While I have not read “Tape to Space: Redefining Modern Hockey Tactics” by Ryan Stimson, the foreword by Matt Pfeffer has struck a chord with many in the community, ranging from the casual fan of the game of hockey (the #1 Best Seller in Hockey according to Amazon.ca) to former executives whom have had a unique view on the game. Speaking to the reader, Matt offers the following passage of why those like himself and Ryan, and countless others on Twitter have become outspoken about their passion for the game and it’s evolution – or lack thereof:
“The antagonist of our struggle is the same: the ever-present malaise within this sport, the crushing weight of consensus, the warm safety blanket of inaction that consumes today’s ruling class of hockey. […] Decision makers in sport are never taking the kind of risks that they should be, because taking on risks comes with its own set of costs outside the scope of the individual game.”
We have seen it time and time again – in a league where “contests between two randomly chosen teams are closer to a coin-flip, in which each team has a reasonable shot at winning”, and 30 teams largely try to mimic intangible and improbable characteristics of the one team that happened to outlast everyone else to capture the Stanley Cup in a unpredictable post-season, most of the supposed forerunners and architects of Hockey Clubs have remained deliberately passive and reluctant to hold themselves to praise and esteem they give themselves of supposed world-class organizations. When the craziest thing that has happened in the past while by a General Manager was Marc Bergevin actually getting Sebastian Aho to sign an offer sheet – of which the Carolina Hurricanes easily matched and had their social media team make fun of it for a week as they waited to make it official to force the Canadiens to wait on possibly making any other moves – you get the idea that things are largely stale on the business aspect of the sport.
Take a look at the copycat aspect of team-building we see from Stanley Cup Champions in recent memory. When the Los Angeles Kings and Chicago Blackhawks traded the Cup back-and-forth, some teams saw it as a sign of bigger and heavier teams dominating the ice through grit and determination (others appropriately saw the possession-heavy aspect of their games). With the Pittsburgh Penguins and Washington Capitals, many saw it as a sign that the smaller, speedier teams could get by these now bigger teams, as they had become older, sluggish, and slower (instead of realizing that smaller sized players could, in fact, be good at hockey without a specific gimmick to their game). With the St. Louis Blues, several front offices will likely think that continuity and working through adversity will be key to establishing culture and an identity – failing to realize the Blues always were a good team, missing the playoffs once in the past eight years while never falling below 44 wins, but had always been hampered by below-average goaltending.
Whereas the game of hockey itself has largely stood the test of time as one of the most exciting sports in the world (even though it is insanely expensive to get into), the National Hockey League and its clubs pales in comparison to the basic and advanced business components of the other professional sports leagues, be it basketball or baseball here in North America, or football across the Atlantic Ocean. Whether its through the league’s contrived points system that rewards losing in overtime, the Collective Bargaining Agreement’s outrageously high and demanding compensation threshold for offer sheets and its similarly egregious high age to hit unrestricted free agency, or clubs rehashing coaching hires from team-to-team while pretending they each have their own competitive advantage and philosophy, the business piece of hockey is desperate for innovation, or even just modernization.
What's actually being changed, and change management
“Innovation, by definition, suggests change will be taking place. If there’s change taking place, it’s not likely going to feel right. If it felt right, it would have been done a long time ago.” -Astroball
In my opinion, the front office of any Club is ripe for a re-evaluation of the value they provide to achieve success on the ice. We have seen a slow adoption of ideas in the history of the sport: teams have now begun having a workforce dedicated to ‘sports science’, be it best recovery practices or sleeping patterns in preparation of back-to-back’s, or mitigating fatigue when traveling from coast-to-coast; organizations either having an analytics team or a dedicated staff member working on specific data or interpretation and use of a third-party’s results; increasing personnel of coaching staff dedicated to specific nuances such as goaltending or strength; et cetera. Most of these personnel come with their own vision and perspective of the value they bring to the players and the organization, whether it is the new goaltending style of the year; another method of weightlifting and the type of conditioning required for the bursts of exertion on the ice; another way of gathering and analyzing data whether through partnering with third-party companies or creating in-house methodologies – all in an effort to gain an edge over 31 other teams.
I think an appropriate question to be asked with this rat race to catch up to every other team (or intentionally disregard some aspects) based on a perspective of how to best run a Hockey Club, is whether these are truly adding value to the singular organization’s success, or if the spirit of most of these additions (when not done by the first-movers) are mostly reactionary, with persons and functions haphazardly being placed into the current structure of the Club without respect given to aligning the purpose from the top-to-bottom of all levels in the hierarchy. More on this in a bit.
Of course, the hottest thing to add on to Hockey Operations these days is analytics. Shayna Goldman of the Athletic recently put together a compilation of all in-house staff dedicated to analytics on every club – the list is impressive for some teams, and interestingly barren for others (though not considering any outside companies). In Shayna’s article on “How the Rangers could further involve analytics in the front office’s approach”, she spoke to one of these NHL analysts who explained:
“When thinking about an optimal analytics organization within the hockey operations team, it’s best to start with thinking about what you’re trying to achieve, then build out the team from there. Hockey has an increasingly vast amount of data to work with and one of the key goals of an analytics organization is to find meaningful insights in that data to drive better decision making.”The rest of Shayna’s article is a terrific read, and I encourage you to read it if you can, but in a (weak) effort to summarize it, Shayna goes on to interpret those steps as investing in those with backgrounds in data science, with the ideal goal of translating results and analysis to hockey operations in a utilizable fashion, be it through data visualizations or other methods of effectively communicating findings to the rest of the Hockey Operations function (GMs, to Scouts, to Coaches).
Simply hiring personnel with skillsets that your current organization lacks is an ideal start to bridging the gap – but simply hiring to fill in talent gaps is not enough. Shayna does go on to detail this in her own article, but I want to frame it in another perspective: Kyle Dubas in March 2015 spoke at MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference presenting on “How Analytics has Limited the Impact of Cognitive Bias on Personnel Decisions”, but an important part I want to pull out was in the introductory portion of his talk with regards to how hiring an analytics person did not automatically make a team the best in the standings, at the OHL or NHL level:
“There’s been a very big rush this Summer [2015] in particular for teams to gain or bring on people who are very proficient in analytics. And what’s happened is those teams magically overnight haven’t transformed into a contender, and people will all jump on and say ‘I told you that that analytics shit didn’t work, those teams are no good!’ […] There’s a massive difference between just collecting data and information, and actually valuing it and using it to build into your processes of how you’re going to guide your team.”Many people have this view that if they add the supposed missing puzzle piece into their own equation, that magically a turnaround will occur and their fortunes will improve – this can apply to a hockey club, a business, to even your own personal life. How many of us have went on a new diet for a few months only to eventually call it a fad and give up, either trying another diet plan or giving up a healthier lifestyle altogether? Of course, without dedicating enough focus to following the diet all the time exactly as intended, any diet is destined to fail – and so too are the ways of integrating analytics, or strength and conditioning coaches, or sports science analysis, etc., into a hockey club. For the Greyhounds, it was not until they had buy-in and belief from the executive leadership all the way down to the players on the ice – without any missing link – before they became a dominant team in the OHL. Even in a 31 Thoughts: The Podcast episode, Elliotte Friedman spoke to the point that even the Ticket Sales Representative was a part of this buy-in (he was in fact the person on the staff tracking things like zone entries and exits for the team).
“This is year two in Sault Ste. Marie… we’re on this slope downward [in Corsi percentage], and right here we make a coaching change. In that season, with Sheldon Keefe as our [Head] Coach, we went from being in the first 30 games with our CF% at 47%, and the remaining 38 games it was 57% - so a 21% difference in our shot differential or possession percentage. Exact same roster, different coach. What I learned at that time was the extreme value of having buy-in all throughout your organization and the fact that that takes time. If your President, General Manager, Coach, Scouts, everyone buys in to using what you can gain from statistics and analytics, you’re going to have a lot more success than if you have one person on your staff alone saying ‘this is important’ and trying to gather buy-in from everybody else.”
“James Mirtle took it on himself to let everybody know that the Soo Greyhounds were 36-9-2, demolishing an opponent, and that that was a team built by analytics. I’m going to say something that many Toronto Maple Leafs management people has said before and that’s that “James Mirtle is wrong!” His point was well taken, but it wasn’t actually the builder, per se. Analytics served more as a teacher for me and for our as staff than it was as a builder.”
There was no skepticism. There was not the idea that overnight it would magically turn things around as if it built the team. It was a belief that analytics could serve as another tool to better improve current processes and create new ones in an effort to beat out the competition, should it be integrated within the team from the players all the way up to the owners.
We see this in businesses all the time, especially in the optics of change management. How many of you have been in an organization where a transformation effort seemed imposed upon you, without input from your level or lower, and unsure of exactly what changes you were expected to make in response to this corporate announcement now in your inbox? Undoubtedly, this would have probably made you stressed, increase your anxiety, and feel a rise in frustration: “OMG, another change? We already changed a few months ago!” “The last change failed – why are we doing it again!” “Is this actually productive change or is management trying to get employees to self-select out through resignations so they can bring someone else in?” et cetera, et cetera. As such, the success rate of major change initiatives is only 54% – in other words, nearly half of businesses that try to implement a transformation admit its failure, and it results in financial losses, wasted resources, and diminished morale, on top of a now convoluted process that might only be half-implemented.
There are no shortcuts in change management. The “strategy+business” company outlines ten principles of leading change management, and I am willing to bet that each of you reading this can go in and point to one or more of these principles where your company failed to address the matter, leading to a massive hurdle to overcome, or a failure of the implementation of the change effort altogether. There will unquestionably be hurdles in change management, and they must be addressed swiftly, with purpose, and conscientiously keeping the current and future state of the organization in mind.
A hockey club dealing with any sort of change in its operations should be no different.
A History and Potential Future of Winnipeg Jets’ Hockey Operations
“One reason people resist change is because they focus on what they have to give up, instead of what they have to gain.” -Rick Godwin
When True North Sports + Entertainment purchased the Atlanta Thrashers and moved the Hockey Club to Winnipeg, they made two major changes in its Hockey Operations: introducing Kevin Cheveldayoff as their General Manager, and promoting Claude Noel from the Manitoba Moose to be the Head Coach for the Winnipeg Jets. They let go of the likes of Rick Dudley and Craig Ramsay, along with Don Waddell (then President of Hockey Operations). With only a few months before the puck dropped on the ice for the inaugural 2011-12 season, many portions of its Hockey Operations remained intact in comparison to its Atlanta iteration. After a year of evaluation, the Jets made a few more changes and entered their 2012-13 season with the following as their team staff (taken from their Media Guide):
Pretty barebones. Six years have now past, with a rollercoaster of expectations met or unmet – their team staff at the 2019 playoffs looked like the following (taken from their Media Guide) (those highlighted in blue are returning from the 2012-13 season):
Not considering any external companies providing resources or the such, the Winnipeg Jets have largely fleshed out their Team Services staff but have kept their Management, Scouting, and some parts of Coaching the same. The biggest changes were to its Head Coach in hiring Paul Maurice, and since then hiring Jamie Kompon, Todd Woodcroft, and Matt Prefontaine. However, in total the Jets’ Hockey Operations personnel numbers had only increased from 39 full-time staff members to 44 – essentially, they trimmed a portion of their Scouting staff to increase the dedicated resources for the NHL level. You can likely look around the league and find pretty similar assemblies of Hockey Operations, titles and all.
Interestingly enough, those limited to 280 characters on Twitter and routine attendees to conferences are not the only ones seeing the archaic nature of the business of hockey. Mike Gillis, the former Vancouver Canucks GM from 2008-2014, was largely seen as a progressive and different type of hockey executive, introducing and becoming the first-mover for things like sports science in tracking sleeping patterns of the Canucks, and analytics in terms of gaining advantage in zone starts (of which many teams have now picked up these aspects as part of their own). At the TeamSnap Hockey Coaches Conference, five years since his final days in a leadership role of a hockey team, he stated that he viewed the NHL and its teams’ organizational structures workflows as “inefficient”, with management stretched far too thin. As an example, he specifically identified scouting as one portion of Hockey Operations that is “ripe for modernization”:
“There's too much groupthink. There's not enough evidence. The analytics are poor. There's no real predictiveness in drafting. If you're bad enough to (draft) in the top 10, you're probably getting a good player, but you might not because you picked the wrong one."Though many Jets’ fans likely view their team as bucking the trend in recent memory, Gillis is not entirely wrong. The Jets’ have 14 members as part of its Amateur Scouting staff, picking the likes of Adam Lowry, Connor Hellebuyck, Andrew Copp, Mason Appleton, Sami Niku, and others past the second round. But it has not been all been diamonds in the rough, for the Jets or other teams. Chris Tierney was selected 55th overall in the 2012 draft, passed on by 30 teams nearly twice. Colton Parayko was 86th in 2012 as well. In 2013, the likes of Brett Pesce and Jake Guentzel could be found in the third round. Brayden Point and Viktor Arvidsson were similarly found in the later rounds in 2014. With hindsight in tow, these certainly seem like better picks than Lukas Sutter, Scott Kosmachuk, Nic Petan, Eric Comrie, Jack Glover, Chase De Leo, and more.
The question then becomes: how could 14 members on staff miss these electrifying players in the NHL today in their younger years, as well as 29 or 30 other teams of similar sizes? Or – maybe it is the player development and available opportunity after being drafted? Is it not having the resources to find where to send scouts for more viewings to come to a proper evaluation of talent? Are certain styles of players drafted no longer valuable once they make the big leagues, such as ‘enforcers’?
There is a sincere lack of alignment from top-to-bottom of most organizations that at least one of these reasons or more may apply for any given player. And ultimately, all of these lie at the feet of any given General Manager, who is responsible to acquiring UFAs based on advice given by Pro Scouts; drafting players based on advice given by Amateur Scouts; assembling a coaching staff that best suits the players they have already gathered, even though it sometimes works in reverse with getting players to suit the coaches’ specific system; providing reports and information on the upcoming competition collected by Analysts; and so on. Gillis’ comments begin to ring true: it seems like a lot of items and responsibilities to juggle, all the while trying to incorporate a structure, culture, belief, and ultimate plan of what makes a successful hockey club, while reporting to some of the most successful people in business in the particular city, province or state, country, or even worldwide.
Let’s visualize it in the case of the Winnipeg Jets through an organizational chart of its Hockey Operations as it is today:
Some assumptions I have made based on my own extrapolations in the past:
- Cheveldayoff takes on the responsibility of the Scouting team
- Heisinger is responsible for Manitoba Moose Hockey Operations, and thus also takes on Player Development as well (AHL to NHL)
- Simmons takes on the Analytics piece as the ‘numbers’ guy
I have talked about this before online, but it seems like a lot of multiple hats for persons to wear with little actual ownership of the functional responsibility that the teams within Hockey Operations can bring. In a hard cap world where teams can only spend so much for what is on the ice (barring financial gymnastics with LTIR), one would and should immediately turn to the value being provided to the players off the ice, which is capped only by the organization’s budget. But don’t take it from me – just listen to Jets' assistant coach, Todd Woodcroft:
"If you have money to spend outside the (player salary) cap, it’s going to make your team better. Teams that have huge financial war chests will have an advantage, being able to put a ton of resources into analytics. Teams that maybe don’t have the luxury of spending all of that money on it, I think down the road will probably suffer. You saw in the '80s. (There were) teams that didn't have goalie coaches, video coaches, and strength coaches, and then they understood it was the wave of the future and started hiring these guys full time. Now teams have two goalie coaches, two video coaches, three or four strength coaches. There's no cap off the ice. The best teams spend smartly outside the cap, whether it's player development, or the best things your team can eat, or sleep doctors."But again – it is not just simply adding skillsets that are missing. Integrating it through the entire organization, aligning functions, and incorporating change management to effectively make it a part of the core culture and processes of the team.
In other words: how can we align amateur scouting and player development with bringing players up through a consistent system from the time they are drafted, to when they are playing in the AHL and finally brought up to the NHL? How does Kevin Cheveldayoff acquire players that can integrate into this system and are indeed talented players that are not masked by whom they play with or play against? Not to mention, let’s look at it from another perspective: are staff members who are designated as “Coordinators” actually trusted and given a voice in deliberations about roster decisions and providing value past their job title, or are they there mostly to do the legwork of what the GMs or coaches believe is best?
It is not enough to bring people into the Club if they are not given a seat at the table. It is tough to see how new hires can be simply inserted into the Hockey Club’s structure as it is today. If we refer back to change management practices, the innovation that a modernized hockey club can provide to its on-ice results starts at the top and involves every layer – that everyone agrees about the case for change, how they’ll get there, and engaging those and integrating feedback from the executive vice presidents, to the coordinators, to the players.
So, what could a modernized Hockey Club look like for the Winnipeg Jets? This is by no means the be-all and end-all for what it could look like, but the reasoning following will explain why I have it in such a manner:
The massive change for any Hockey Operations club will be having Directors take on a functional responsibility, partnering with a GM that most suits their day-to-day, while a VP, Hockey Operations is responsible for the internal movements and evaluation of the success of these functions while the GMs are focus on using the results of their work for the on-ice product. Kevin Cheveldayoff as the General Manager of the Winnipeg Jets can partner with Pro Scouts, Pro Research & Development Analysts, and NHL Player Development members to put together the team for Paul Maurice to coach, using his network and understanding of player assets and potential trades in the open market to bring it all together. Craig Heisinger similarly works with the Amateur levels for developing talent in the AHL and understanding the incoming prospects better for his team. Larry Simmons, as the supposed Salary Cap expect works with Analytics in staying with his affinity in numbers and being able to integrate it in final negotiations of comparable contracts and valuations according to their production.
The Analytics and Player Development teams are in most need of modernization. With an influx of data about to be had at the NHL level with the ‘player tracking data revolution’, hockey clubs and the Winnipeg Jets need to be prepared for the incoming ‘big data’ era to decipher and translates swaths of datasets into meaningful analysis and on-ice results. This will also be needed at other levels, where gathering data at the amateur levels can be fed into scouting in determining initial draft lists throughout the season and knowing where to send scouts for viewings and collecting more information on the player, or at the AHL level to find out which player can best slot into a lineup effectively in cases of injury. Also underneath the Analytics section is someone responsible for ‘Tactics’ – the data coming in will allow for teams to partner with the coaching staff in determining best passing methods and zone entries and defense, and more. This team can tie with the Player Development team in more effectively addressing areas of improvement for each individual player, being able to refer to the results of more intricate data and its results and work with them on exactly how to improve those areas – and this of course needs more than two people to manage if we want to have this for the maximum of 50 players on any given reserve list of a team.
All in all, when the Hockey Club needs to come together to deliberate on a decision, be it acquiring a player, making a change on the coaching staff, changing a lineup, and more – the likes of Cheveldayoff and Maurice are not left to make their own decision. If Maurice decides he needs to make a change to his line-up, he should be able to go down the hall to the Director, Analytics and Director, Player Development to ask about a player he’s interested in inserting for a change of pace, or reaching out to ask if three forwards’ playstyles will mesh well from the onset instead of hoping that enough practice time will do it. And vice versa, a Tactics staff person should be able to call down to the coaching staff during the second intermission to identify that the opponent is having trouble defender zone entries on the right-side of the ice or are entering primarily on long stretch passes against the team in order to make appropriate in-game adjustments that is not based on gut feel.
Closing Thoughts
In the middle of the Summer, talking about front offices appears to be topic du jour with Free Agency dying down and trade talk replaced with margaritas at the cabins.Petbugs of Hockey-Graphs.com wrote that “It’s time to stop talking about analytics” – which is true at first glance, as speaking about whether coaches or front offices are actually utilizing it for the value it can provide has become annoying to read on Twitter every single day. The actual point was that analytics should not be separate from the rest of the team, but actually be a part of a data-drive culture that is about making better decisions.
Ian Fleming, now Director, Strategy and Analytics for the Houston Dynamo (MLS) and Houston Dash (NWSL) tweeted that teams need analysts and engineers to build efficient pipelines for the data and determining effective ways to use it as the first step as the appropriate response to the player tracking data coming next season.
I do not believe this upcoming "tracking data revolution" is the beginning of a transformation of the functions and value that Hockey Operations provides to any given team - nor should it be the end, either. In an era where teams have become so similar and even, partly due to their own fault in sustaining such mediocrity and the leagues unwillingness to change it out of interest for more 'playoff pushes', finding market inefficiencies, competitive advantages, and innovations off-the-ice - and making them a core function of the team and it's culture from top-to-bottom - will likely do more for a team than simply inserting that highly touted prospect into the lineup, or making a coaching or General Manager change, or signing an UFA to a contract during the offseason.
All this and more could likely be had for the costs of one or two Matt Hendricks, and I assure you morale will improve when the team starts winning more games.
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