My Silent Olympic Hockey Truth

The loud „not so much truth“ is a disastrous statistical goal performance of the so called and overrated best forwards in the world like e.g. Crosby, Nash, Tavares, Ovechkin, Malkin, Sedin, they all scored just one or even zero goals at the Olympics. The same goes for all Swiss forwards who „proofed“ not to be able to score on the highest level.

My personal Olympic hockey truth is as follows:

Don’t read too much into a tournament-format like the Olympics. Just 4-7 games for each player. The above-mentioned players are of course the best forwards in the world and they are not overrated. They proof that they can score vs the very best since years. In general this hockey-tournament did show more than ever before that international hockey did develop a lot. In today’s hockey-world also the smaller countries can produce easily 30 competitive hockey-players if they do their homework. Take these hockey-players, implement for them a defense-first strategy and build a mutually supportive team-chemistry. The result of this: Even the very best teams with the very best forwards will have big problems to score and in single game formats - as it is in the Olympics - a lot can happen result-wise. This doesn’t mean that the best players from the top-countries are not better than the players from the smaller countries. Modern training-programs lead into a decent level of a lot of players and this level is not that far away from the very best. This is the nowadays men’s hockey-world, not so much yet the women’s hockey-world although also women hockey develops slowly but steadily into this direction. For the average Olympic fan who basically just watches hockey every four years it’s pretty frustrating because he can’t see the performance-difference between the very best and the next level players. To notice these differences is getting more and more difficult and this is definitely not spectacular. Even worse for the average Olympic fan: If he follows a game like e.g. CAN vs USA there are some of the very best players on this planet and because they level each other out it’s not easy to notice on what high level they play our great sport, the sport of hockey. This normal and healthy development of our sport is also tricky for the real hockey-fans and for some media. It’s tricky because we tend to overrate the results and the stats of this just handful of games. We read things into actual results instead of reading things into the most possible results. If Sidney Crosby doesn’t score in a handful of games we might get trapped into thinking that he is an overrated player. Sidney Crosby and all the other above mentioned superstars in hockey are not overrated, they are that good but the gap between this category of players and the next category is not like Five-Star Hotel and Two-Star-Hotel. It’s more like Five- to Four-Star with the tendency to Five- to four and a half-star and this leads into short-term stats where fanwise unknown players can easily look better than the superstars. To stay with my silent truth: I could really still see the difference between the very best hockey-teams and players and the next category but the differences are getting smaller and this means that it’s now possible that even Latvia can beat Canada with their best players in a single game on a given night with very lucky bounces. This is the modern hockey-world. Fact of the modern hockey-world is also that today’s best players are significantly better than the best players 20 and 40 years ago. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to take away just a tiny little bit of Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Bobby Orr, Makarov, Krutov, Fetisov, Larionov and so on; this would be completely unfair and they have my deepest respect, but it’s reality: With their performance 20 or 40 years ago they couldn’t be superstars anymore. Hockey did develop a lot and it’s easier to push the level of hockey-players from 60/100 to 90/100 compared to improve from 90/100 to 95/100. In modern hockey we have worldwide much more 90/100 players than 20 or 40 years ago and these players make life of the maybe ten 95/100 players miserable.

My Swiss “truth”:

Swiss hockey did improve to a nasty to play competitor approx. 10 years ago although the  Swiss usually got outshot quite badly vs the very best. It was not clear anymore that they will lose all games vs the very best. The Swiss did achieve this with slightly improved skills and decent to good skating players, with solid goal-tending, excellent defensive structure and hard working teamplay especially in the plays without the puck in the defensive aspect of the game. Since approx. Since 10 years it’s not easy anymore to score vs the Swiss senior national-team. In the last two to three years I noticed an additional step forward: The Swiss have now a handful of really good and skilled d-men and a couple of forwards who can create goal-scoring-chances also on the highest level. Of course, the silver-medal at the 2013 “Worlds” was not a normal result but the Swiss are now one of the “boys” who can win a medal in certain circumstances. Most important the Swiss did achieve this with even-keel amounts of goal-scoring-chances and shots vs the very best, it was not anymore just a defense-first strategy and praying to god that the goalie will be hot. They played to eye-level in all aspects with the very best for the first time in hockey-history. It was interesting to see how all this looks vs the very best of the very best in the Olympics.

The loud “not so much truth”: The silver-medal was just a fluke, Swiss hockey is overrated, they couldn’t score at all and even did lose vs Latvia. This was a shock in a lot of media and a big disappointed in the whole Swiss hockey-world.

Coming back to my personal Swiss truth:

The Swiss confirmed in this Olympic tournament that they can compete on the highest level in most aspects of the game. They played well vs Latvia in the group game (double amount of shots), very well vs Sweden – just 26:31 shots, well and a bit lucky vs the Czechs 26:26 shots and did outshoot Latvia again in the 1/8-final by quite a clear margin. The Swiss team was able to create goal-scoring-chances even vs. the very best and they slightly dominated Latvia in both games. Partly because of some unlucky bounces the loss to Latvia happened, partly also because of the real good performance of the Latvian team. But please put in front of your face the game Latvia vs. Canada, this was a result of modern hockey-development. The Swiss did lose 0-1 vs Sweden and played nearly (not quite) as good as the Swedes. It was a more or less equal game vs the Czechs (SUI did win 1-0) although in this game the Swiss were a bit lucky. It was overall a really good performance of the Swiss hockey-team. The Swiss really did take the next step forward. It was clear from the very beginning that the Swiss won’t score a lot and the now collective outcry is a bit surprising for me. If players like Crosby, Tavares, Toews, Getzlaf, Nash St.Louis, Perry, Marleau, Ovechkin, Malkin, D. Sedin and Kane combined to just three goals altogether (before the gold-medal-game) – this tells you something and definitely tells you that the expectations for a lot of Swiss goals with no NHL-star-forwards was simply much too high. It was clear that the goal-production in the last World-Championsship was too high compared to the normal level. And now it’s positively clear for me that the Swiss goal-production was too low compared to the amount of goal-scoring-chances, compared to the most probable outcome of the level they played on. Yes, I really did like the Swiss hockey Olympic performance. Goaltending was very good, the Swiss never had better dmen and with Josi a real world-class defender. The forwards improved in terms of skills and creating goal-scoring-chances. What is still missing is high-level-shooting-quality and more depth in terms of high-end forward-skills. The Swiss confirmed the next step. They are still one or two steps behind the very best and  it will be extremely difficult to close this gap. But this achieved level means that they always will have some sort of medal-chance in World Championships but don’t forget, other smaller countries are nearly on the same level and if the Swiss can beat the best on a given night they of course always will have also the “chance” to lose to Latvia, Germany, Norway e.g. on bad nights. Again:  This is the result of the modern hockey development.

To all experts: It’s very complicated to predict things in an Olympic hockey-tournament and very tricky to look for wisdoms in such a small tourney. Please take this into consideration if you bash the Russians and praise the gold-medalists. Again: Is there one expert who would have predicted that Toews, Crosby, Malkin, Ovechkin, Getzlaf, Perry, D. Sedin, Tavares, St.Louis, Marleau and Kane would combine for just three goals in the tournament? The world is complicated and this doesn’t fit to the thirst for findings of what is right and wrong on this planet and in hockey. We have to be humble enough to accept that even experts don’t know much about the world and about hockey. There are much more question-marks than answers. If somebody claims for the opposite he might not be an expert… A strong individual subjective opinion is not a reliable indication for the truth, a soft conviction might be more informative…

Enjoy the gold-medal-game! I definitely will!

Thomas Roost                                               23^rd February 2014

NHL NFL NBA MLB Premier League pro sports in general: Don't get trapped by simple commentaries, thesis and "wisdoms"

Sport-business is entertainment and most people don’t take it too serious and from a bird-perspective they are right: Don’t take it too serious. Because nearly nobody takes it too serious we find here a place for relatively uncritical media-report-judgment. It’s not very dangerous for sports-journalists to write completely wrong things and they don’t have to „fear“ unmasking antithesis to sometimes much too simple conclusions and „wisdoms“. In addition I absolutely don’t want to blame especially journalists from the popular press because they just do what is expected from them: They need readers and that’s why they have to personalize crises and miracles they are always trying to find scapegoats and heroes even if there are none. The popular opinion is that the readers are looking for this. The journalists have the order to create polemic. So, they just do their job, nobody to blame here. I also do know that in today’s world a lot of journalists fight for their jobs because nowadays -with the endless possibilities of “amateur”-news on the web - the aura of the old-school journalistpower somehow disappeared, not so much glitter and glory anymore. Also sportswriters have to fight to stay in the business and they have to fight for the level of their salaries as never before.

But all this doesn’t make bad reports/comments/thesis better.

With the much appreciated help of Christian Seibt’s brilliant observations I try to sharpen our readers brains a little bit and the brains of sport-directors, GMs and presidents who sometimes might be too easily victims of garbage pressure from popular press. I don’t want to change the writers I want to help the readers to become more sensitive to garbage writing and especially in sports we find too much garbage-writings, tons of wrong “wisdoms” and too many thesis without antithesis.

So here are some lessons I did learn:

The sharper, the more spicy a thesis, the more critical we should check it. Don’t forget: Spicy herbs cover meat which has gone bad.

Some examples:

“Czech hockey is going nowhere”. “European players are softies”. “Canadiens are winners”. “Russians are moody”. “The neutral zone trap is dead”. Watch out for such generalizing thesis! Not really better are thesis with a messias or a scapegoat: “Brian Burke saved the Leafs”. “Bryzgalov is the problem of the Flyers”.

Sometimes thesis are “proofed” with poor stats. I did read headlines about a bad goalie and in the article they refer to stats from just 5-10 games, one single tournament or even just one game…

Also with mainstream-outrages we should be very careful. “European imports destroy the development of homegrown players”. “Players from NA take away jobs from local players in the European leagues.”

All such thesis have one thing in common: They are somehow right halfway through and in a retrospective view basically never. Finalities like a guillotine or a canonization work nearly never. The manager of the month is the fired one next year. The “lunatic” coach who did lose most of the games will win championships soon after. We also have to be very careful with so called trends. A printed trend is nearly always a yesterday’s trend.

So, what shall we do?

The mechanical method of questioning a thesis is to do some research of antithesis but this is not the most fair method because in too many cases it also doesn’t lead to find the truth. Maybe more inspiring is to check this thesis in practical life, to ask some friends, relatives, experts. Sometimes you might discover that this thesis did overlook a giant gorilla in the room. In addition: Bad editors ask for a thesis before doing some research. Good editors just ask questions. Last but not least: You should never repeat or even strengthen already spread out errors or multiply banalities. E.g. “He knows how to win championships”, “after the bad first two periods we showed good character”, “goalies are Mr. 50%”, “soft coaches never win championships”. “A good assistant can’t be a good headcoach”. Better try it with “wisdoms” without a lobby. Ask questions as e.g. “Can a no-name amateur coach win the Stanley Cup with an NHL-team?” “Is it possible to become a successful hockey coach/scout/GM without the experience as a pro-player?” “Can we win the Stanley-Cup with just average goaltending?” “Is it possible that in reality we do know significantly less about winning games in hockey than we “experts” would like to believe?”

Maybe not very spectacular, my this writing, but if it helps just a tiny little bit to avoid believing the biggest garbage in sports-writing it will be positive for our beloved sports.

Thomas Roost  

                                                               

Zurich, 15^th September 2013

Switzerland arrived in the NHL

After long years of evaluating, scouting and sometimes even recommending Swiss players to the NHL I often had to challenge the following question: „How many Swiss play in the NHL“? For too many years my answer had to be: None. This fact, this result, didn’t reflect the real strength of the Swiss hockey program. NHL-organizations were too reluctant, maybe too conservative in terms of drafting Swiss players. A similar result one could find in all the lists of the CHL-Import-drafts, just very few players from Switzerland did find their way onto these lists. This was the time when Switzerland established itself as a more or less solid A-Pool-Hockey-nation on all age-groups.

Today it’s a different world. Some of our players established themselves as solid NHLers (Mark Streit, Roman Josi, Jonas Hiller). Sven Baertschi, CGY, will follow and also Nino Niederreiter, MIN is on the verge of becoming a NHL-regular. Switzerland did win a silver-medal at the last World Championships and more and more players are drafted in the NHL-entry-draft and the CHL-import-draft. In addition NHL-franchises started to become interested in also older players who might have a chance to play in the NHL, e.g. Damien Brunner. My impression is that after many years of paying not enough attention to Swiss players it’s now the opposite. Right now I smell a tendency that the Swiss players might be a bit overrated.

How good is Swiss hockey today?

Swiss hockey did take a huge step approx. 15 years ago. A good program and the necessary money did complement each other and so the Swiss managed to improve from an outsider to a world-ranking 8-12 nation. This was followed by confirming this step more or less in all future years. The world-ranking 8-12 became stable. What was missing is the next step, narrowing the gap to the worlds best. In the defensive play without the puck, most of the Swiss junior national teams and the senior national team became world-class. In terms of skating-mobility a lot Swiss players could play with the best. The main differences were – and still are - obviously in the shot-quality, pass-quality, puck-control and stickhandling-skills-area, plus stability on the skates. The Swiss didn’t improve anymore but also didn’t regress. Indirectly they did improve but not because of their own strength it was more because the Czech and Slovak junior-programs did regress and so the Swiss could catch up. The Swiss did overtake the Slovaks on junior-level and closed the gap to the Czechs but the difference to the worlds best juniors in Canada, Sweden and the USA remained the same. Recently the Swiss had some astonishing results on senior and junior-level with wins against the very best in the world. It’s easy to tell that this was the next step but I tell you “not so fast”.  Individually one can still see all the above mentioned weaknesses compared to the worlds best and now comes the time when the Swiss have to confirm these astonishing results. The Swiss have to resist the unrealistic expectations of good parts of the Swiss media. Many expect now to play always for a medal and these are dangerous tendencies. “Success leads to handicapped learning” and the Swiss might fall into this trap. Still: They can be proud for what they did achieve recently but should think about the next big step in the junior-programs so that one fine day it will be a realistic expectation to play for the medals tournament by tournament. What is missing in the program are one or two protagonists of e.g. the very successful Swedish or US-program with the target to make our hockey-educators even better than they are now. They should be hired by the Swiss hockey-federation and their target should be to improve the quality of the Swiss hockey-educators. Don’t get me wrong: The actual level of the Swiss hockey-educators is far from bad but there is still significant room to improve and the Swiss should try to improve and open up a bit their hockey-education-horizons and then even better things will come!

What Swiss names will be noticed in the near future in terms of NHL- or CHL-drafts?

The Swiss have a very strong age-group born 97! Names like Denis Malgin, F, Jonas Siegenthaler, D,  Auguste Impose, F, Roger Karrer, D, Fabian Haberstich, F, Nathan Marchon, F are players who can make a difference even in international competitions. Also for the 2015-NHL-draft late 96-born 6.07 d-man Colin Fontana will be in the spotlight. For the upcoming NHL-draft 2014 I expect from 96 born Kevin Fiala, F, that he will be an early-round-pick. He is polishing his game in the world-famous HV71 talent-pool in Sweden. Also 95 born forward Fabio Högger is very talented but he was unlucky in his draftyear with a longterm concussion, so he got overlooked. The 98s don’t look as strong as the 97s at this point but it’s too early to judge definitely.

From the older players who might have a chance for some sort of NHL-contract in the near future I point to Luca Cunti, F, (former Tampa Bay Lightning draft-pick) and Denis Hollenstein, F. From the already drafted but not yet in NA playing prospects I expect good careers from Christoph Bertschy (Minnesota Wild) and Joel Vermin (Tampa Bay Lightning). Also goalie Reto Berra (Calgary Flames) has a good chance to become a positive surprise already in his first season in NA.

In general Swiss hockey is very healthy. A good – but no great – junior-program, huge crowds in the arenas, attractive, open, fast-paced, offensive playing style in a lot of teams of the pro-league. The entertainment-level of the Swiss pro-league is very good. In addition: Quite good money in the league and the sport of hockey is popular in all three language-parts of Switzerland.

You can also follow me via Twitter @thomasroost

and

www.getrealhockey.com

Horgen, 9^th September 2013 / Thomas Roost                                                                                   Switzerland arrived in the NHL.docx

Modern times in hockey-scouting

Hockey-scouting in old days was watching game after game, travelling long hours on long and winding roads, crumpled paper, writing down notes, freezing in lonesome and odd rinks, guzzling fat fast-food, drinking bad coffee and being polite by accepting small-talk with all the countless passionate hockey-experts sitting under  the roof in the cold provincial rinks. How is scouting today? Exactly the same. I watch game after game, travel long hours… and you name it… but this is just part of nowadays truth. Today’s scouting is much more to it. I don’t agree with some old-school scouting-experts who still just rely on what they see in the rink with their own eyes. I also don’t agree with some young intellectual academics if they believe that hockey-scouting can be done just by cutting and analyzing videos and stats. And I also don’t agree with some “armchair—scouts” believing in putting just some names on the table with doing some research on the internet. I’m a strong believer that today’s most efficient scouting-approach is a combination of all the mentioned methods. I compare modern scouting to a certain point with a modern and unspectacular secret-service-officer. A modern secret-service-officer is not living even 1% of the adventurous lifestyle as in the world-famous James Bond movies. A modern secret-service-officer is doing a lot of unspectacular computer work, analyzing data – most of them are more or less “number-crunchers”. I guess that a modern scout has to do the same to a certain point. Researching about helpful datas , analyzing them, analyzing reports and opinions, separating the serious from the garbage-opinions in reports and forums. In addition in today’s world it’s technically very realistic to watch nearly all hockey-games you really want to watch via Internet-Live-Stream . Is this useful? Does offer a hockey-game on TV - or even worse on a PC-screen - as much to a scout as to watch a game live in the arena? No, I don’t think so. I still think to watch a game live in an arena is the best thing you can do as a scout BUT: I very strongly believe that to watch a game on TV or via live-stream on PC is much better than nothing. Does give web-research-results about a player as much as if you watch a player with your own eyes in an arena? No, I definitely don’t think so. I clearly prefer to watch a player playing live in the arena BUT again: The result of an intelligent web-research is much better than nothing. So in modern scouting-times it’s not the question whether live-watching, video-analyzing, talking with other hockey-experts or doing some research in the web is the real promising method of scouting. It’s not either or, it’s all of this together in a sensible combination. I think we scouts have to use all these sources to sharpen our picture about a player and it’s not wise to disdain scouting methods we personally might not like so much. To put it “quick and dirty”: If I would be a GM I wouldn’t care at all about the methods this or that scout uses to bring the right names. A scout just HAS to bring the right names.

One last thing:

Before I started to be a scout I sometimes judged players just because of their stats. Soon after – means after a couple of years scouting-experience - I did feel that I’m now a BIG scout and I have my own experience and of course I do know – I have to know – much more than stats. I started to judge players mainly from subjective observations. This was wrong. Today I’m a strong believer in stats. Stats influence my opinion much more than in the past even if this hurts a bit my scouts pride. Unlucky me I live in a country, Switzerland, with a pure stats-desert. If I talk about useful stats I talk about stats one can find in brilliant sources like behindthenet.ca and Rob Vollman’s Hockey Abstract. Two practical examples how stats overruled subjective observations: Years back our scouting team did follow the progress and judge the potential of 17 year old Russian netminder Andrei Medvedev, born 83. If you watched him one easily could notice that he definitely didn’t look like a sportsman. We then did talk to a Russian coaching-staff-member and asked him about Medvedev. He answered: Listen, Medvedev is clumsy, he is fat and a little bit dumb and he is no athlete…. but…he stops the puck! Right he was, Medvedev had brilliant stats, he then did get drafted by Calgary and two years later became U20 Worldchampion. To be fair… he later never managed to become an NHL-netminder. His weight did grow year after year and not only naughty voices did tell that Medvedev might have been the first goalie eating himself out of the NHL… The second example is 2013 MTL draft-pick Sven Andrighetto. I heard again and again experts talking bad about him. This is bad and that I don’t like and he is not the biggest and has no extra-gear and his play away from the puck is nowhere, not easy character and so on… These comments were impressive for me and I would be lying if it didn’t influence my opinion but more impressive was that I did notice that Andrighetto was among the topscorers in whatever competition, in whatever league and in whatever team he played, ALWAYS among the topscorers. Should he be drafted? Opinions still vary a lot about Andrighetto. I tell clearly yes because today I’m convinced that real stats – you need to have tons of data and not just stats from one tournament or one season – are strong indicators about a players potential. Conclusion: Don’t overrate your subjective observations and don’t underrated serious stats.

You can also follow me via Twitter @thomasroost

or

www.getrealhockey.com

Zurich, 11^th September 2013 / Thomas Roost