Thursday 5 July 2012

As The Habs World Turns

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.

Monday 2 July 2012

It's Easy to Bash the CBC


This piece appeared in the print versions of the Montreal Gazette and the Calgary Herald in early June.  It was panned by local radio guy, Ted Bird, in his Bird Droppings blog, and by close friends and family.  After an e-mail exchange with Bird, he invited me on the TSN990 morning show to discuss with his colleagues over knishes.

MacLean's 9/11 Comparison Wasn't Insensitive

With all eyes moving between the streets of Montreal and the Mother Corp during a dramatic second round series in this year’s Stanley Cup playoffs, it was easy for Pat Hickey and other national columnists to rebuke Ron MacLean for his recent equation of NHL hockey players with the 9/11 first responders (“MacLean’s 9/11 comments were insensitive,” May 10, 2012).  To claim that his remarks were insensitive or dumb, however, is to deny a central role performed by athletes in society.  It is also a missed opportunity to acknowledge Canada’s social identity at this moment in our history.

With the selflessness, bravery, and strength that it takes to do the job, firefighters and police officers clearly represent the best values of a society.  In times of crisis, such as during the 9/11 terror attacks, we are amazed by the tasks they perform under life threatening conditions.  As citizens watch men and women coolly perform their duties, communities come together.  Solidarity is engendered not only out of shared fear and uncertainty.  It results from the fact that a community’s highest values are embodied in, and publicly displayed through the actions of, the first responders.

It is neither inappropriate nor preposterous to suggest that identical social dynamics and meanings characterize the performance and fan appreciation of athletes.

As with the first responders, athletes are also implicated in a community’s value preferences.  In discussing, for example, the presence or absence of character traits like leadership, gameness, and integrity in the actions of the players, fans apply venerable societal values to what athletes do.  A hero in sports is thus not necessarily a player who scores the most, but the one who competes and comports him or herself in a manner that conjures up the highest qualities a society encourages in its members.  Community bonding around sports heroes is not only engendered by collective appreciation of their skill.  The special feelings shared by sports fans when they watch athletes perform also flow from the satisfaction of a social need to be reminded of a community’s core set of values.  This happens routinely in fan involvement with athletes.

Though first responders literally work to save lives and athletes do not, they are both rightly hailed as heroes.  This is because, in invoking many of society’s highest principles for human conduct, the public practice of both of their jobs serves the function of animating moments in time when individual citizens share the experience of sensing, and participating in, their community in truly meaningful ways.

If the preceding arguments are compelling, then how can the swift rejection of MacLean’s similar analogy be explained?  Is it, as most commentators suggest, inherently obscene to compare those who save lives to million dollar athletes?  Are the values that are embodied by the first responders more important to members of our communities than those that are symbolized by athletes?  There are better answers.

It is a time of small and large ‘c’ conservative ascendance in Canada.  In response to cuts to our social services and to belt tightening in the private sector, we are disdainful of our very own student opposition movement and we seem ready for the chopping block to be dropped on the public broadcaster.  With the CBC susceptible, it also doesn’t help MacLean’s case that Hockey Night in Canada and Don Cherry are widely believed to have lost their direction.  Add to this context the fact that the private media corporations for whom the Canadian columnists who led the attack work are angling to squeeze the CBC out of the business of sports broadcasting and there was a perfect political-economic-cultural storm brewing not far beneath the surface.

It was certainly delicate for a highly paid broadcaster working for a targeted public institution to compliment highly paid sports heroes by comparing them to first response heroes.  Calling the analogy insensitive, however, establishes an invidious distinction between athletes and first responders that is both inaccurate regarding the social functions that two the groups share and less than forthright regarding the range of reasons motivating the censure.