Saturday's FTB: Knights in Green Satin

Last night London did the deed. They spotted Moncton a few choice power plays but when it really mattered, their PK was perfect and they scored a couple to take the lead deep in the third. London (or the ref, depending on who you ask) gifted Moncton one more power play, but no dice. Final score was 5-2.

The Memorial Cup Final is Sunday night where London faces the only team they haven't beaten in Medicine Hat.

In other news, there's been some low-level signings on various teams, but this bit of hilarity needed to be aired:

I lied yesterday when I said I was done talking about team building. I found something else I was thinking about. The other thing, the thing about how we look back at the past, that just didn't work out, but you'll hear about it at T25 time, so something for you to hide from if you have any sense. This is about changing your DNA.

While I was writing about Marner and the history of his NMC, I read things I wrote when Brad Treliving was first hired. And at the same time, I'm reading a book about the history of the way we create metaphors about evolution and genetics.

This book:

The Tangled Tree - David Quammen

In this New York Times bestseller and longlist nominee for the National Book Award, “our greatest living chronicler of the natural world” (The New York

David Quammendnny

I was struck in this story of how we went from Darwin to bacteria and viruses transferring genes around like hockey cards at a swap meet at the time scale involved. A fellow in England about a century ago discovered bacteria giving genes directly to their neighbours at a time when the word gene was theoretical. And over decades of discoveries and proof and proof and proof and proof and yet more proof, it's finally become part of the canon of biology. Or mostly.

The author at one point describes a certain man with this preface: in academia, you can come to believe in a changing paradigm, but usually only once. And this fellow maybe did it twice.

This got me thinking, because it's late May, about paradigm shifts in the NHL, but also time scales of change. Back in the first article I wrote about Treliving taking over, I expressed some of my irritation and skepticism about some of Kyle Dubas's paradigms of management. Not the weight and height coefficient of his draft picks, more about the mass of people in the front office. In his final year, it looked desperate. Spaghetti thrown at the wall.

Ch-ch-changes

Instead of guessing the future, which is basically all we do in June, July and August around here, how about a break where we think about the past, question the way things have always been done and ask where else there should be changes than just the players themselves.

PPP LeafsCathy Squires

Looking over the very, very bloated org chart that Kyle Dubas created over the last two seasons, it might be time to rip some brass plaques off of some doors. The Leafs have (remember the list we see publicly is mostly just management level people):

4 AGMs (not counting Laurence Gilman who is listed only on the Marlies org chart or Shane Doan)

10 Directors or Senior Directors of various departments

7 members of the coaching staff still on board after the departure of Carbery

11 player development staff

The numbers now are:

• 5 AGMs still not counting Shane Doan as he's a special advisor and comes before the AGMs
• 11 Directors, if I skip over the business departments
• 5 members of the coaching staff, leaving out Lane Lambert

I laughed at myself for ever thinking that glut would be culled right away. NHL hockey teams aren't quite as complex as a search for the origin of life on Earth, but they don't move quickly to change the "way we've always done things."

A bunch of Dubas's consultants on various, er, okay I call this woo-woo at home, but it's the stuff that comes under the umbrella of wellness and what we used to call pop psychology.

I do actually expect some of this to get streamlined. There is no way that many people doing stuff directly reporting to the GM is anything other than a recipe for him to have a hellish email inbox that he just mass deletes every other week.

But paradigm shifts about hockey itself, those are really interesting to consider. How many have their been at the macro level? The end of the enforcer, the clutch and grab crackdown, the high shot rate revolution almost no one noticed in 2017-2018. I guess that one was like boiling a frog, it happened relatively slowly and steadily and no one notice the temperature rising.

At the individual level? Well, for me I've totally changed my ideas on drafting and prospects – more on that soon – but I've also changed my beliefs on defence and who you want doing it. But mostly it's been what measures I care about.

I've been very "points are stupid, I don't care" for a long time. And I remember some of the old sites that did live updating Corsi data for games, and I paid so much attention to that. But then the opinions I got from it proved to be so unreliable, I stopped. I was very, very, extra sauce very skeptical of GAR and I remain so. As someone once said: I don't need to know who was lucky, I need to know who was good. GAR mixes them up so it's like trying to sort out the gin and the vermouth in a martini.

Models that isolate player impacts are imperfect. You shouldn't have "faith" in them. You should know where they are more likely to fail, just like you know where that player on the Leafs is likely to go wrong. But they aren't useless in their imperfection, any more that players are in theirs.

I feel like a paradigm shift on offence is right on top of me, and I've been disguising it in jokes about the Hurricanes who never score or the teams like Ottawa and Minnesota who don't seem to want to. But there's something there. Something true about how a lot of good shots isn't enough or even the thing to be strived for, and aiming to be best at the measure of bestness ends up showing you the hard way there was more to bestness than you realized.

But the thing about these shifts... they're easier if they are total 180s. Like enforcers are useful/not useful. This is easy to decide. But when they're moving on a continuum, not repudiating everything you used to hold dear, but just shading it a little away towards other ideas... they're harder to even see.

Team big vs team small or team grart vs team skill or team simple vs team fancy or team corsi vs team qualtiy are good for internet arguments, and trust me a century of biologists and geneticists were good at that long before there was an internet, but it won't make you smarter.

An open mind. That's what you should be hoping Brad Treliving has, not one with an ideology you or I agree with perfectly. Because you want him to figure out the stuff we're too myopic or stubborn to see.

Who'd want to be a hockey GM? He's got barely over one month to overhaul the team. And while the world of academia would laugh at nine years being a long time to not win the Nobel, one more year without the Cup and Brad might be taking his ideas somewhere else. What a stupid thing is sports, sometimes.

Good luck, Brad, we'll come for you with pitch forks and torches if it doesn't work out.