East Meets West

Now that the head is gone, maybe the stench will go away too.

Apparently there may be a God. Boivin, he of the we only hire French here, left the Montreal Canadiens to pursue outside interests. 

http://habsinsideout.com/main/36526

Pierre Boivin was an interesting character. He openly advocated the French first policy for hiring of coaches, General Managers and we must assume players. As a result, he artificially constrained the talent pool the Habs could leverage. 

Was it a corporate policy? Was it his policy? Who the hell knows. The reality though was that the Montreal Canadiens, once famous for being a class act, were now famous for their reverse discrimination.

Look, if the Greeks can be coached by a German, then the Habs can be coached by a non-Francophone. And when Greece won the Euro Cup, no one cared where Otto came from, just that he was there and that Greece won. 

But the problem with Boivin's stance is that it provided cover for the uglier elements of French Quebec. Those elements spent 11 years trashing Saku Koivu, the only bright spot on the Habs. Those elements advocated that Montreal draft Francophone (or is it pure-laine?) players regardless of talent after the fourth round. Those elements trashed AK because he's not French. 

Boivin created a culture where being "French-First" was acceptable. And if the President of the Habs said it was okay to be French first about the Coach and the GM, the rest of the province probably was wondering why we were not following that principle to its logical conclusion and go all the way?

So Good Bye Boivin! Maybe your departure will see a shift away from the poisonous culture you helped create... 

The value of a backup is NIL

The recent events in the NHL have dropped the value of goaltending measured in cap dollars to an all time low.

The recent successes of the Detroit Red Wings, and the recent lack of success of teams with premier goaltending have pushed GM’s to abandon their highly paid goaltenders.

Which brings me to the problem of a backup. The value of a backup is NIL. You see in the playoffs, you only use one goalie. Which means any dollars spent on the backup are dollars that could have been spent on guys on the ice. Essentially you can view the backup goalie dollars as a tax on your team’s CAP. If your cap is 59.8 million dollars, and your backup consume 2 million dollars, then your effective CAP in the playoffs is 57.8.

In an era where teams are no longer dominant that 2 million can be the difference between winning and losing the damn thing.

Which brings me to the Price vs Halak debate…

The value of a very talented backup is also NIL. If the backup is good enough to be a starting goalie, then that means you are missing players that could play during the playoffs. Because regardless of how valueless a goalie may be, everyone needs a starter, and if you’re backup is one of the top 30 goalies, then there is a team that is willing to give up some talent for him.

Ultimately one of Price and Halak had to be traded. And because the CAP dollars devoted to goalies is at an all time low… the right decision was to keep the cheap guy and trade the expensive guy for some front-line talent.

A great, great, great deal.

I could not agree more with this analysis.

http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/37790399/ns/sports-nhl/

Goalies are not worth big contracts.

So it’s Price

After almost two years of debates, where every shot became a goaltending controversy, Montreal has chosen to go with Halak.

In spite of Halak’s performance against Washington and Pittsburgh, Montreal decided to go with Price.

There are a bunch of questions:

1. Did Halak outplay Price this year?
2. Is Price a step-down?
3. WTH?

Let’s look at each one.

1. Did Halak outplay Price this year?

If we look at averages, Halak and the most useless of stats Wins, Halak outplayed Price.

But if we dig a little deeper, it’s not so clear.

The problem with averages is that they miss the point about goalies. Goalies either have good games or they have bad games. If you read this blog, you’ll recall that last year I observed that the difference between great and not-so-great goalies is how often they put great games together.

Let’s define a great game with a save pct >= .920 and let’s also agree that there has to be more than 30 or more shots.

Using that math we discover that Halak had 17 such games and Price had 13. So Halak outplayed Price!

Okay let’s define a good game with a save pct >= .900 and let’s also agree that there has to be more than 30 or more shots.

Using that math we discover that Halak had 2 such games whereas Price had 9.

So if we look at the good and great games, Halak had 19, Price had 22 … not so clear cut any more. And if you consider that Halak had 19 of 43 starts that were good or great and Price had 22 of 39 it’s even less clear.

2. Is Price a step down?

Not really. Halak is better if you expect to be routinely have 40+ shots directed at your net. At 40+ shots, a .920 is more valuable than a .900 save percentage. At .900 you are letting in 4 goals. At .920 sometimes you can keep it to three goals letting you win a few more games.

If you don’t expect to be routinely outshot, then Halak isn’t necessarily that much better.

More to the point, Price was good to great as often as Halak, whereas Halak was great a few more times.

So you’re trading off some great for more good…

3. WTH?

It’s not that complicated. As much as I poo-poo’ed Corsi, the reality is that if you can keep shots to below 30 a game you need good goaltending not great goaltending.

Montreal’s problem last year was the lack of a credible third and fourth line. The combination of Moore, Eller et al gives Montreal a third and fourth line. 

Halak’s 17 great games were not going to move the competitive needle effectively. On the other hand if you could keep the shots down, you could rely on Price’s good goaltending and less frequent great goaltending to win you some games.

So it all boils down to the cap. Given the holes elsewhere, spending big dollars on a goalie who wasn’t that great that often, made no sense given you had another goalie who was good just as often.

Pittsburgh Outplayed Montreal Everywhere Except the Crease - So what?

An open letter to the stats heads who dismissed Montreal's performance as luck. 

So Pavelski scoring 8 goals over a 4 game series is OK but Halak playing great is not? 

There seems to be, almost as an article of faith, that winning with Great Goaltending is luck.

This, to be blunt, is a side effect of the statistical analysis you are so desperately fond of. 

So before I go into my tirade, let me observe, that sabermetrics, and the analytical study of baseball is a hobby of mine. The 1986 baseball abstract opened my eyes to how you can use numbers to analyse how players performed. It served as a starting point for my own personal investigation into how existing numbers could be used to understand hockey. The last several years I have continued to be impressed with how we've acquired a deeper understanding of how the sport works. 

But.

The problem with the current form of crude statistical analysis (Corsi et al) is that they do not account for the goaltender. If the goaltender was equalized then Corsi et al is a valid measure of who will win and who will lose. The problem with Corsi obsessed analytics (and all of their derivatives) is that they assert a goaltender who stops more than his fair share of shots is lucky. For Corsi obsessed analysts, a goalie who outperforms norms is by definition lucky. And any team that relies on such a goalie is doomed to failure. 

And thus we have this year's final with two teams where the goalies were vying for the title of biggest goat.

Halak's record when being outshot over two seasons is surreal. His record this year was phenomenal. And because it can not be explained it must be luck. And the reason Corsi et al hate goaltending is that they view relying on extraordinary athletic performances as a poor way to guarantee wins. Because Corsi says over the whole season everyone will play well and badly at times so on aggregate things will balance out. So if you have a good Corsi team then, guess what, you are more likely to win because your reliance on any one player goes down.

And relying on goaltending seems to be the exact opposite. It says screw the aggregate, I am going to rely on the particular. And guess what all of the analytical models in the world won't help you figure out why X did Y at time T. Which is why I love sports. Because guess what, the analytics don't allow you to know what will happen.

And that's why Corsi fans don't get the playoffs. They believe that the playoffs are luck because statistical anomalies can happen. And so they dismiss the term playoff performer. Because the sample set is too small etc. 

But this was about JM's coaching. The theory goes that the Habs should have played X or Y or Z style of hockey because it would have produced better results. 

Better than what? That's the part that drives me nuts. Better statistical results? Or better than an ECF performance? Seriously? Did you actually believe they could make it as far as they did playing some other system? I didn't. 

You don't like his passive system? Neither do I. But I'm not sure I care about Corsi. What I care about is whether players are performing to their expected norms. And the reality is that they were. 

This fan base will not tolerate the kind of team we created. But the kind of team we created relies on excellent goaltending opportunistic forwards, tough-as-nails dman and a smattering of transition cable d-men. Which is ironic because our choice of Price over Kopitar more or less sealed our strategy. Look at the end of the day the goal is to score more goals than the other guy. If you do it by stopping more shots or by getting more shots than the other guy is irrelevant. What's relevant is the number that go in. 

But what drives me, especially, nuts is that everyone must have forgotten JM's teams in Ottawa. They weren't passive. They were exactly the kind of Corsi optimized teams you love. So it's not his style. Maybe it's his team... It is easier to win if you don't have to rely on a single player ... but relying on a single player, especially if he's your goaltender isn't that bad. 

Now as for the left-wing lock and Philadelphia. The team was wiped. And Philly was not. Yes the left-wing-lock was hard to break through, but it's especially hard to break through if you're tired. There is a reason no team has won the cup after playing two straight seven game series. There is only so much gas in the tank. If you want to blame coaching that's fine. But until we have an energy bar metric, we'll just have to agree to disagree. Montreal was wiped. The effort necessary to beat Pittsburgh and Washington was too much. Maybe it's because I've seen way too much cycling. Watch it enough, and you can see when an athlete cracks. It's not pretty.

In short, Corsi and Chances discount goaltending, the team was tired and got beat by a team that wasn't, and finally JM was exploiting Halak's incredible performance, and that maybe given how everyone else was playing that wasn't a bad thing. 

cheers, 

kostadis

And now what? Instant thoughts on the post season

Now that the Sharks were eliminated, the always entertaining post season begins.

The challenge for the Sharks, as for every team that competes for the Cup, is how to remain a cup contender within a fixed budget.

The big question marks are going to be Joe Pavelski, an RFA, Patrick Marleau, a UFA, and Nabokov.

Patrick Marleau was playing himself into a miserably poor pay day. His performance against Detroit, and his performance against Chicago, more or less guaranteed him 5+ million with many many years.

Pavelski was playing himself into Marleau like numbers but his disappearance against Detroit, and more ominously against Chicago, more or less put him back into Clowe numbers.

As for Nabokov, the new working theory is that no contending team will ever pay a goalie that kind of money, so we’re looking at either a pay cut or a new goalie.

The challenge for Wilson is that Marleau will be offered some big dollars by various teams.

And there is no guarantee Marleau won’t want a change of scenery, just because.

So my thinking is the following.

Marleau will walk. I think we’ll offer him good money, but he’s gone. He lost the captaincy, he’s blamed for too many defeats and there are stupid GM’s with lots of money to offer him a change of scenery.

Nabokov is also gone. Paying 6 million dollars for a goalie just doesn’t make sense any more.

So what do you do with that money?

I’m so very happy that I get to cheer the Sharks on, rather than have to make those decisions.

Go Sharks.

They cracked.

In cycling, there is nothing more tragic than watching a cyclist crack. It's that moment where the cyclist is powering up a hill, minutes away from an amazing triumph, and then all of a sudden, it all falls apart.

His pedaling becomes labored.

His body which seemed so light on the bike now looks like a sack of potatoes slumped ungainly over the top tube.

His eyes which seemed so full of poise look lost.

And it's a sad moment. But when that happens, at that moment you know that this guy who was about to win, is no longer going to win.

 

Phil Liggett will say: So-and-so-and-so has cracked "... his legs have turned to rubber and his effort reduced to mere survival." Can he find a way to win?

Typically Phil's side-kick will say something like: I don't know Phil, so-and-so looks broken to me.

And Phil will say: What a wonderful ride by so-and-so but I have to agree with you, I don't think he can recover. He's a broken man.

And then the announcers quickly focus on the guys who will win. They are the guys who pedal past this broken man. And you look at this guy, who for a moment flirted with glory, and then quickly forget him as well.

I used to think that this is a property of cycling. But it’s a property of hockey teams as well. There is this moment, where what was easy, suddenly becomes hard. All of a sudden, what was simple suddenly becomes complicated. And it’s not that they other guy is better than you, it’s that you just lost it. You broke. And when you collectively break, it’s like the guy who breaks in cycling, at that moment you know all is lost.

And it’s sad when that happens.

But it has an aura. A stench. A smell. And right now the Montreal Canadiens are suffused with that stench and smell.

So it will be easy to say that the Flyers were better (which they were), because they had better drafting etc. And it will be easy to blame Timmins. And it will be easy to blame Gainey.

But the reality is that our heroes broke. And when you break, there is nothing, and I mean nothing that can put you back together.

I'm so glad I'm not a goalie looking for a contract

Earlier this week, I posited that the Red Wings had constructed a new kind of Stanley Cup winner: a team that had great defense, good two-way forwards and a mediocre goaltender.

In the modern NHL, great goalies have a save % of approximately .920. The last three Stanley Cup winning goaltenders were Ward, Giguere, Osgood and Fleury. 

Giguere has an albatross of a contract, lost his starting job and is in Toronto.

Cam Ward has a massive contract and has played remarkably inneffectually since his one Stanley Cup.

Osgood, well Osgood did what was asked of him for very little money.

Fleury allowed the Montreal Canadiens to walk away with a series the Pens should have won.

If you look at the two teams about to play in the finals, we have Leightonen and Antti. They are not exactly household names. But beyond the lack of brand recognition, what is way more important is that they are cheap. I mean dirt cheap. And in the new NHL where capology is as important as drafting, that is not being lost on the GM's of this world. 

The big name goaltenders (the guys who played in the Olympics), got eliminated in the first or second round in embarassing fashion. 

The reality is that an NHL GM would be stupid to pay a goalie big dollars. Stupid because in the NHL doing what the other guy is doing is seen as the only intelligent thing to do. In fact, the right thing to do in the NHL will be to get the worst goalie you can, and surround him with a good team. 

Although I have posited that Corsi numbers are just a reflection of how specific teams are built and not necessarily indicative of how a team must be built, the fact is that three of the four teams that did well in Corsi are in the semi finals, and the other kinds of teams are one game away from being eliminated from the finals. 

Which brings me to goalie salaries. 

Right now Halak is thinking he is looking at a huge pay day. But if I am Gauthier, I am thinking that a great goalie is an unnecessary luxury. 

Winning the cup does not require one.

Having one does not guarantee success (Mr Vokun). 

And because cap dollars are a precious resource, I am thinking Halak may get a raise, but he's not going to get super star money, because that money is better spent elsewhere. 

It may turn out that the worst decision Gainey made was drafting Price. Not because Price is a bad player, or may not dominate in the NHL, but because a great goalie is completely unnecessary to compete for the cup. 

For a guy who loves goalies, this is an ironic moment. 

JM as the least interesting man

He once thought of something provocative to say, but caught himself just in time.

He has described a decapitation as an "upper-body injury."

He speaks during timeouts – to Kirk Muller, who then talks to the team.

He is the least interesting man in the world.

"I don't always hold press conferences, but when I do I prefer to say nothing.

"Stay bored, my friends."

From www.habsinsideout.com/boone

Hawks whup the sorry Canadian, American, Russian and Swedish asses

I called the series: Hawks in five. Not because I believed the Hawks couldn't sweep, but because a sweep is such a hard thing to do. You need to be both better and  lucky. A better team will occasionally lose to a worse team, because of luck. So I figured San Jose would win a game because the Universe works that way.

I was wrong.

Sweep.

Now it's easy to say: Choke etc, but the reality was that a San Jose victory would have been an upset. This Hawks team is a great team. They are a well put together team, consisting of some great players on offense and on the blue line. There is little to be said about them other than they are the best team in the NHL this year. 

And this is with one of their best players, playing like crap, Hello Mr. Hossa. 

All season long the Hawks dominated the Sharks, not in the "ah shawks" dominate, but in the "I'll whup your sorry skinny Canadian, American, Russian and Swedish asses up and down the ice, and then whup them some more" kinda dominate.

When I saw the Hawks outplay everyone last year and not make it to the finals I was worried, because I knew they would get much, much better this year. And they did.

So Bravo, and here's hoping that miserable streak finally gets broken (unless Montreal pulls a rabbit out of it's hat and makes it to the finals...)