This piece, co-written with Mort Weinfeld (McGill University), was published today on the Gazette's Hockey Inside Out blog. You can find a link to it here. As of this moment, there are more than 625 comments in response to this posting on the site. Habs fans are using the comments section to slam sociology, the simplicity of the method and findings, as well as to count down the days until training camp.
The piece was accompanied by a Mike Boone feature on Weinfeld and me that looks at why we decided to put this together. You can find a link to Boone's piece here.
A great honour to also get listed on Puck Headlines on the Puck Daddy blog here.
Don't take the academic stuff in this one too serious.
Pondering the Permutations of Therrien 2.0.
With As The Habs World Turns set to break for the
offseason, fans and pundits have expressed polarized responses to rookie
GM/Director Marc Bergevin’s cliffhanger decision to hire Michel
Therrien to coach the Canadiens. While some are willing to give
Therrien a chance, others expect his second stint to be no better than
his first. To provide a dispassionate perspective as the free agent
frenzy continues on the slow fade to summer, we used a “moneypuck”
inspired approach to assess the coach’s potential.
This past season, over-achieving coaches like Dave
Tippett (Phoenix), Barry Trotz (Nashville), and Kevin Dineen (Florida)
got the most out of their players and brought teams not considered to be
outstanding on paper to the playoffs. By contrast, an under-achieving
coach like Terry Murray (LA) presided over a team that failed to live up
to its potential, and was replaced by Darryl Sutter whose success
requires no chronicling for championship-starved followers of the bleu,
blanc, et rouge. Like all fans, we wonder where Therrien will fall in
relation to these trends.
Successful over-achieving coaches must motivate their
players, as individuals and as a team, prepare strategies for the season
(systems and lines), and develop tactics suited to the specific
challenges offered by each opponent. Fighting off the visceral
temptation to join the doubters, we pondered over how we could use our
sociological expertise to make a fair and systematic prediction about
how Therrien will stack up the second time around.
Effective strategic and tactical preparation is
premised upon making realistic assessments of a team’s talent. When
Therrien used his opening press conference to evaluate his new players,
we decided to use some statistical data to test his claims. Among other
possibilities, overly generous or naïve remarks by the coach could be
seen as indicating poor talent assessment skills. They would also
provide credibility to the fear that a pathway had been cleared towards a
redux of Therrien 1.0.
Therrien identified the first line (Desharnais, Cole,
Pacioretty), the goalie (Carey Price), the young defenseman (PK Subban),
and the second line centre (Tomas Plekanec) as highly talented core
players with whom he was ready to work to ensure that the 15th place
finish would be an aberration. We compared statistics of these players
with equivalent players from the 16 teams that qualified for the
playoffs this past season, focusing specifically on the final four. To
our surprise, the results yield promise for Therrien 2.0.
All statistics in our analysis were taken from
Nhl.com. To put together data on first and second lines, we located
records of game-day team lineups from this year’s playoffs and compared
them with records of team lineups from the second half of the regular
season. Considering factors like injuries during the season and line
rotation adjustments for match-ups, we assembled first and second line
combinations for each team in our sample that we considered to be
representative of what the teams used, or intended to use, for the
2011-2012 NHL season.
Compared to the playoff teams, only five team’s first
lines (Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, San Jose, Boston, and LA) scored more
points than the Habs first trio during the regular season. Twelve of
the sixteen playoff teams did NOT rely on placing their top three point
getters on their first line as the Habs did this past season. Though
Therrien got this one right, the numbers also confirm the widely held
view that the relative strength of the Habs first line masked an overall
lack of offensive depth.
Carey Price tied for 12th out of all goalies in regular season wins. Among the highest winning goalies, Price tied for 13th in save percentage. Goalies from three final four playoff teams (Jonathan Quick, Mike Smith, and Henrik Lundqvist) finished in the top five in both regular season wins and save percentage. As Therrien suggested recently, there is room for improvement. The numbers also suggest that many pundits and fans are right to believe that Price has the potential to be an elite goalie.
Compared to the top regular season scoring defensemen
on playoff teams, Subban tied for 14th. This solid if less than
spectacular result is put into perspective by noting that six out of the
playoff teams (including LA and New Jersey) had their top scoring
defensemen finish out of the top10 in regular season points for
defensemen. In comparison with the top scoring defensemen on playoff
teams, Subban’s +/- rating of 9 during the regular season put him in 8th
place. This is the highest result for a non-playoff team’s defenseman
in this category. The numbers suggest that Subban clearly has the
potential to be an anchor on the Habs back end.
Finally, compared to second line centres on playoff
teams, Plekanec finished 6th in points during the regular season. Of
the final four playoff teams, only New Jersey’s second line centre
(Patrick Elias) scored more points. On the other hand, Plekanec ranked
last in +/- compared to playoff team second line centres. While the
numbers show that Therrien has work to do to help Plekanec realize his
offensive AND defensive potential, this depends both on the player
having an effective supporting cast and on improved team defense.
The numbers show Therrien’s talent assessment skills
to be quite sound. But, and interpreting the meaning of the numbers
differently, in systematically confirming that Therrien demonstrated
good judgment in his decision to parrot the conventional wisdom on the
team’s strengths, we have still left a tough question about last year’s
Habs unanswered: Did a 15th place team with a solid core of players
reveal a coaching regime that had no clue or did it reek of other
deficiencies that not even a Toe Bake, Scotty Bowman, or Jacques Lemaire
could overcome on his own?
Regardless of how one interprets the numbers, what can
anyone fairly predict at this time about whether Therrien can take this
core, develop it and the other players, and get them to over-achieve?
A sociologist would argue that there are many
variables that determine coaching success, but no scholarly training is
needed to safely predict that Therrien cannot act alone. All loyal fans
of a team with a painful recent history of poor trades and ineptitude
in retaining or developing its homegrown talent know that Bergevin and
his impressive-on-paper team have a key role to play. So, as barbecue
season heats up, we hope that this exercise reminds all fans, and
especially the coach’s doubters, that it is at least as important to
pray that Bergevin can channel an inner Kenny Holland (or Dean
Lombardi!) as it is to agonize over whether it’s within the realm of
possibility that Therrien’s hiatus has given him what he needs to
channel an inner Darryl Sutter.