10 things the Ice Hockey IIHF World 2013 did tell us

1. It’s rather easy to improve from bad to average. All of the bottom teams are not bad anymore (even Slovenia and Austria were not easy to play against).

    2.  It’s more easy to improve from average to good  (France, Norway, Denmark) than from good to very good and it’s most difficult to improve from very good to high-end and the downfall from high-end to good goes very fast if you play not with your very best players.

    3. The high-end hockey-nations need their very best players and some sort of professional preparation to beat the good and very good hockey-nations with a certain probability. It’s not enough anymore to expect a gold medal with just off hand chosen players and experiments. High-end hockey-nations had to accept silver-medals to Slovakia in 2012 and Switzerland in 2013.

    4.  The level-difference between the very best and the next best and the following nations became smaller (Switzerland did win 9 in a row, France did beat Russia).

    5. Not everything is explainable and predictable in the world of hockey. Did anybody predict that Switzerland will win silver with 9 wins in a row and not even one of these wins was a steal?

    6. For smaller hockey-nations it is significantly easier to compete in a senior WC than in juniors because for a competitive senior-national-team you need „just“ one or two really good players from each age-group and if you do your homework even very small countries can „produce“ 30-50 competitive players.

    7. Switzerland did not only get excellent results, it was also most surprising the way they played and how they could play on this very high level for the whole tournament.

    8. Roman Josi is on the verge of becoming a star player in the NHL and John Gibson is already close to the NHL. He has everything a future above average NHL-goalie needs to have.

    9. In some cases it is really the superstar-players what makes the difference (Sedins)

   10. With approx. 75% probability the team who scores the first goal will win the game but this did tell probably already former IIHF World Championships.

SOME SWISS THOUGHTS:

The good:

We did win 9 consecutive games and all of them were deserved wins, not even one steal. Of course we were a little bit lucky vs CAN and CZE (Quarter-Final) but also in these games it was not really a steal. Even as a neutral observer I would have to respect the attractive up-tempo style with optimistic approaches, brave attacks and players full of confidence and with decent skills. Four different and useful units resulted in a very balanced team. I never followed a Swiss team with all needed ingredients to become successful and attractive: Good goaltending, clever defense with Josi and Diaz as high-end players. Physical presence up front (Walker, Moser) a powerforward who crashes the net (Niederreiter), some spark and magic (Cunti), a very productive player (Hollenstein), a scorer (Suri), a dangerous weapon on the powerplay (Gardner), speed (most players), clever, desperate and high-energy-play without the puck (the whole team),  very good coaching and a true hero in every aspect (Seger). Nothing was missing. To make it short and simple: To watch Switzerland playing in this WC was just a beauty!

The bad:

I can’t think of bad things about the Swiss team in this competition, even if I try to be very critical. It was just positive, plain positive! There are just maybe some negatives: Usually people have the tendency to stay very uncritical in the case of a big success. E.g. it would be a huge mistake to think that the Swiss program is just fine. On the junior-level we are not very close to the very best, there is some sort of stagnation and people in power should do everything trying to improve our junior-program, to improve it from good to very good (e.g. not to dismiss the planned hockey-academy in Winterthur, not to cut money from the national-junior-teams, not to refuse participations in great junior-hockey-tournaments esp. in NA, implement some new strategies and maybe add the one or the other high-end-hockey-teacher to the federation-staff. I hope that the clubs support the federation in trying to improve from good to very good. We Swiss hockey observers have to stay self-critical and modest: In hockey we have every year a world championship and the same goes for the U20 and U18-programs. This was the first medal since ages and although I was so impressed we have to confirm this result a couple of times in the next 10 years. Only if we can do this we can tell that we did catch up with the very best. Success is a big trap. Success leads to handicapped learning. We are not allowed to get fooled from this trap. Next year’s Olympics and the 2016 World Cup – if Switzerland will be invited – will be the next true measure-sticks as are all the upcoming U20- and U18-WC-tournaments. How can we compete against the very best? After this tournament I’m more optimistic, I guess we can stay competitive even against the very best. Can we win a game vs a top nation with their very best players? I guess, yes we can! Can we win consecutive games vs top-nations with their very best players? Maybe I’m too negative but to be honest: No, I don’t think so yet... but this team has now the chance to prove me wrong, it already did prove me wrong in this sensational IIHFWorlds 2013.

https://twitter.com/thomasroost

Thomas Roost, 20th May 2013

Judging NHL and Swiss League Hockey Coaching: Fooled by randomness

Fooled by randomness

or

Why we “experts”, journalists, fans, players and coaches have to stay very modest and humble with our opinions about the game of hockey.

In the – just sometimes ;-) - serious world of economy it was painful for some experts to find out that their theories from elite-universities bursted like a children balloon in the recent finance and economical crises in the US and Europe. We have so many highly intellectual and wise economical experts on this planet and nobody of them did predict these huge crises (sorry if I did forget the one or the other exception to this fact).

In sports we have even more “experts” and not all of them have a sharp intellectual mind and not all of them are highly educated but sports of course is also not as serious as economics, it’s “just” entertainment but still: I tried to figure out what we “experts” did tell and advise in hockey in recent times. To make it not too complicated I stay with the analyses with some statements about coaches:

Approx. one year ago the Swiss national-team-coach Sean Simpson got heavily criticized by the majority of the Swiss media, he was called a loser with naive game-strategies and wrong roster-decisions, culminated with the recommendation to fire him. Now, one year later, after some wins in the group-games vs top-hockey-nations he is now a genius. Arno Del Curto, head-coach of the HC Davos and Chris McSorley, head coach and GM of Geneva, are two of the most hyped coaches in the Swiss league. Del Curto even has a status of a Messiah in some Swiss pencils. Finnish Antti Törmänen, head-coach of the SC Bern – on the other end of the scale – was bashed nearly all season long again and again. Some people have the opinion that results always tell the truth, so let’s stay with the results at this point: Arno Del Curto did lose in the first playoff-round twice in a row with a top-four-roster in his hands. Chris McSorley did even go to the relegation-round last year with an average roster and did lose in the first playoff-round this year with an above-average roster. Smart and wise Antti Törmänen became champion with Bern after missing the championship last year only in game seven of the final. To be fair, he had a top-roster in both years. Media-loser Doug Shedden did lose Raphael Diaz to the Montreal Canadiens in one year and Damien Brunner to the Detroit Red Wings in the other but still managed to reach the semi-finals in each season with the EV Zug, so maybe he is the real coaching hero, a winner? So, the results of the last two years actually tell the “truth” that Arno Del Curto and Chris McSorley are bad coaches and Antti Törmänen and Doug Shedden are really good ones. To make our opinion-finding even more painful: Is Sean Simpson a scapegoat or a genius? I can ask the same question about NHL-coaches Jack Capuano, New York Islanders? Is he a genius – he is the head-coach of the now surprising New York Islanders – or is he a loser (last year’s New York Islanders were really bad)? What about Bruce Boudreau? Got fired in Washington, now successful in Anaheim? Barry Trotz? As good as last year’s Predators or as bad as this year’s? Randy Carlyle? After winning the Stanley Cup in 2007: As bad as he was badmouthed in Anaheim 2011 or as good as in Toronto who made the playoffs for the first time for quite a while? There are also tons of other examples of coaches in hockey and other sports who are just sometimes successful and sometimes not. But if I would tell in Switzerland that e.g. Arno Del Curto is a normal, average coach with some good habits and some bad ones, successful with good teams, average successful with average teams but nearly nobody would agree with me on first sight. To be fair: He let his teams play an attractive, entertaining style of hockey, this is what I really like about him. In Switzerland Del Curto is a coach you either love or hate, but in my opinion he is just ok, average with a colorful personality and especially a good self-promoter with charisma. But charisma has nothing to do with being good or bad. If we analyse history we will pretty fast find out that usually not charismatic people did turn the world to good. In most cases charismatic persons did do very dangerous and destructive things in the end. Means: Be very careful to declare a charismatic coach a good coach, you might overrate him. Don’t let the charisma fool you!

Coming back to the painful search of the truth, the truth in hockey: Of course, you smell it: If you are not a lazy thinker you know that the truth is much more complicated than just analyse naked results but still: This “rolling out the facts” is somewhat interesting and eye-blinking to some big mouth-reports and recommendations and according to the results these recommendations were just plain wrong.

Yes: It’s wrong to judge good and bad, right and wrong just from the results. Not only in economical analyses but also and even worse in sports-analyses we get fooled heavily by randomness, we get fooled too many times by the results. Instead we should try to find out the most probable results and start the analyses from then. Usually for much more than 50% it’s not this strategy or the other, not this coach or the other, not this roster-decision or the other. It’s just plain luck! It’s painful for us who have to explain the fans and the average observers why this team did win or the other. If we would be very honest, we would have to tell in most cases on the top-level: I don’t know really, in the end this team was just more lucky than the other. Watch the NHL-playoff-series round 1 this year. Tons of series go to 6 or 7 games. Tons of games go to OT… and after an OT-win or loss somebody wants to tell me why the winner did win and the loser did lose? The same goes for the Swiss league. Tons of series went to seven games and if just one coach tells me that he has control about the result in a game 7 or about the outcome in OT he is just a joke. Common! Yes, there are much more unexplainable things in life than we human beings in a self-overrating and naive arrogance admit. Yes, there are much more unexplainable results in sports, in hockey than “experts” admit. Actually life and sport-results are so exciting because deep inside we do know that we don’t know. We never know who will win on the top-level and after the games we usually have just very empty and pale explanations if we are very honest with ourselves. Very small changes in life can have dramatic changes in probabilities. Very small things in a hockey game can dramatically change the probability of a result (shot 1cm more to the left or right, a referee-call or non-call, a small brain-cramp of a usually reliable player, one genius play of a star-player, one bad decision in the neutral zone, one bad read of the goalie, one risky play of a player what results in a goal for or a goal against and you name it…). One of these small things can change the characteristic of a game dramatically and no coach on this planet can control all these small things.

Coming to an end with a positive quote: It’s one of the biggest illusions to believe that randomness is bad and risky and that we can control it. Randomness is exciting positive, we just have to accept and enjoy it. And maybe we should be much more careful with badmouthing or hyping hockey-coaches.

Thomas Roost, 11th May 2013