Sociological Reflections on the Uneven Fan/Media Reception of the NHL's New 3-on-3 OT

For this piece, published at Habs Eyes on the Prize in December, 2015, I took on the question of how hockey fans and media analysts are reacting to the new 3-on-3 overtime implemented by the NHL for the 2015-2016 season. In speaking to an avid fan of the Montreal Canadiens, a Canadiens reporter for TSN 690 radio in Montreal, and a Montreal-based arts reporter who also maintains a regular blog on the Habs, I compared their views with some sociological ideas I've had about whether the wide-open and formless style of play associated with 3-on-3 hockey may clash with our contemporary cultural obsession with order and predictability.

Points, Purity, and Predictability: Exploring Disagreements Over 3-on-3 OT

When it was announced this past June that the NHL Board of Governors approved 3-on-3 overtime for the 2015-2016 season, the official explanation was that the league and its players wanted to make game outcomes, as well as the manner in which they were decided, more pleasing to the fans. So, one decade after the shootout was added to the NHL in order to bolster game excitement, league officials decided that 3-on-3 OT was needed to make hockey even more exciting.

NHL folks responded to the announcement by either talking up the unfettered offense that would be unleashed by the significantly opened ice space of the new extra frame format or by expressing hope that more games would be decided by back-and-forth team competition than by the single-man scoring of the shootout. Coaches and players expressed varying types of hesitation.

Would team tactics and player deployments be all-offense or all-defense? Would coaches be able to come up with any workable tactics for their players to execute at all? Would goalie stats go out the window? Would skaters suffer from exhaustion?

We're now more than a couple of months in and, aside from some early mainstream media and blogger endorsements, some unsurprising player objections, as well as some numbers that tell us that 3-on-3 is infusing offense into an NHL game that many say badly needs some, what more can be said about the hockey community's response to the NHL's new experiment?

In my own experience of watching a variety of overtimes this season, I've been absolutely mesmerized. During play like this, I've been routinely annoying my wife and daughter with the constant sounds of joy that involuntarily burst from my mouth. Resulting, moreover, from the absolute pleasure I've gotten from what looks to me like an obvious amplification of skill, precision, and speed, I haven't even been overly bothered by losses suffered by the Habs during OT this year.

Well, I may be just the kind of fan the NHL had in mind when the decision was made to transition to 3-on-3, but I've also noticed that many of my fellow fans view this development rather differently.

Peering outside my own personal viewing space this season, social media routinely tells me that the response to 3-on-3 OT is actually quite mixed. While some in my network are buying in, there's also no shortage of clear and strong opposition. So, rather than enthusiastically sharing my enjoyment of the OT action with like-minded souls on Twitter, my awareness of the critics has actually led me to hold back so as to avoid a potential backlash that celebration might elicit.

Compensating for the cowardice I've shown by staying on the Twitter sidelines, I decided to explore hockey community reception of 3-on-3 OT by talking to a few people with informed views on the matter. What became clear was that one of the major points of disagreement centers around the question of whether 3-on-3 OT is accepted as a pure, or authentic, form of hockey.

  

Eric Engels, who covers the Montreal Canadiens for Sportsnet, acknowledges that 3-on-3 deviates from the form that hockey traditionally takes. Engels argues that the type of play that it actually enables mostly outweighs some of the concerns he has over its hockey authenticity.

"I think 3-on-3 is highly entertaining, but don't believe it's any less gimmicky than the shootout is," Engels wrote in an e-mail. "Search the video archives and watch Tampa and Philadelphia in early October or go back to Los Angeles and Chicago [from a recent] Saturday night. [It's an] absolutely unbelievable display of skill, saves and beautiful goals. People say they'd rather see a tie. But, you'll never convince me that's more exciting."

While Engels accepts a 'gimmick' that he believes (despite its occasional sloppiness) is bringing a clear reward in terms of its on-ice results, the perceived novelty aspect of 3-on-3 is the exact point that drives others to reject it completely.

Rosalyn Roy is a Newfoundland-based blogger, author, and diehard Habs fan who can be found tweeting about her team on most nights they play. Contrary to welcoming the offense of the new 3-on-3 OT, Roy simply can't accept what she sees as the less-than-true hockey form that it takes.

"I hate it. It feels less like a fix for the skills competition that is the shootout and more like just another gimmick," Roy said. "The best strategy, if you can even call it that, seems to be to lose the initial draw, wait for a turnover or failed scoring attempt, and hope for an odd-man rush going the other way. Even at only five minutes, it's bound to tire out your skaters because of all the open ice. As far as gimmicks go, it's hardly a good sales pitch for newbie hockey fans and this old timer hates it just as much."

While not all critics of the new OT format reject the shootout as Roy does, the sense that traditional hockey is being eroded via this innovation can run pretty deep.

Brendan Kelly reports on arts and culture for the Montreal Gazette and CBC Radio's Daybreak in Montreal, and maintains his own Canadiens blog. Never pulling punches in his critique of his favourite team, or of the NHL as a whole, Kelly's opposition to 3-on-3 OT's dilution of the game of hockey is no less militant than Roy's.

"I do not like the 3-on-3 at all," Kelly said. "It's funny because I am a fan of the shootout. I think everyone enjoys that. But the 3-on-3 just looks goofy. I love playing 3-on-3 on a 3-on-3 sized rink. On a NHL-sized rink, it just becomes silly. It's really a typical Bettman innovation. Ideas coming from a guy who knows nothing about hockey culture."

Kelly's perception of threats to traditional hockey culture clearly provide powerful justification for his rejection of the inauthentic style of play that's resulting from what he calls a cold and corporate imposition of 3-on-3 OT. Yet, not all hockey observers I spoke to agree on the specific features of that cultural tradition.

Amanda Stein is a reporter for TSN 690 radio in Montreal who covers the visitors' dressing room at every Habs home game. In offering her appreciation for the style of play created by 3-on-3, Stein also presents a dissenting take on its place in relation to hockey's tradition.

"While the Canadiens haven't participated in too many 3-on-3 occasions this year, I've certainly enjoyed what I've seen from other teams playing in the new overtime format," Stein said. "I'm enjoying the quick pace of back-and-forth with so much free ice. I like the entertainment value of odd-man rushes, big saves, and one man's mistake is another man's goal. I think it showcases hockey talent better than an individual shootout move does. Ending 3-on-3 is much more in the spirit of the game of hockey - a team effort - whereas that dreaded shootout is much more individual."

So while the offensive production of 3-on-3 is definitely winning some observers over, mutations to the very game conditions that are enabling the offense violate others' conceptions of authentic hockey to such a high degree that endorsing the innovation is normatively impermissible.

Now, I don't know about you, but I find the claim that 3-on-3 defies hockey tradition to be dubious. Like Amanda Stein said, aren't pretty passes, risk-taking, and breath-taking collectively produced goals not part of hockey's tradition? And, like Eric Engels stated, if 3-on-3 OT provides these things more starkly than regulation play, and definitely more often than the shootout, isn't that a good thing? Or, if it really reminds us of the shinny that Brendan Kelly loves to play on the outdoor rink, aren't we actually tapping into a central part of hockey's great tradition by integrating 3-on-3 into the NHL game?

There must be additional explanations for the mixed reviews, and when I thought about all of this a little sociologically for a few moments, I really thought I'd figured it out.

When it comes to the world in which we live, and also our mundane daily lives, what do people crave more than predictability? We want to know what the interest rates will be for years, we read polls to tell us who will win elections in months, and we expect forecasts to allow us to plan for weather we'll face in weeks. Our tech devices are for communication, but we gleefully use their multiple functions to guide us through each part of each of our days in highly routinized ways. (Just think about how your routine gets thrown off if you leave your mobile phone at home one day.) So, comfort in predictability characterizes the workings of our wider social world. It's the same in sports and hockey as well.

As the public representatives of major businesses that put a premium on maintaining positive reputations, what have most athletes' public comportment and communication styles become if not predictably limited and dull? Engaged in minute-by-minute consumption of information about games, trades, and fantasy transactions, what are sports fans routinely doing if not trying to predict the accomplishments of their favorite players and teams? And, as the numbers are gathered, analyzed, reported, and debated, what's the new generation of fancy stats bloggers and writers doing if not working according to the belief that the seeming chaos of player deployments and plays can be converted to understandings that might lead to more predictable team tactics and outcomes?

It's within this broad social context that the NHL dropped 3-on-3 OT into hockey. With its significant and intentional heightening of uncertainty, randomness, and un-predictabilty, I wonder if 3-on-3 OT isn't just a a little too displeasing for today's players and fans who've been trained to embrace sports and life routines that depend nearly entirely on order and the expected.

Well, as good as that theory might sound at a sociology conference or in a classroom, according to the hockey observers with whom I spoke, player and fan rejection has little to do with a lack of fit between 3-on-3 OT's inherent unpredictability and the predict-all logic of the wider world in which we live. For them, the wider opposition comes down to much more basic negative emotional and psychological reactions people are having to an unfamiliar change made to a game whose features they've known intimately for quite some time.

Leaving aside her own view that it deviates from authentic hockey tradition, Roy suggests that many other fans aren't warming up to 3-on-3 OT because, despite the hype, they're actually underwhelmed by the on-ice product they're seeing from the change thus far.

"Fans don't like 3-on-3 because, like the shootout, it favors the faster teams," Roy said. "Workhorse teams are not going to benefit from it. Like the shootout, it reduces team effort to a lucky snipe, only with two more players on the ice, and at a faster pace. Big whoop de do."

Eric Engels believes that some players and fans struggle with 3-on-3 OT because it leads them to feel intensified disappointments in response to those parts to the games that, due to their respective ways of being competitive, they never really want to confront.

"Seeing as how I view 3-on-3 as the same type of gimmick as the shootout, I believe what fans don't like about it is the anticlimax of seeing their team lose in that situation," Engels said in his e-mail. "I've been to several hundred hockey games at this point, and I've never seen fans all sitting and quiet during the shootout. But, when their team loses, it goes dead silence. It's the same thing for the players. The Canadiens were ornery after 3-on-3 losses against Ottawa and New Jersey. They don't like losing, and they especially don't like losing in a format where mistakes are magnified."

While Brendan Kelly insists that most fans agree that 3-on-3 is a "travesty" that has little to do with the game of hockey, similar to Engels, he also points to a specific and negative psycho-emotional context when giving his view of why not all the players are embracing the change. For Kelly, 3-on-3 OT can bruise players' egos.

"The players don't like it because it's very hard for them to play this game," Kelly said. "The teams, notably the Canadiens, don't know how to play 3-on-3. It's almost impossible [for them] to set up to play 3-on-3 on a rink this size, and thus they often end up looking downright amateurish out there."

For Amanda Stein, player and fan hesitation is not so much about intensified emotional discomfort they experience in response to key moments of a 3-on-3 situation. Rather, the resistance is mostly evidence of a near universal human tendency that most of us have to be slow to embrace change in the worlds around us.

"I chalk it up to learning to adapt to something new, to accept new additions to the game we hold so dear to our hearts," Stein said. "It can be a scary thing to watch things change. Consider Erik Karlsson, who first called 3-on-3 'boring,' then backtracked a couple of days later saying, 'I really liked the 4-on-4, so maybe I'm going to give 3-on-3 some time.' It boils down to learning to accept the changes that are coming to the game of hockey, and requiring the time to accept that it does."

So, let's summarize. While some fans and players enjoy a 3-on-3 OT that's facilitating goal scoring and the liberated collection of points for their teams, others reject it as an unholy deviation from traditionally pure hockey. Though the hockey observers made a convincing case that the opposition is better understood as the psychology of hurt feelings than as illustrating the sociological effects of the force of the culture of our times on hockey fans' tastes, at this early stage in the 3-on-3 experiment, there's clearly a paradox.

The NHL brought in 3-on-3 OT with the hopes that it would allow its players to make the game of hockey more fan friendly, but a sizable number of hockey fans, and maybe even players, hold mostly unfriendly feelings towards the place of 3-on-3 OT in their favourite sport.

Regardless of your own view, and like one of the hockey observers said, I don't expect that our overall love for the game will be eclipsed by the reality that two solitudes appear to have formed around 3-on-3 OT in the NHL.

"As the years go on, questions about the change will become less frequent, we'll talk less about it, and it will just be part of the game," said Amanda Stein. "You can't make everyone happy in this situation, unless I guess you score the overtime winner. But, remember, there's no 3-on-3 OT in the playoffs. And, that's when the games really matter."

When Political Commentators and Journalists Double as Hockey Fans

For this piece, my first published on Habs Eyes on the Prize, I wrote about three public figures who spend their leisure time tweeting about hockey and the Montreal Canadiens in particular. I caught up to Andrew Coyne, Les Perreaux, and Emmett Macfarlane during the 2014 NHL playoffs. Each was paying attention to the exciting run the Habs managed to put together to get to the Eastern Conference Finals. You can view the original piece here. 

 

The Unexpected Habs Fanatics

While the real action is undoubtedly on the ice, we’ve heard quite a bit about Habs fans during these playoffs.

We've read about the religious fervour with which expatriate believers unite around the Montreal Canadiens. We've learned that the superstitions and neuroses that we thought to be unique to our own living rooms are actually universal features of the game-day experiences of fellow members of Habs nation. Finally, we've seen how the traditionally face-to-face act of collectively cheering on the CH is now increasingly practiced in digital space.

Forgive Habs fans if they've been panicking in this third round series against the New York Rangers, but even with tensions running high, it's been a thrill.

Now, there's nothing unusual about fans doing fairly typical fan things. But, as the Habs have gone deeper into this year's playoffs, I've also noticed unexpected partisanship emerging around me. From the Coordinator of my department who's closing e-mails with "Go Habs Go," to the Humanities professor who's talked my ear off about Thomas Vanek, people who normally shy away from the hype have exposed themselves as full-blown boosters.

I have many academic friends who'll keep their hockey passion on the down low out of a sense that sports is not serious compared the real life topics we're supposed to be dealing with in higher education. But, in light of the numerous Habs love reveals I've witnessed in recent weeks, I decided to explore this question in a little more detail.

In the age of Twitter, it's easy to locate people with particular interests, and it's from my own feed that I drew a sample of hockey fans with whom to talk. Similar to the normally closeted Habs devotees at my work, these folks address important social issues in their professional lives. Yet, they've also stood out for their enthusiastic hockey tweeting during the playoffs. I turn to them to explore the phenomenon of the unexpected Habs fanatic.

Readers of Andrew Coyne know that the Postmedia national affairs columnist is deeply engaged in Canadian politics. Those who follow him on Twitter also know that Coyne's not shy about defending the positions he takes against those who come after him. Though he admits he'd rather be chatting with those he knows personally, Coyne explains why he'll go back and forth with his critics on Twitter.

"People don't always get your point," Coyne said. "People tend to believe what they want to believe, but every now and then you run into somebody who you're able to disabuse of whatever preconceptions they had about either me or about the column. [Twitter's] useful sometimes to know how you're being perceived."

Debating Justin Trudeau's policy on whether Liberal MPs can vote their conscience in parliament on abortion is one thing, but trolling the proponents of advanced statistical analysis in hockey on Twitter is something else entirely. Then there's the commentary he provides on the Habs' ups and downs in the playoffs. Why is a prominent political commentator taking time out of his busy schedule to do that? Coyne explains how tweeting his hockey interest is a welcome release from writing about the big issues of the day.

"It allows you to show a different side of yourself," Coyne said. "There are bounds of tastes that apply to newspapers that are a little looser on Twitter. You might throw in a swearword that you wouldn't in a newspaper. It seems to be an understood norm of the place, and that can encourage a breezy informality. And, [hockey] lends itself to that."

Coyne was a Winnipeg Jets fan growing up. As the only Canadian team in the playoffs, Coyne says he's solidly behind the Montreal Canadiens.

Supporting his notion that political writers tend to enjoy sports, Coyne wasn't the only nationally published journalist I was able to find who's been revealing affection for the Habs via Twitter during these playoffs.

In the recent Quebec election, Les Perreaux, a news reporter for the Globe and Mail, was assigned the task of live tweeting the second leaders debate. Leading up to the event, Perreaux provided historical context by supplying 140 character highlights of debates from the 2012 election. That his replay resembled TSN's routine of showing the previous year's Grey Cup on the afternoon of the current year's championship game is no coincidence. Like Andrew Coyne, Perreaux enjoys alternating between news and sports in his public musings on Twitter. Hockey and the Habs make regular appearances.

"Hockey is an area I feel pretty free to say what I think," Perreaux said. "I don't have to have evidence that the Habs stink to say, ‘the Habs stink,' whereas before I can say Philippe Couillard stinks, I better have pretty solid reasoning to say it. Sport is a distraction, a leisure activity, a spectacle, and for someone in my job, it's a fun area to talk about."

Before he began to use Twitter to discuss issues he's reporting on, hockey was the subject Perreaux tweeted about most frequently. And while he thinks that too many people tweeting the exact same things during games can ruin interactions, Perreaux's personal investment in the Habs playoff fortunes and his work duties keep him involved.

"I will continue to observe play and games, and [tweet] things that happen on the ice," Perreaux said. "If the Habs continue on a run, there's going to be stories we have to do outside the actual games, [like] the buzz in the city or Stanley Cup fever. If they get to the final, we'll be doing stories everyday, so I'll be using twitter for that sort of hybrid news-sports."

It might not be all that surprising to find Canadian columnists and journalists publicly commenting on the Stanley Cup playoffs as part of their chronicling of current events. But, can the same be expected of folks in the ivory tower? Are my colleagues and their coming out stories an aberration or are many scholars experiencing & expressing a similar latent Habs fever? Twitter supplied me with an answer.

I first learned about Emmett Macfarlane due to the fact that his Habs tweets would frequently appear in my Twitter timeline on game nights during the regular season. Macfarlane, an Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Waterloo, studies the Supreme Court of Canada, and also writes on politics for Maclean's and the Globe and Mail. A regular participant in Twitter discussions with a network of political journalists and academics, Macfarlane won't hesitate to express his adoration for the Habs right in the middle of the high-flying conversation.

"I tweet about [hockey] because it's one of the things I'm passionate about," Macfarlane said. "Most of my tweeting is during a game, particularly big games, like in the playoffs. It's kind of neat to connect to other Habs fans online, or to get into debates with people who like other teams. A lot of the people in my twitter feed are tweeting about the game, and it's a shared experience in that way."

It's refreshing to hear a fellow academic be as unabashedly enthusiastic about a sports team as he is about the politics he studies, but is there no hesitation to mash the Montreal Canadiens with the Canadian Constitution in such a public manner? Macfarlane makes the balance work.

"I'm much more inappropriate when I'm talking about hockey," said Macfarlane. "There are people in academia who are conservative about seeing someone swearing or making stupid jokes about other teams. They regard it as wholly inappropriate, and even something that can damage your professional reputation. I don't personally buy into that. I am a fan of hockey, so I behave as a fan. I will literally tweet ‘YAAAH' when there's a goal, as if this is a remotely an intelligent thing to do. But, it's something that's one of my passions, so I enjoy engaging in that way."

In their public expressions then, all three unexpected Habs fanatics transition between the serious content of their day jobs and the joy that comes from following their sport. But, beyond tweeting the Habs, I also wondered what they thought about hockey's place in Canada more generally. Isn't hockey really just a diversion? Or, is it truly as vital to our nation as the CBC and Prime Minister Harper would have us believe it to be? These observers and storytellers of the national scene are in a perfect position to comment.

Though he certainly sees crossovers between hockey and real life affairs, Les Perreaux mostly views hockey as a distraction with limited societal stakes. Taking a different tack, Macfarlane and Coyne not only respect hockey's value to Canadian society, but they also suggest that its big picture significance is partially responsible for drawing them in.

"I think we're a little bit insecure about what makes Canada distinct," Macfarlane said. "We do so much comparing of ourselves to the United States, so we point to things like universal healthcare or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as things that make Canada special. I would put hockey in that class of things. In some ways it's analogous to what baseball is to Americans, but in other ways it's also reflective of us being a winter nation, a northern country. We do hold it in pride of place in that sort of cultural perspective."

While Macfarlane acknowledges that the Conservative Party has invested a lot in trying to leverage hockey into political gains, he also maintains that the sport is a legitimate and needed marker of Canadian identity.

Andrew Coyne agrees that hockey's expressive of Canadian culture, and he offers an inspiring take with which many of us would no doubt agree.

"Hockey crosses every boundary of identity politics," Coyne said. "All the supposedly immutable differences and vast gulfs that are supposed to separate the different languages, or the different races, or even the different genders, all of those get blown apart, and people just find a certain unity just playing a game for fun. That's a wonderful and sacred thing and, at its best, the game really does bring people together."

Coyne recognizes hockey's role as a great social unifier. Yet, true to his reputation as a bit of a contrarian, Coyne offers an additional view of the sport's importance in forcing Canadians to re-evaluate taken for granted views of their own historical and cultural sensibilities.

"It is not the peaceable kingdom caring sharing type of sport, it's just not in its nature," Coyne said. "When you see the game of hockey, you see a more accurate picture of what this country has been than a lot of the nationalist mythmakers would allow. It is violent, individualistic, spontaneous, freewheeling. We've colonized large sections of America with it, so the whole argument of cultural imperialism gets turned on its head. That's probably part of what appeals to me about it, [and] there's a part of me that finds that ruggedness of our forebears something to learn from."

It's clear that even unexpected Habs fanatics enjoy publicly supporting their team, and that they recognize varying degrees of hockey's social value, but one final serious matter requires attention. 

Can the Montreal Canadiens actually win this year's Stanley Cup?

"The stats people would say that Montreal is the odd man out amongst the last four teams in the sense that they were the least effective at controlling the puck all season long," Coyne said. "But, the fact that they've come this far shows that maybe statistics don't explain everything, and that intangible things like emotions and teams playing above themselves can also kick in."

Coyne's foray into the language and logic of fancy stats is impressive, but his prediction is basically a hedge. He's not alone in stopping just short of a clear declaration.

"My ability to predict hockey is much worse than my ability to predict what the Supreme Court will do, and I'm often wrong about what the Supreme Court will do," Macfarlane said. "I was nervous going in to [the Rangers] series, but I'm starting to feel that something special's going to happen this year. The Rangers are a good team, but I think the Canadiens match up well against them."

And, despite being closest to the ground in Montreal, Les Perreaux goes no farther than the others.

"I honestly don't know what's going to happen," Perreaux said. "Hockey's a weird sport. The stats guys are getting a bigger and bigger presence in how hockey's analyzed, but hockey has to be the most unpredictable sport. Anything can happen. To me, that's the crazy thing about hockey."

So, despite all their collective knowledge and opinions regarding the most important happenings in the country, the unexpected Habs fanatics' predictions about their team are surprisingly non-committal. Thus, even taking the highly serious nature of their professional engagements into account, maybe Coyne, Perreaux, and Macfarlane are not so different from fans like you and me.

"After the win over Boston, I suddenly [became] very excited," Macfarlane said. "But, as a Habs fan, being excited just makes you nervous. Are you getting your hopes up only to be crushed? It very much is a completely irrational approach to assessing these things as a fan I think."

Whether our Habs fanaticism is expected or not, it's the irrationality of it all that helps makes the ride so worth it for all of us.

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.