maybe not eight years into a long-term extension, but certainly

I think into its early 30s because a lot of his stuff trends very well towards not necessarily having a huge physical toll on his body, right? And in just general kind of IQ and the way he plays, I think that's going to look pretty good, even three, four years from now, right? So I think that's interesting. You know, a player who I've given a lot of thought about this, too, is Nathan McKinnon because he's obviously having just such an outlandishly good season,

and he's a freak player. And he's going to be 29 in September, and the physicality and force, I guess, he plays with. And I'm going to be fascinated to see what he looks like. when he's 34 years old, let's say. I would never bet against him because, first off, I don't think anyone in the league right now has a bigger commitment to their craft that he does.

Certainly, right from obviously, as everyone knows by now, the diet stuff, but also I think generally from, you know, getting to talk to Belfrey all the time, just getting a better understanding of like how he has this just like insatiable appetite for maybe not food. But also for just like crushing game tape and statistics in terms of trends and patterns and constantly trying to improve by evolving and fixing things that are kind of holding his game

back in various ways, right? And so he seems like a player who I think is going to adapt very well when he can't necessarily play the way he does now. I think he's going to find ways to still be effective. But I also wouldn't be surprised that in the early stages of that, you maybe see some kind of like lashing out and frustration from him, right? When he's trying to do stuff where like rev up the engine and kind of just do the things that we've come to expect from Nathan McKinn and maybe it doesn't go the way it wants

used to when he was younger. I think that's going to be a pretty tough thing for him to sort of come to terms with. But I think he eventually will and he's going to find a way to still be obviously very productive for a long time. Yeah, you make a really good point where you look at his skating now and it's so violent. and he just chews up the ice and he's so forceful. Like I just can't picture a 35-year-old Nathan McKinnon doing that. I'm sure he'll be some version of that forceful player,

but it seems like that's more of a young players thing. But, you know, as everyone knows, he's basically Sidney Crosby 2.0 as far as, you know, how he thinks about hockey, how maniacal he is about, you know, his fitness about just like you said, the game tape. being around Crosby, I think it's not a stretch to assume that he's going to adjust his game. He'll probably become, you know, this two-way dominant player when he's older if he loses that offensive spark or at least some of it. He's one of the players that I would, in a way,

I'd be like the least worried about, but also I'm really curious about how he adjust, how he ages and what he looks like when he's in his 30s. He's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, He's a really interesting guy to be around in a sense that he's kind of like a rock star as far as, you know, how talented he is, you know, the type of flare he has on the ice. But he's also very kind of down to earth. And, you know, he pushes his teammates really hard. And so there's just a lot there as far as Nathan McKinnon and his evolution. And I just wonder how, you know, how that contract looks. the 12.6, if I'm not mistaken, if I'm remembering correctly,

12.6 million over the next however many years, and who's around him and how they're able to fit everyone under the cap and what type of minutes he's getting, because as we know this year, he's being driven into the ground. So, like, there's just so much intrigue around that guy, and the best part is that he's, you know, a one-of-one player in a lot of ways as far as how he plays the game.

Yeah, that's the thing. That's the reason why I highlighted him because he's such a physical outlier, but he's also such an outlier in so many other ways that that lends itself, I think, pretty well to overcoming whatever sort of traditional aging curves I think we'd expect from a player like that. And he's said earlier this season that the game's slowing down for him,

which just, you know, if you're hearing that as an opponent, you're just, that's nightmare fuel. And I asked him about it this weekend, and he just kind of said, you know, it's just coming to him a little easier. It's just, you know, always hear about how the smartest players, the Crosby's of the world, are seeing plays, you know, before they develop and whatnot. And it's crazy to think that McKinnon thinks that right

now he's essentially never been smarter, I'm putting in quotes, never had better vision. And hey, that's pretty interesting. And you're seeing it with the Terry's been on, right? So it all adds up in that sense. He's a hilarious guy. I think he won the first event at the skills competition or whatever and then went back and asked if he actually wins any money for that or not. I don't I think realized that it was a cumulative thing. But yeah, he's the type of player where he can score, I can have a four-goal game like he's had. And then the next day, work his way through the tape or whatever,

and be like, oh, man, I took two bad angles on these rushes and then go back and start working on that. And it seems like a stressful way to live your life. But I also don't think it's an accident that he's been able to be as good as he's been. It's all the work that's put into it. Okay. Next question. Brandon asks, what is a play or event that commonly happens in games that really irritates you?

For example, I hate when a player tries to pick a corner coming down the wing, misses the net, and it rims around the boards, clears the zone, and kills the possession. I think the obvious answer here certainly is point shots, right? Especially at the end of a long sequence where it's like, oh, man, that went right into the shin pads and clear the zone and everything we just worked for for 40 seconds is gone because of a bad decision or a suboptimal one. But are there any others that kind of stick out in your mind in terms of things that you see generally with, I guess, some sort of regular occurrence during a game where you're like,

I wish a better decision was made there by the player. Yeah, I have a couple. So the first one would be when the puck carrier makes a teak, some sort of move right before the entry and it leads to an offside, they have this. tunnel vision and their teammates are waiting. They're being very diligent with how they're crossing the line. And they think, oh, this guy's just going to go straight through. I'm going to time it nicely so I can join the rush.

And then it turns out that they're offside because the puck carrier does this little deak when no one's even in front of them. And next thing you know. And that's one of those things where you really catch it watching on TV, but up close or on the ice. I'm sure the teammate just goes that it is what it is because things happen so fast down there. but it's one of those things that just drives you nuts as a viewer where you're like the puck carrier did not need to make that elastic and now we've got a whistle and play stopped that kind of thing another one and this is like totally general but goalie's playing the puck I mean I'd say vast majority of the time they don't need to I have nothing against

the idea in general but I feel like the risk reward is often imbalanced and and you know know, they end up on the on the low light film and whatnot. And it's, it's obviously case by case. Some guys can pull it off, but there's some goalies where you're like, you're not good at playing the puck yet. You continue to do it. And the last thing I'll throw out there. And this is more of a league thing.

And it has nothing to do with the players. But why can't we use the puck tracking to tell us if the puck is crossed the line or not? Like, we have this great technology now. But we're going to these long reviews. And it's like, how about we figure out how to, you know, make the chip work for us, this puck tracking chip as far as goal reviews and it has it cross the line or has it not.

And that's one of those things where obviously they got to get it right. You don't want to just bring that in and it causes more chaos, but that's something that came to mind as well. Yeah, I think that's one that we can all share in common and our frustration, especially when the momentum of a game is just completely derailed while you wait seven minutes, looking at officials staring at an iPad trying to figure out

frame by frame whether someone's skate was off the ice or not. Um, mine is because you, you listed a few of the good ones and certainly like, I think when you see teams go five on three and then like settle for a lower percentage shot instead of just passing the puck around and like trying to find the absolute best shot is very frustrating for me. Um, how about this? Letting your opponent off the hook with an uninspired neutral zone reload. So you have an offensive zone shift. The puck gets cleared. and it goes kind of back to your own defensive blue line. And instead of immediately sprinting to get it and then quick-uping it back and entering the zone

and attacking as the other team is either tired or frantically trying to change, I hate it when teams lethargically go back and then work the puck back deep in their zone and then take a change themselves and basically start from scratch again. It just seems so counterproductive and it's no coincidence that some of the most scary offensive teams like the avalanche at their best utilize that time and time again to just absolutely punish you right and so i think uh a lot of teams would improve their offensive results quite drastically if they added that as a as a point of emphasis to their attack as opposed to sanna i guess taking those opportunities for granted well that's purely a coaching thing or at least it

appears that way from the outside where obviously the players want to attack immediately i mean i think it'd be silly to think that they would like to regroup when there's open ice right there. So that's probably a gripe with the coaches and their video sessions and saying, hey, if you're in this scenario, regroup, be conservative. Let's settle things down where really it should be attack mode. And like you said, the abs came to mind when you're talking about it as a team that does it right. And Jared Bednar obviously is a pretty progressive coach and pretty all in on just being a relentless this offensive team.

So that was a good, a good name drop there. Okay. We have time for one more quick one to squeeze in here. Do you want to do offer sheets or do you want to do a defenseman on bad teams? Let's do offer sheets. Okay. All right.

Well, we'll save the defensemen on bad teams because I'm going to do a show on that later this week. Question from Adili says, what would need to change for offer sheets to be incentivized by NHLGMs? On the one hand, this could be a very quick answer. On the other hand, it could also be a full episode.

So I'll give it to you here. Well, I think the number one thing is they've got to weaken the compensation. So, you know, some teams clearly don't want to pay the price of a successful offer sheet. So for example, you have to give up a first rounder and a third rounder to sign a player for a contract that has 4.2 million to 6.4 million as a cap hit. So when you think about it, you're probably overpaying for the player because that's how you get. the guy to sign the offer sheet. And then you're giving up a first and a third. So if it was like a second, I think that's, that's way more desirable if you're the, if you're the team that's doing the offer sheeting. But a first and a third, it seems like that would give a lot of GMs pause.

And another important component to all this that I think sometimes fans don't realize is that offer sheets are harder than it looks because the player needs to sign the offer sheet. So you have to get the buy-in from the player to even start this whole thing. So for example, like Mitch Marner got offer sheeted by Columbus back when he was an RFA signing a second deal. Well, he didn't sign that offer sheet, so it never became a thing. Whereas with Sebastian Aho, he did. And then obviously Carolina match. So it's tricky because there's slowly a changing of the guard, I think, in the NHL as far as, you know,

maybe it's at the ownership level with a Tom Dundon who wasn't afraid to offer. offer sheet or at the GM level, less quote unquote old school traditional hockey guys are starting to make their way in. Obviously, it hasn't fully transformed and whatnot. So maybe that brings more bold offer sheet scenarios. And then maybe the rising cap helps as well. So if we want to put a positive spin on the potential for offer sheets moving forward, maybe it's just we got to give it some time here.

I don't know. Yeah. I'm not sure if I buy the compensation as an example. excuse because I certainly on the high end, but I would argue that some of the biggest headway you can make in terms of punishing a rival team is stealing a very valuable player on their team for that like four to $4.2 million a V range would cost you just a second round pick, which is an absolute no-brainer for acquiring that player, right? And oftentimes we see those players are the ones who get punished the most in this case because they're not getting

those deals. And so their team is able to leverage them, at least on a bridge for well below that and retain them and still fill out the rest of their team. And so I think those are the players where you could see the most traction and teams still don't take that route. And a lot of it is because they don't, they're worried about retaliation and they don't want to burn bridges. And it's also, I think it would benefit a lot from new voices and new faces getting GM positions because maybe it would be less friendly in that sense, right? And you'd have less of a track record or long-term connection with some of your arrivals. And so you might be more willing to go that route.

So you're right, though. You've got to get the player to agree, certainly. And in some of these cases, that's, I think, kind of overlooked or taken for granted. I think there's also been, you mentioned the Martyr one, there's been countless examples I've kind of heard rumblings of over the past, however many years I've been doing this, where it's like the team went very far down the road and even put together. the offer and really was about to go and seal the deal. And then for whatever reason fell short or didn't wind up pursuing it.

And that never really makes it out or whatever. I think like the Kucharov one in 2016 or whatever, I'm pretty sure the Panthers were going to offer sheet them. And then they were just in so much organizational turmoil with all the different voices there and everything. They never wound up pursuing it. But that's an amazing historical footnote. to think about because what the lightning got him on a bridge for like three years, 4.7 or something.

And if he had gotten significantly more, I'm sure they would have retained them. But then that would have probably tied their hands on doing other stuff they did over the next couple of years. And so that, you know, the NHL history might look much different if, if that would have been a more viable tactic or if the Panthers had done so. So something to think about.

Yeah, it's one of those things where like on one hand, it seems so simple. Like there should be more offer sheets. This is something that is legal. there's a lot of RFAs that are in a situation where they're not going to get paid well that they have no leverage. So if they got offer sheeted, it's possible that they jump to this new team. But then again, like you mentioned, like I took, with the compensation thing, I had taken the

view of the offer sheeting team, whereas you took the view of the team getting offer sheeted or losing a player, I should say. And so there's different ways to look at the compensation. It can be, you know, not a good argument to say, oh, that's part of the problem. and it could be a good argument to say that's part of the problem because it depends on the who you're thinking about. So it's super, it's super layered. And even with, you know, we're talking about the changing of the guard, maybe these disruptors,

you know, Tom Dundon, whoever, new GMs that come from different backgrounds. I mean, it's possible that they just, they just don't see the value in it, that they don't see the point in doing something like that, which there's a human, dynamic to it. Maybe they don't want to piss off their contemporaries. Well, I'm going to have to get Mike Gillis on the show at some point and talk about this with him because he'd be a good voice for this. All right, John,

we've got to get out of here. Everyone go follow John's work at the score. Check him out. Mattis John. Thank you to listening for us. Go hob on the Discord server. There's going to be plenty more to come from there and you can get in your future mailback questions as well. The invite link is in the show notes. And thank you to listening for listening to us. We'll be back

with plenty more of the Hockey PEOCast streaming on the Sports Night Radio Network.