Archive for the ‘Hypothesizing’ Category

Frequent readers of this space may remember that I have a little bit of an obsession with principles of general management. Around the trade deadline and UFA day, everyone is always talking about management, but most of the conversations are situation-specific: is GM A go after Player X or Player Y? Where will Player Z land? While these questions are certainly interesting, they’re also extremely speculative, because they rely on information most of us do not and cannot know. GM A may only be releasing partial dribs and drabs of information to the media insiders in the hopes of influencing the market. Player Z might be motivated by money or climate or family concerns or any number of inscrutable private impulses. When we talk about individual cases, we’re often daydreaming.

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The thing about draft day is that most of us don’t really know what we’re talking about. You, me, even most of the guys in the newsrooms, all of us- we’re almost all relative idiots when it comes to the draft. Sure, at the deadline or UFA day, we can be pretty sharp. We watch the NHL a lot, we read about it, we know the players and the teams and the market, we can form some grounded, objective analyses. But when we talk about the draft, even smart, serious, knowledgeable hockey people are apt to talk out of their nether regions more often that not. Like goaltending, understanding the draft takes a kind of knowledge one doesn’t just pick up from zealously following the Show and catching a couple of major junior playoff games. You don’t just grow draft wisdom with age and observation. You have to make a serious study of it, and few of us have the time and patience to do so.

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I held the second-to-last shift too long, the immutable law of never change when the puck’s in your end having been burned into my reptile brain by a hundred overserious hockey friends. The puck had been stuck in our end, our attempts to break out muddled by the growing fatigue, and by the time it got enough across the line for me to head to the bench I fairly crashed through the door and slumped, gasping, against the back of the boards, eyes unfixed.

There is no kind of tired quite like hockey-tired. There is a kind of hockey-tired, the mid-game version, that is packed with nervous, hyper-focused energy, but by the time the end comes near, the tired has spread from your legs to your brain and even attention feels like too much work. Hell, breathing feels like too much work. It doesn’t even hurt anymore. I’m too tired to feel pain.

It is 7:00.

I still have one more shift.

There’s no way I can skate one more shift.

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I know a lot of people don’t like stats blogs. They’re turned off by the charts and the sometimes arcane comment thread debates over mathematical modeling issues. They try to read it, and then somewhere in the middle their eyes glaze over and they wander away thinking, how come these number guys never talk about the soul of hockey?

Here’s the thing: they do. They do all the time. Stats blogs are full of narratives and philosopizing and cultural analysis and amateur psychology. It’s just always in either the introduction or the conclusion. Read a blog post about some bit of statistical reasoning, and 90% of it will be tightly-argued, evidence-based, chart-heavy discussion of some particular detail of the game, and then suddenly the conclusion will take an abrupt left-turn into a massive philosophical generalization about the nature of hockey. Honestly, sometimes I think advanced statisticians could solve their entire PR problem if they just chopped off their concluding paragraphs and made them into separate posts.

For example, last Wednesday, the sometimes brilliant and often combative Tyler Dellow posted a piece that was nominally about the Rangers’ playoff shot-blocking. As in, that’s what the tightly-argued, evidence-based, data-rich part was about. However, wrapped around this statsy part was a whole other argument, comparing soccer and hockey and questioning why there isn’t much “room for the idea that aesthetics matter” in hockey. That’s an important question, rarely asked and even more rarely answered, and worthy of a post in its own right. Like, for example, this one.

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