Jim Nill, Assistant General Manager, Detroit Red Wings, agrees that predicting how a player will develop, and if he will at all, is one of the toughest parts of amateur scouting.  The varying development cycles of prospects, not only physically but mentally and emotionally, too, all make amateur scouting a head spinner.

-The Art of Scouting, Shane Malloy: John Wiley & Sons (2011), p. 17.

Many of my difficulties with Shane Malloy’s The Art of Scouting are in evidence in the passage from the book quoted above.  These criticisms relate to matters of both style and substance.  Malloy’s effort is stricken by so many technical issues, for example, that one might seriously question whether anyone at Wiley & Sons was tasked with editing the manuscript.  Proper names are – maddeningly and inexplicably – italicized throughout the book.   I know of no other work of literature in the English language that observes this convention.  Don’t even get me started on the haphazard manner in which punctuation is deployed; commas in the above-noted passage, typical of the work on the whole, appear to have been applied with the degree of care and precision that one generally associates with the use of a potato gun.  Content-wise, did I really just read a (tortured) sentence that struggled to relate to me a piece of un-information, namely that one of the hardest parts of amateur scouting is predicting whether an amateur player will be any good in the future?

Whatever, right?  Nobody reads a hockey book for the writing.  It’s ultimately about the hockey content, isn’t it?  For the record, I disagree.  I can think of at least three hockey books off the top of my head that I consider to be enjoyable primarily on account of the writers’ craft.   The writing need not play a starring role, perhaps, but without skilfull storytelling and clarity of expression the reader’s immersion in any subject material is inhibited.   The importance of a certain amount of technical merit is underscored by its absence, when (as in this book) that is the case.  Frequently awkward and almost juvenile, Malloy’s  text is from an aesthetic perspective frankly something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

Obviously, though, the marquee feature of a book about scouting, especially one that is subtitled “How the Hockey Experts Really Watch the Game and Decide Who Makes It”, is the promise that a light will be shone on the obscure habits and arcane methods of the (mostly anonymous) bird dogs in scouting circles.  In this regard, it must be said that – as perhaps the passage quoted above might suggest – Malloy’s book fails almost as spectacularly and almost as completely.

The concept of the book is, in my opinion, a strong one;  it is in the execution of that concept that this book falters.  Malloy is, according to the jacket on the book, a columnist and broadcaster who has been covering hockey prospects “for the past decade.”  He is apparently a co-host of Hockey Prospect Radio on Sirius Satellite Radio, though I have never heard of either the show or the author.  I gather that he has been involved in scouting for some time.  His concept was to take what he had learned about hockey scouting and complement it with the wisdom of others;  as a member of the scouting fraternity, Malloy was able to interview his peers and hoped to get them to talk about what exactly it is that they do for a living.  I was very excited by the notes on the book jacket  (a work of “tremendous substance” according to Doug Wilson; an inside look at what scouts do, per Bob McKenzie); I thought that I might enhance my ability to watch hockey critically by reading about what exactly it is that the scouts look for when evaluating talent.

Sadly, the book mostly fails to deliver any specific technical information in that regard.  For the most part, the information conveyed is either insultingly obvious (do I really need a flowchart to explain that typically, a team’s Assistant Director of Amateur Scouting reports to the Director of Amateur Scouting and “assists [him] with all of his duties”?) to the only slightly less obvious (scouts apparently look to see if a prospect can skate fast with the puck) to the  maddeningly uninformative (a section comes to mind in which readers are told that scouts are always on the lookout for prospects whose hands are “too high” or “too low”  on the stick – without giving any real guidance as to what parameters are preferable.)   In truth, what Malloy accomplishes is merely to set out a laundry list of issues or concerns that scouts typically look for – quickness, puck sense, decision-making, skating ability, physicality, etc. – without really delving into how physically the scouts watch for these things.  My complaint about the book is that as a former (rec league) player and follower of the sport, given half an hour and a pencil, I probably could have come up with at least 95% of these issues or concerns on my own, and you could too;  what I wanted was some insight into how the scouts identify those who possess the desired qualities while watching underdeveloped prospects compete against inferior opposition.  Not much of that was forthcoming.

Consider the section Malloy devotes to skating.  Like most of the specific attributes singled out for discussion in this book, skating is first said to be “one of the hardest” qualities for scouts to assess (page 113).  The general proposition that Malloy seems to advance is that few players in the cohort scoured by the scouts are possessed of a “perfect”, mechanically sound skating motion, and that the problem facing scouts evaluating young players, therefore, is identifying which players’ skating motion will be good enough, or successfully improved, to permit the prospect to achieve success in the NHL?  Malloy then says (at p. 118):

Most scouts and fans can see the players who don’t bend their knees or who are knock-kneed, but it’s the other little aspects that are harder to figure out.  When Jay Heinbeck is watching a player’s stride, he’s looking for a hint that the flaws aren’t going to be an issue moving forward.

“I often try to look at the the stride itself and the mechanics of it.  Is it the type of stride that strength and practice can improve? Or is that stride always going to hinder him, with little window for improvement?”

This passage begs the question:  what “flaws”, specifically, in the stride will be “an issue” moving forward?  What “type” of stride is susceptible to improvement through practice and the addition of strength?  What “type” of stride is not a candidate for this improvement?  These questions scream out for an answer, but questions such as these slip by unanswered in rapid fire succession throughout the book.   Ultimately, this passage collapses into an assertion of evaluation through unarticulated criteria – a reliance upon those with experience alone as judges.  If it is impossible to articulate precisely what components of the stride scouts look to for the answer to this question, it amounts to an assertion that they simply rely upon comparisons spontaneously brought to mind from patterns previously imprinted in their memories.  If that’s really all there is to scouting, it is no wonder that athletic scouts struggle so mightily to identify the talented among us in every sport.

The format of Malloy’s work is grating: peppered liberally with direct quotes from his sources, the text often reads as though these quotes are mere restatements of the general propositions with which Malloy has introduced them.  It would have been preferable for Malloy to vastly reduce the number of direct-quote passages and instead to write more analytically, synthesizing the information obtained from his sources into a more comprehensive and intelligible whole.  The continuous statement and restatement of more or less obvious observations – introduced first in a sentence or two by Malloy, then reiterated in a quoted passage from his industry source -  leaves the reader with the impression that far too many platitudes have been relied upon.  Consider the following pasage, from page 186 in the section on Goaltenders:

Corey Hirsch believes that the ability of prospects to play through minor injuries is a must in today’s NHL.  He points out that the larger goalies have an advantage in absorbing physical punishment.  The susceptibility of the smaller goaltender to injury is a serious consideration for scouts.

“The ability to play through injury is an aspect that we look at, and it seems the bigger goaltenders tend to be more durable these days with the crease crashing.  Although, as a scout you never want to completely rule out a smaller goaltender with ability.”

It is not surprising to me that scouts (and, by extension, their NHL organizations) want goaltenders who are durable, and that larger goaltenders might be believed to be more likely to survive the rigours of the pro game.  I certainly didn’t need to be told about this twice in consecutive paragraphs, particularly where the quoted passage is, in actual fact, much more ambivalent about the necessity of size for a goaltender than Malloy’s introductory statement would have you believe.

The general impression left by the book is that Malloy’s insiders only tell you that things like skating, passing, physicality, hockey sense and will are all important to them, that all of these are difficult or challenging to assess, and that nothing of value can be said about any of them that would assist someone  to reliably identify what observations of an individual might be made to identify those possessing the requisite level of skill and those without.  The overall effect is that writing about scouting seems – with apologies to Martin Mull – to be a little bit like dancing about architecture.

That general impression is unfortunate, first because it is difficult to believe that the proposition is accurate – it must be possible to articulate with some precision the desirable aspects of skills that are, in fact taught through verbal instruction by coaches in rinks across the country.  Second, it is unfortunate  because there are some informative specifics in this book, but these sections appear sporadically and tend to be obscured by the format of the text and the surfeit of generalities.  Through reading this book, for example, I learned that scouts look at whether a prospect alters the distance from his body at which he carries the puck (closely in traffic, further away and more out front of the body when on the rush).

My overall assessment of the book is that it represents a decent first draft of the book that should’ve been written on this subject, organizing the structure of the information to be imparted, but a first draft that represents nothing more than a statement of the problem to be tackled by the text, and in dire need of aggressive editing and a significant re-write at that.  I believe that an editor would wholly excise the chapter devoted to the “memorable” pranks played by scouts on one another – spoiler alert: they are not memorable at all.  What they are is thematically unrelated to the rest of the book; awkward and unentertaining, they ought to go.  An editor would drastically reduce the number of directly quoted passages, and would demand that Malloy provide some specific and concrete details in the areas of interest identified by scouts.  To be expanded would be sections on the steps pro clubs are taking to enhance their institutional efforts to assist players in their development and a tantalizing but all too brief segment about the use and development of some software called RinkNet – a scouting information database apparently used by 29 out of 30 NHL teams¹ (page 52).   Without these efforts, the book for the most part disappoints the reader hoping for help in revolutionizing the way he or she watches the game.

———————

¹How the hell could Malloy include this sentence in the book without going on to identify the lone technological holdout among the big league clubs?  How glaringly obvious is the fans’ desire to know which of the 30 teams is too cheap to shell out for a tool that every other club has found invaluable?

If Al Gore and a dangerously uncritical way of thinking have taught me anything, it’s that he invented the Internet some time in 1994. Since then, people the world over have been amusing one another with LOLcats, hilariously awkward teenagers playing at being a Jedi warrior, and anonymously calling one another “douchebag”.  Oh, and looking at porn.  Lots and lots of porn.   You’re on your own for links to that last one.

Sadly almost entirely absent from all of those 17 years of e-hilarity, however, was my friend Melissa.  She was the only person I knew who didn’t have access to the Internet at her house.  Work blocks us out from all the educational stuff on the ‘Net – like this video of a baby laughing hysterically – so my friend missed out almost entirely on the finer things that teh Intarwebs have to offer.  It’s a wonder she was able to function in society, really.

Well, no more.  My friend Melissa is now hooked up.  I picture her sitting down at her newly installed home computer, freshly connected to the cable modem  in her house, clicking links furiously, trying like hell to catch up with the rest of us by reading the entire Internet.   Got an all time favourite Internet meme that my friend should have the pleasure of experiencing for the first time ever with Internet n00b eyes?  Drop a link in the comments!

In the meantime, let’s have some applause for my friend!

Team Picture of Lokomotiv Yaroslavl taken Days Before Plane Crash

My deepest condolences to the families, friends and loved ones of all those who perished in the charter plane crash in Russia earlier today.  There are no words to express the sadness this tragic event has brought upon the hockey world;  no doubt players, coaches and team personnel throughout the NHL are thinking of teammates and friends gone too soon tonight.  Somewhere, there are young families grieving their own horrible loss as well.   A terrible day at the end of an awful summer for hockey’s extended family.

Slogan: “You may already be a member.”

I believe this organization to be the only one superior to the Sydney Carton Society (still waiting for that Second Annual Meeting, by the way).

Those trees along the north wall of that turkey barn? They used to have tops.

We had quite a storm last night around 9:30. Very strong winds for a short period of time, and protracted lightning/thunder. This morning, we discovered that we had several large trees down on the property.

These pictures were taken just down the road from our house. Apparently, Environment Canada is investigating reports of a possible tornado that tracked from Cambridge to Burlington; if so, I think it went right past our front door.

Thanking our lucky stars no one was hurt, and that the house and cars weren’t damaged.

A Ninja, doing the hokey pokey

You may have noticed that this blog has fallen dormant over the last little while.  I am a ninja, and I am here to tell you about that.  Why has a ninja been sent to explain these things?  Fool! It is not the right time for you to ask questions.  When will that time be?  Sometime shortly after the next Atlanta Thrashers Stanley Cup parade will do fine.

The Junior, Lord and Master of the Juniorvanian Realm, has been a busy Lord and Master.  Not just “I need to fix the trailer tire” busy – as you have seen, he can find time to write while being that kind of busy – but Very Busy In A Work Related Way busy.  Also, you may have heard that there has come a child to Juniorvania.  So, Very Busy In A Work Related Way has also been augmented by Very Busy In An Emptying Diapers Way.  All of which is very busy indeed.

I would think it’s fairly obvious now why a ninja has been sent to speak to you.  Yes, that’s right, because of global warming.

I, the Ninja, will now bring the message to you.  It is in several parts, which I have not bothered to count yet, because I have been busy sneaking around instead.  You may not know this, but sneaking around is a major part of pretty much any ninja’s day.  I didn’t know, before I went to ninja school.  For some reason, I thought there would be a lot more singing and dancing, but I suppose I was mixed up and thinking of Broadway actors by mistake.

One thing James Reimer can't stop: the momentum of the Maple Leafs Annual

Anyway, here is the message:

1. There has NOT been an unfortunate tire repair-related explosion;  The Junior is alive and well;
2. The Junior does plan to return to regular – or what passes for “regular”around here, anyway – blogging, probably sometime in September;
3. In the meantime, The Junior has written a something, once again, for Maple Street Press’ Maple Leafs Annual.  The book is available for pre-order online now ($9.99 plus shipping).  It will appear on newsstands throughout the GTA and in Chapters bookstores across Canada beginning August 30th.

It doesn’t take a Ninja to figure out that 112 pages of content  with no ads, for less than ten bucks, is a pretty good deal.  As Alec Brownscombe (esteemed editor of the mag and Resident Padishah of Maple Leafs Hot Stove) pointed out, you were probably going to spend that ten bucks on a crappy calendar anyway.

Anyway, I gotta get back to skulking around invisibly, or I’ll have to answer to my boss.  Ever had your work environment supervised by a Master Ninja?  Let me tell you, it’s no day at the beach;  you can’t get away with anything.   You can’t ever tell when he’s in the room.  At least I think my boss is a male.  Not sure, now come to think of it.

See ya!  You won’t see me, though…

The boy on the right may have a dangerous idiot for a father.

Had you seen me, ’round about six o’clock in the evening on Sunday, heading in the general direction of the People’s Lawn Tractor with a gas can, some matches and a distinct air of purpose about me – well, no one would have blamed you for feeling a little uneasy.  That vague sense of foreboding may just have gained some urgency, if you were told that just minutes earlier, I had been studying intently a page on the Internet that used words like “fire”, “explosion” and “gasoline.”  Let’s face it, there’s a certain gleam that a man gets in his eye when he’s fixing to blow something up, a gleam that you would recognize instantly though you’ve never seen it before.

Here’s the thing:  Spouse, Furious G and I have been residing beyond the borders of little Juniorvania for about a month, or rather we had been away, living at my parents’ place, up until Saturday afternoon.  The reasons for the exodus are complicated, but boil down to the serious strain placed upon the People’s Treasury as a result of paying for electricity to heat the house when it gets cold outside, which is “always” on account of Juniorvania’s extreme proximity to Canada.  Accordingly, the People’s Department of Public Works, Heatery and Assorted Mechanicals contracted with an external provider to bash a bunch of holes in the walls of the house, install duct work and hide the workshop by placing a giant furnace on it.   This arrangement, of course, has caused the People’s Treasury to ratchet up the level of complaining to “jet engine” volume levels, as the People’s Minister of Finance is incapable of understanding how such an enormous expenditure could ever “save” money, and is instead convinced that this is all some sort of preposterous and grotesque joke perpetrated at the expense of his fragile nerves and anxious bowels.  In the silver lining department, however, this hugely destructive and horrendously unaffordable and unsightly project brings a bonus: air conditioning!

Where was I?  Oh yes, explaining how Spouse, The Boy and I made like Jed Clampett and Clan, packed up the truck and moved to Beverley in order to avoid being demolished along with the walls and ceilings.  Did you know that walls and ceilings are highly offensive to HVAC contractors?  Well, based on the nature and extent of the destruction I have seen, I can only assume that walls and ceilings have an unfortunate habit of making intemperate comparisons between HVAC contractors and uncouth and unattractive individuals with small penises, because the walls and ceilings really do seem to take a walloping from these fellows.

Our month long banishment from the premises thus allowed the stainless steel behemoth to take root and grow within the house;  outside the four (or fewer) walls of the house, however, also growing and taking root was an enormous rainforest where the front lawn used to be.

Now, I don’t want to say that the lawn was a little overgrown, but just this past weekend, scientists discovered three heretofore unknown species of snake, two tribes of nomadic peoples and a dinosaur roaming among the densely packed vegetation on the front forty.

The long and the short, but mostly just the long, of the problem.

The lawn needed to be cut, but this was not going to be just any mowing; in musical terms, whereas the usual lawn mowing is a three-chord doo wop tune,  this particular excursion was going to be a Wagnerian opera with a side discharge chute.  There were many technical problems to be confronted – how to keep the engine from stalling when asked to chop down the giant trunks of the grass trees, how to illuminate the path of the mower (with the dense canopy of the lawn blocking out the sun from above), how to keep the Operator’s beer cold for the prolonged Mission time – but chief among these worries was the Problem of the Clippings.

When you cut large amounts of long grass, you create a commensurately large pile of clippings on the lawn, which pile must be moved, because if you don’t move them then you have essentially just piled a bunch of dead stuff on your (now shorter) lawn, thus depriving the living part of it entirely of sunlight and making the whole damn thing dead.

Complicating the problem, it’s been raining continuously here since August 6, 1942, so the clippings were a little wet.  Huge piles of wet grass clippings that need to be moved by means of manual raking means that the People’s Lawn Tractor Trailer must be utilized.  Patience, I’m getting really close to explaining the bit about fires and explosions and such now.

The trailer was banished outdoors from the relative safety of the garage this past winter, and there was one casualty: the left tire on the People’s Trailer lost the bead on its rim and came up flat.  The bead needed to be reset, and the tire re-inflated.

Like any reasonable person, I turned to everybody’s most trusted technical advisor: random and completely anonymous people with no verifiable credentials whatsoever.  They taught me this trick:

I didn’t have ether, so I used (a VERY little bit of) gasoline instead.  It took three attempts, but each one featured a very satisfying “thwumpf” sound, and enough of a fiery flourish to excite all but the most finicky of pyromaniacs. Still have all my limbs, didn’t set the house on fire, and did not launch any exploding fiery wheels through the upper story windows of the house either. Time elapsed: maybe five minutes (including time required to fill a really big bucket with water as a precaution measure, lest there be any unfortunate incidents).

Trailer’s working like a charm.

Round and round and round they go, where they stop, nobody knows except that everybody knows it's not here.

Noted fishwrapper/parakeet cage liner the Toronto Star has news today that is guaranteed to fan the already raging nationalistic fire that burns so brightly among many about the state of professional hockey.  According to the Star, a report published today by the Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation at the University of Toronto argues that the league “should focus on bolstering the game in Canada where demand is greatest”.

Canada’s six teams account for nearly one-third of league revenue. Most of those loonies end up in the United States, which has 24 teams, through revenue sharing.

The report, titled “The New Economics of the NHL,” uses potential gate revenue as a measure of economic success. It looks at 10 Canadian cities and ranks each as a potential host for an NHL team, based on size, wealth, geographic location and other factors.

There are six Canadian markets where a new NHL team would thrive, the report found, citing Greater Toronto as the best one.

In fact, with 9 million people, the larger Golden Horseshoe could successfully support as many as three NHL teams. The study found that another team would be successful in Hamilton, London or Kitchener-Waterloo.

Montreal and Vancouver also have enough demand, as do Winnipeg and Quebec City. Teams in any of those cities would generate higher gate revenues than the average U.S. Sun Belt team.

DISCLAIMER: I haven’t read the report.  It follows, then, that in reacting to this news, I am relying heavily upon the Star to have accurately summarized the content of the report in question.  I am well aware that there is little compelling evidence to suggest that such reliance is warranted.

It seems to me, though, that two important points need to be kept in mind about these findings when this report is inevitably brandished by those who favour repatriation of the Coyotes Jets, or the importation of the Atlanta Thrashers (or whatever the troubled franchise du jour happens to be):

1. The study seems to rely upon potential gate revenue (tickets sold) as the key metric of success for an NHL team.  Though I don’t have the time at the moment to Google up the relevant data, I believe that it is true that the NHL, when compared to other professional sports leagues, relies disproportionately upon ticket sales to drive revenue.   The key business problem facing the league as a result of that fact is that it limits the growth potential of the business.  If income is almost entirely dependent upon tickets sold, you can only increase income by selling more tickets; if you can only sell more tickets by either (a) adding more capacity (through expansion of the league or physically increasing the size of the buildings in which the game is played) or (b) ensuring that you sell more of the currently available tickets (increasing efficiency by reducing unsold inventory).   Whichever of these growth strategies are employed (and they’re not mutually exclusive), the fact remains that there are real limits to the currently unexploited potential.   How many teams are too many?   Some would argue that the current complement of 30 is excessive; does anyone believe the NHL would be viable with 36 teams?  Forty?  Similarly, it would be ludicrous to plan for expanding gate revenue by simply doubling the size of the buildings.   The point is that if the NHL is to have its eyes on real sustainable growth of its business over the long-term, it needs to develop additional revenue streams.  By now, everybody should know that “additional revenue streams” means either getting paid for a national television rights in the U.S., or finding another way (Internet, PPV) to deliver the content to consumers willing to pay for it.  At the end of the day, this study – at least according to the Star article – says nothing about the effect upon that growth strategy that an increased concentration of teams in Canada would have.
2. The study assesses the suitability of ten Canadian markets for an NHL team and concludes that six would perform (again, concentrating on gate revenues) better than current “Sun Belt” teams.  Keeping in mind the limitations of the gate-revenue focus discussed above in point #1, all that can really be said is that if the NHL decides it can and should put another team in Canada, that the GTA is the best available option from that perspective, with Hamilton, Montreal, Vancouver, Kitchener-Waterloo and London all ahead of Winnipeg and Quebec City in the estimation of the reports’ authors.  In other words, because of the limitations of the reports’ focus, it should probably only be used as a tool to select among Canadian candidate cities, rather than as evidence of the superiority of the Canadian option on the whole.

One last thought:  it was interesting to me how far down the list of suitable candidates Winnipeg and Quebec City were ranked.  Much of the media coverage of the Coyotes and Thrashers recent problems, at least since the death of Mr. Balsillie’s proposal to bring the Coyotes to Hamilton, has been premised on the unstated assumption that Winnipeg and Quebec City are the leading candidates.  This may very well be so, in that these cities are favoured by the League for reasons of its own.  What is made clear as a result of this report is that if the NHL does have such a preference, it must be premised upon considerations that are much more far-ranging than merely potential gate revenue.

Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.  ~Jack Handey, “Deep Thoughts,” Saturday Night Live

Click here to hear some of that medicine – The Boy Laughing

We’ve been ill around here for the last little bit.  A noxious, soul-destroying cold, first imported into the Land by Spouse, has layed us low and challenged our little nation’s strategic tissue reserves. The outbreak cannot be blamed upon Spouse; she became infected late last week (we believe) at a

"I recommend amputation!"

I have been fortunate enough to be able to reduce the impact on myself – I’ve been munching ginseng capsules like they’re Cheerios since last Sunday morning – but Spouse can’t avail herself of any of the myriad common cold remedies because she is nursing.  Her lot, sadly, has been to suffer The Crap unshielded, unmedicated and undiminished, praying for the onset of convalescensce.

It’s not May yet, but we like to be ahead of the curve here at HiR:tb. It rarely happens, but we like it. Anyway, Moms of the world – including my own Mom – you rock.  Thanks for doing all the stuff you do for the rest of us jackasses.  We might not act like it, but we do appreciate it.