Week 6: ‘Hockey Sense’ and the un-Moneyball-ifiability of Hockey

Watching the NHL this season, there’s been a trend emerging in the analysis that I’ve seen, heard, and read, which I think has been a trend of all hockey analysis, but feels more prominent in the post-fivethirtyeight world of sports analysis that we live in. The trend is that commentators and analysts fall back on intangible eye-tests and vague concepts like ‘hockey sense’ and things being ‘off.’

Now, a certain amount of this is true in all sports. Football analysts are always quick to use terms like ‘explosive’ and ‘functional speed’ to refer to a guy who can move down the field fast, to provide some sort of superlative to the player that they’re talking about in the moment, rather than having to qualify someone’s speed with lackluster statistics, something along the lines of ‘this guy had the 23rd fastest 40 in his draft class and is currently the 106th fastest 40 active in the NFL, but trust us that means he’s still super fast!’

It makes sense, really. I’ve never studied sports journalism or broadcasting in any formal setting — or in any setting at all for that matter — but I imagine it’s something that they teach you pretty early. Who would want to change the channel when they’re being told that they’re watching the best player — or the best game, or the best quarter, or perhaps most relevantly, the best channel — that their eyes can be on. It happens across all sports, too, not just football. As an avid fantasy football manager, I’ve got the football intangible terms closer to top of mind, but they are all around us. Come March, we’ll be inundated with college basketball stars who are ‘dynamic’ and ‘driven,’ and year round we are up to our necks in athletes of all sports who have the elusive quality that somehow gets projected onto a new guy every week that has people describing them as ‘special.’

Where I’ve noticed this the most is when people are talking about rookies and other young players who have yet to play enough games to form any sort of statistical, career-long opinion of their play or their skill with any sort of consistency. But it gets tossed around when talking about older veterans as well. Especially people who have in their careers been recipients of the kinds of praise that I’m talking about. The example that comes to mind is in Pittsburgh right now, where Sidney Crosby looks like Sidney Crosby, putting up a point a game and being one of the best leaders in the league, but the Penguins as a team are looking like the bottom of the Met, without too much hope of rising out of that position. Something’s ‘off’ — even if you can’t quite articulate what it is — there is something missing from the team right now.

The argument I want to make though is that when words like ‘hockey sense’ and ‘special’ and ‘off’ are tossed around in conversations about hockey, there’s actually more of a place for them than in other sports. Let me reframe that. I maybe don’t want to make that argument, but I at least want to explore why it might be the case.

Let’s talk about the 2011 movie Moneyball. Obviously, the movie didn’t mark the beginning of the moneyball era of sports — Billy Beane began that about ten years previously, bringing statistical analysis to front offices of MLB teams, and rebelling against the old school eye tests of prospect and trade scouts, as well as coaches and managers when putting their lineups together. If you haven’t seen the movie, go watch it. It’s a lot of fun, and tells the story in a funny and compelling way, even if it isn’t all entirely 100% accurate. But I think the bigger impact it had was for sports fans, who were able to watch this movie, and recognize the trends in coaching and sports management that have been emerging throughout the twenty first century, and apply the same trends to how they watch their favorite sports, whatever they may be. (Of course, the real die-hards felt this impact after reading the Michael Lewis book in 2003, but how many of us can claim to be in that rarified air? Not me!) In any case, the movie — and the book, but more the movie — glamorized this approach to sports management, and made it necessary for even the casual fan to understand at least some of the intricacies of statistics in order to keep up with the decisions that coaches and players are making in games.

This is more of a side note than anything contributing to what I have to say about hockey, but I find it fascinating that two sports in which analytics-based management has risen in popularity and come to dominate the sport perhaps more than any other sports — the aforementioned baseball, and cycling (where Sir David Brailsford’s revolutions in analytical focus on incremental gains led team Sky/Ineos to win 7 out of 8 Tours de France from 2012-2019) — came as almost direct responses to major doping scandals. I don’t have too much to say about doping here, but it does feel like logical — if unfortunate — conclusion to an individualistic, he-who-scouts-the-next-superstar-wins approach to management.

In some cases, the analytical revolution has completely changed the landscape of the sport in ways that are immediately noticeable to even the most casual viewer. Take basketball, for instance, where the three point shot has become the primary attacking strategy of every offense in the NBA. not only have three pointers become far more important for the guys who had always been jump shot specialists, but they’re a requirement for every person on the court. It looks different now if you’re watching on TV or if you’re a six-foot-three fourteen year old who’s still growing and dominating your high school varsity basketball team already. Doesn’t matter how big you are, you still need to shoot if you’re going to make it. Analytics have changed the the criteria for success in the game so much that I don’t know if it’s a hot take to say that Shaq even in his prime would not be able to cut it in the NBA today.

I won’t recite a laundry list of the other sports that have been altered by analytics, because that isn’t really my point. I want instead to jump into what I think might be the ways in which hockey has changed because of analytics — or maybe just not? — as a way to talk about how in many ways, it hasn’t.

The first change I think we’re witnessing in hockey that is the most likely change to be the result primarily of analytical analysis and management, is the rise of the goalie tandem. A few things to be said here. First, I don’t think that goalie tandems are a bad thing. I think that tandems like the Boston pair of the past few years — where Ullmark won a Vezina and the following year both he and Swayman finished top-ten in votes for the same trophy — are enormously exciting to watch. Maybe I’m just spoiled as a Boston fan, but I loved the power-tandem. I also loved the years of Thomas and Rask, where we had one guy who could hold it down night after night and be a Vezina contender every year, but I gotta say, I didn’t miss that when we had two top-tier guys. In any case, I think tandems and more evenly-split goalie shares are rising for a reason. And I think it’s the same reason that more and more NFL teams are rolling with running back committees rather than a bell cow situation. Playing the position on your own is really hard. I won’t go into the specifics of running backs, but for goalies, you’re the only player who’s on the ice for all 60 minutes — or thereabouts, assuming all goes reasonably well — and you have one of the most technically difficult and heavily scrutinized roles on the team. Doing that for seventy or eighty nights a year is incredibly difficult, and teams that have found a way to spell their top net keeper for twenty or thirty of those games with an alternative that can perform comparably, have gotten better performances out of them. For reference, since 2010, only one Vezina winner has played 60+ games in a season, and it was Carey Price with exactly 60. Between 2000 and 2010, all but two Vezina winners were at 60+ games a season. I know that part of what makes Brodeur and Hasek and the likes so legendary is that they did suit up 70 nights a season, but imagine what they could have done if they didn’t have to!

Now, I’ll admit, I think that this shift is legitimately one that’s been informed by analytical marginal gains. BUT, let’s for a moment consider the ways in which it might not be solely due to that. The first could be that the position is simply too difficult to play 70-80% of the games for anymore. Thinking back to my piece about how players are so good that the game is unimaginably fast and opportunistic, the mental and physical strain that it takes to stop the kinds of goals that everyone on the ice can score is immense. I think this is maybe the dark cousin of the analytical theory above, with less panache. It’s not that coaches are implementing tandems to get the best out of their goalies, they’re doing it to keep the poor guys alive. While it’s the other end of the same spectrum of coaching, I don’t think it fully counts as a moneyball strategy if this is the case. Or, maybe teams are just hoarding good goalies whenever they can get their hands on them. I’ve heard a few different arguments along these lines. Maybe equipment and training is so optimized that the upper echelon of good goalies is packed, and it takes something really special to look great, which puts an artificial scarcity on goalies that teams like Boston take advantage of for as long as they can until the players start to butt heads with the salary cap. Maybe the younger generations of hockey players, all of whom have grown up with the internet and most of whom have grown up with social media, grow up dreaming of being the guy who scores the crazy goal in the Tik Tok they watched, and not the poor, faceless netminder that got absolutely dunked on. Let’s be real with ourselves, who among us can remember the last time they pulled up a greatest saves video when a Top 10 Shootout Goals video is right there? It’s possible that there’s simply less desire to be a goalie than there has been previously, or that the position isn’t attracting the top hockey talent, creating a very real scarcity at the position that NHL teams are feeling. It could be some of all of these things contributing to the rise of the tandem, but in any case, I think it’s much closer to the exception that proves the rule to the un-moneyball-ifiability of hockey than anything else.

Let’s take another look at a goal-scoring trend that feels like it could be a moneyball trend: the decline of the slapshot. It’s no secret that slapshots have all but disappeared from the National Hockey League, and while it has been the cause of lament for some, I think it is one of the greatest indicators of the speed and opportunism that I’ve already talked about. One-timers have not decreased by any means, nor has average shot speed. It’s just that players have found ways to get them off much faster, without the need for a rafter-scraping windup. There’s a chance that this has been something that is getting coached out of the game in a moneyball sort of way, but I see it more as a natural evolution of goal scoring and gameplay as the game has gotten faster and the time that players have to capitalize on a scoring chance decreases. Drawing on my experience in youth hockey and high school hokey, there’s very little coaching at all at non-elite levels about goal-scoring. There’s general advice along the lines of ‘shoot low’ or ‘roof it’ or ‘shoot with all your might’ — all of which are direct quotes from coaches I’ve had — along with positional guidance to put yourself in the best position to get a shot off. Beyond that though, my teams had people who scored, and people who didn’t. And the people who did were the ones who found the ways to do it. I understand that at even marginally more competitive levels of competition the coaching gets much more specific, and — and I say this with only the deepest love, respect, and appreciation for all of my coaches — better. But based on player interviews it seems like a transition borne from gameplay, and not the locker room. Broadly, it’s ultimately the same kind of change that I’m talking about with analytical management, in the sense that there is a survival of the fittest of strategies and techniques that are the best at winning. But analytical management is different in an important way from players doing things differently on their own over time to adapt to the way the game is changing.

In terms of other kinds of changes that the league could have seen that have been indicative of moneyball schemes in other sports, there haven’t been many. Players still see the same basic distribution of time on ice that they have for decades — McDavid sees about the same minutes per game now that Gretzky did in the ‘80s, for instance. Players get bumped around their positions based on line chemistry and ability, but it still doesn’t really compare to the way that running backs might line up as a receiver on the football field, or the way calling LeBron a ‘small forward’ hasn’t really made sense for about 16 years. For the most part in the NHL, if you get assigned to a line as the center, you play center. And the same goes for the wings and defense. As far as I know, no teams are implementing a sort of scheme where a defender or winger is regularly taking faceoffs and then quickly jumping back into whatever non-center position they’re playing. We’ve seen the special units coaching evolve over time — umbrella formation on the power play for instance — but I want to avoid the pitfall of conflating coaching innovations with moneyball-style analytical improvements in team management. I think that those are entirely different things, each deserving of appreciation and conversation, and that good coaches and good coaching strategies should not ever be overshadowed by effective front offices.

All of this is to say that there’s a certain je ne sais quoi in hockey that can only be described in vague terms of awe and appreciation. What stat can you point to that would put Quinn Hughes even close to Cale in the Norris race? None. But anyone who watches a Canucks game would tell you that Quinn’s command of the ice is masterful and dominant, and probably outmatches Makar’s so far this season, even if Cale is on pace for about a million points. There are entire awards dedicated to these intangible eye-test categories, like the Selke for the best defensive forward. What does that even mean? Is it based on plus/minus? Doesn’t make a ton of sense for forwards because high-scoring forwards on dominant lines are usually in the positive because of their offense, not their defense. And even the highest-caliber defensemen’s plus/minus is often more an indicator of the goaltending behind them than their own personal contributions to games. Is it the guy who is the best penalty-killer, or the best faceoff winner? It feels like that’s got to be a factor given how many times Bergeron won it. Bergeron’s whole career feels like a personification of this fact of hockey. Visibly one of the best players on the ice for his entire career, but rarely a guy who put up the scoring numbers of the other elites. Named to Canada’s Olympic team as an obvious choice, and a natural leader of the Bruins for his entire career, even when Chara had the C on his chest. It’s really hard to articulate what made Bergy so good, and pointing at the stats where he led the NHL feels inadequate — unfortunately I don’t think winning a lot of faceoffs is a ticket to the Hall of Fame, and yet that’s where Bergeron is almost certainly headed. He’s an all time great, and he’s top 100 all time in games played, points, goals, and assists, but he isn’t higher than 70 on any of those lists. A piece on CBS Sports which is literally about how much of a lock Bergeron is for the hall of fame contains the sentence “Bergeron wasn't always the most physically gifted player on the ice in his NHL career, nor was he one of the most feared offensive juggernauts of his era.”

Look I love Bergeron. I always have. I’ve always known that he was one of the best in the world. But I’m not quite sure how I know that. And truthfully, it seems like even though we all agree about it, no one can really put their finger on what made him so good. He had hockey sense. He was a two-way, 200-foot player. He was special.

Bergeron is exactly what I’m talking about when I say that you can’t moneyball hockey. Or at least that I don’t think it’s happened yet, and I think it’s unlikely. Hockey is a chaotic sport. It’s so fast and uncontrollable in almost every way. From how much parity there is in the league to how hard it is to guess which way a puck is going to bounce when it lands after a chip into the zone. It’s so chaotic that when someone can control that, it looks like magic, and it feels like magic if they play for the team that you support. There are plenty of stats out there, and some of them are pretty important, and are pretty good indicators of who the best players are. But they don’t tell the whole story. Sometimes all you have to go on is how someone looks when they’re out there. The effect they have on the other 11 people out on the ice with them, and how the puck moves when they have it and even when they don’t. You can’t make incremental gains on magic, and I hope that they never figure out how to.