Moneypuck formula might help Habs
Although the team isn’t crying poor, the GM needs some objective help in picking the right talent
Perhaps what the Canadiens need is a nerd.
On a recent evening when the team was idle … wait, I should clarify that: On a night when the Canadiens were not scheduled to play, I watched Moneyball. It’s terrific, a rare example of a movie I’ve enjoyed based on a book I liked (we won’t talk about Catch-22).
In his 2003 bestseller – the full title of which is Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game – Michael Lewis looked at how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane transcended the limitations of a small market and limited budget to build a competitive baseball team.
The secret – revealed to the reading world by Lewis, to the chagrin of Beane – was an innovative approach to evaluating talent. Rejecting the subjective judgments of Oakland’s veteran scouting staff, Beane used empirical analysis of obscure statistics to find bargain players who could help the A’s win.
Saber metrics (derived from the Society for American Baseball Research) is a school of stats-crunching pioneered by Bill James, who began writing analyses of baseball numbers while working as a night watchman. Beane discovered James’s research, and Moneyball showed how sabermetrics worked for Oakland.
The upshot: Everyone in baseball adopted a new way of looking at stats. And the Boston Red Sox hired Bill James as a consultant.
What does this have to do with hockey in general and your Montreal Canadiens in particular?
The Moneyball model isn’t entirely adaptable – and not just because Pierre Gauthier is infrequently mistaken for Brad Pitt. Hockey is a fluid sport, the action of which cannot be measured with the precision applied to stop-andgo games such as baseball and football.
Also, hockey’s executive suites and coaching ranks are dominated by former players, many of whom have hidebound ideas about how talent is to be evaluated.
That’s beginning to change … albeit slowly. Some teams – notably the Pittsburgh Penguins – are tapping into new methods of statistical analysis
he best known “Moneypuck” stat is the Corsi number. Developed by Buffalo Sabres goaltending coach (and former Concordia University hockey and soccer star) Jim Corsi, the number measures puck possession, for and against.
More detailed explanation would give you a migraine. Readers are directed to Internet sites such as Behind the Net and En Attendant les Nordiques, which offer stats that go beyond the numbers a casual fan can peruse at NHL. com.
Gabriel Desjardins, who created and runs behindthenet.ca, is a consultant for a few NHL teams. Maybe the Canadiens should get his phone number, or at least find the hockey analog of Peter Brand, the character Jonah Hill plays in Moneyball.
You’ve seen Hill – generally playing the overweight, hypersexed nebbish with a Jewfro – in comedies such as Knocked Up, Superbad and Get Him to the Greek. He’s a nerd again in Moneyball, but Hill’s baseball-loving character has a degree in economics from Yale.
Peter Brand doesn’t look or sound like any of the tobacco-chewing good ol’ boys in the Oakland scouting depart- ment. He’s a numbers geek who brings an economist’s objectivity to bear on the study of baseball statistics.
Billy Beane (played by Pitt) had been a first-round draft choice of the New York Mets in 1980. Beane turned down a scholarship to Stanford to sign a $125,000 baseball contract.
He was a bust. In 148 majorleague games over six seasons with four teams, Beane batted .219 and hit three home runs.
In one of Moneyball’s memorable scenes, the Oakland GM presses Peter Brand what his pre-draft evaluation of Billy Beane would have been.
“Where would you have drafted me?” Beane asks.
“Ninth round, no bonus,” Brand replies.
Impressed by his candour, Beane hires Brand as his assistant. The baseball man and the Ivy League guy went on to build an unlikely contender in Oakland.
Again, hockey is not baseball. And the Canadiens are not a small-market team operating on a shoestring budget.
But as a glance at the standings – or a close-up look at the Hamilton Bulldogs Friday night – suggests, this team is in trouble. And restoring the Canadiens to even a semblance of their long-ago glory is going to require the best talent money can buy.
Pierre Gauthier is toast … or, given the nutritional eccentricities of the Canadiens’ vegan GM, he’s tofu. This week on L’antichambre, ESPN hockey guru Pierre LeBrun said Gauthier should have been fired after the trade that brought Tomas Kaberle to Montreal – a deal that would force any self-respecting nerd to resign from his stats blog in disgrace.
As the trading deadline clock ticks down toward 3 p.m. on Monday, one would hope Geoff Molson has made it perfectly clear his general manager is not to tamper with the Canadiens’ core assets. And when NHL teams convene in Pittsburgh in late June, one would hope with even greater fervour that a new general manager will be at the Canadiens table, ready to exercise the team’s highest pick since Carey Price was drafted fifth overall in 2005.
Saddled with two of the NHL’S most toxic contracts – Kaberle and Scott Gomez … not to mention Andrei Markov – the Canadiens simply can’t afford to make any more mistakes, either at the draft or in off-season personnel decisions.
Trevor Timmins, who runs the amateur scouting department, has done a very good job. Let us hope he is part of any revamped Canadiens organogram.
And as yet another rebuild gets under way, maybe someone studying stats on a computer in Mom’s basement can help the hockey honchos on the seventh floor of the Bell Centre.