Are NHL teams moving away from analytics?
Matt Pfeffer is the analytics consultant who argued against the P.K. Subban trade and was subsequently let go by the Montreal Canadiens. And while “I was against the Subban for Shea Weber trade” isn’t exactly “I voted against the war in Iraq” on the against-the-grain scale, history is likely to prove him right and his former employers wrong.
Pfeffer spoke with Ken Campbell of The Hockey News recently, continuing to walk away from the Subban trade like Hugh Jackman from a slow-motion explosion. But there were two rather curious statements in the piece, of varying degrees of dubiousness.
- “Shea Weber is an average NHL player.”
When anyone wants to claim victory in a trade evaluation, it’s not enough to (overly) laud the successful part of it – you have to denigrate the “loser” in the trade. Which is how we get to a point where Shea Weber is labeled an average player.
From THN:
“In my model that evaluates Shea Weber, very, very little of it has to do with shot differential at this point in his career,” Pfeffer said. “With his experience, you really need to only look at goal differential to measure his impact. You only need Corsi if you don’t have a large enough sample size to evaluate goals. My analysis of Shea Weber had very little to do with Corsi. It’s easy to hate on Corsi, but (Weber) is not a good goal differential guy either. He’s not pushing the needle in terms of how many goals the Nashville Predators score and get scored on when he’s on the ice. He’s good, he’s serviceable, but he doesn’t really push the needle on either side.”
… “There’s nothing wrong with being average in the NHL,” Pfeffer said. “An average NHLer is worth a heck of a lot and that’s what Shea Weber is.”
Analytics virtuoso Micah Blake McCurdy offered this glimpse at the last three years of Weber:
Let's take a quick look at Shea Weber's last three years. pic.twitter.com/32t3nRsJ3y
— Micah Blake McCurdy (@IneffectiveMath) July 18, 2016
McCurdy’s opinion? That Weber’s numbers make him “shy away from an overall summation like ‘average.’” That said, the opinion of Pfeffer and the majority on the Subban trade stands: He’s reached his ceiling and that this acquisition is going to look significantly worse in about three seasons.
Still though: Calling 2016-17 Shea Weber “average” reeks of spiking the football after scoring from the one-yard line.
The other puzzling thing …
- The Analytics Pushback
“The person I reported (director of legal affairs/capologist John Sedgwick) to liked my work and the methodology behind it and believed in it,” Pfeffer said, “and there were others inside the team that didn’t believe in it and maybe had their mind made up about advanced stats. I think there’s been a bit of pushback from people in the NHL recently about this kind of stuff.”
And that pushback, Pfeffer believes, is causing teams to still rely on the “eye test” over analytics. Which kind of makes you wonder why teams would even bother hiring analytics people in the first place. Are they simply paying lip service to analytics, then going with their gut when it comes down it? Perhaps. But when the numbers are as decisive as they were in the Subban-Weber trade and the team ignores them, it’s a pretty clear indication that teams are still hesitant to rely on them.
Well now.
At face, this is disturbing. The last few years have seen a dozens of analytics experts gobbled up by NHL teams. They’ve seen open-minded, young executives like Kyle Dubas and John Chayka rise up the ranks with teams like the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Arizona Coyotes. These moves seemed to combat the ludicrous notion that all of this public commitment to analytics was for show, to seem with the times rather than changing with them.
And then you hear Matt Pfeffer say that “there’s been a bit of a pushback from people in the NHL recently” on analytics.
We reached out to several analytics consultants with NHL teams about this claim, and the good news is that Pfeffer’s assessment seems premature or, more likely, centralized to his own experience.
“It always depends on which team it is,” said one consultant, on background.
“It’s certainly not true with my team,” said another, on background. “The more opportunities I have to show people where I can add value, and the more comfortable they are with me.”
And that was the same with others we spoke with on Monday. There are teams for which analytics are a tangible part of the evaluation process, and there are teams that are willing to incorporate them into their front offices but ultimately adhere to a more old-school manner of thinking on player transactions and acquisitions.
What was interesting from some of these consultants, however, was that there is an ideological gap between general managers and coaches.
“Some coaches are more amendable to [analytics],” said one consultant.
Why? Well, consider the nature of advanced stats. They cover minor processes in a game, and these are the things that coaches are generally cognizant and appreciative of seeing measured. It’s a micro-level accomplishment vs. the kind of macro ones that a general manager seeks to evaluate.
To that end, there was optimism from some of the stat-heads we spoke to that the buddy-cop-movie pairing of Chayka and coach Dave Tippett could work in Arizona, as the analytics GM and the crusty ‘ol coach could see the world a lot more similarly than we see the similarities in them.
So, in summary: Shea Weber isn’t average and the NHL’s teams aren’t yet running away from analytics.
But we do encourage Matt Pfeffer to continue giving these exit interviews because it’s July and we can use the fodder.
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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at [email protected] or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
