The VICTORIOUS HOCKEY COMPANY’s Weekly Newsletter: PIERRE MCGUIRE’S PARTING SHOT

PIERRE MCGUIRE’S PARTING SHOT ABOUT ANALYTICS IN HOCKEY IS A REMINDER OF WHAT WE CAN IGNORE

By Sean Gentille, The Athletic

The wise move upon hearing the news of Pierre McGuire’s super soft post-NBC landing — the gracious one, maybe — would’ve been to say nothing.

After 10, 15, 25 years of chasing windmills, McGuire caught one. He’s a front-office Hockey Man once more, courtesy of Eugene Melnyk and the Ottawa Senators. The job title, vice president of player development, is no small thing. He’s not a general manager, as Pierre Dorion is in Ottawa at the moment, and as McGuire nearly was in Pittsburgh not so long ago, but hey, what can you do? Maybe it works out. He followed his bliss. There’s something to be said for that.

Best of luck in your future endeavors and namaste, or whatever. As someone who just spent a too large portion of 15 years watching him on television, and as someone without any stake in the success of the Senators’ player development pipeline, it felt like a win-win.

It still is … but McGuire left us — and “us” here is the coalition of chumps who can’t ignore TV guys who get on their nerves — with one for the road.

It was, of course, about analytics, which McGuire totally doesn’t sneer at and totally does understand. Let ‘er rip, baby! Go out the way you came in!

“It’s not that I hate analytics, but I believe in scouting,” he said.

“I believe that there has to be people that are boots on the ground, hardcore hockey people that can actually evaluate a player without utilizing numbers and (decide that) the player passes the eye test.

I still don’t know if there’s an analytic equation for heart, 

for character,

for hard work,

for fearlessness,

for determination,

so that’s part of the formula that hardcore, boot-on-the-ground scouting has to be.

“I don’t hate analytics. I think it’s a tool that can be utilized in any kind of evaluation, but I’m a big believer in boots-on-the-ground scouting.”

And thus, a reason to write about a guy changing jobs was borne. It’s too tidy of a mission statement to ignore; this is what we’ve heard from him for years, in the face of facts and logic, and a nice reminder of what U.S. audiences won’t get with, say, Brian Boucher standing between the benches on ESPN.

It’s also … kind of weird, right? McGuire knows — he must know — that analytics and scouting, in 2021, isn’t an either/or proposition. NHLorganizations are big places, full of different jobs, skill sets and personalities. No team — literally none — is making personnel decisions based on big, noisy mainframes and dot-matrix printouts or whatever goes on in that corner of his imagination.

That’s conventional wisdom at this point; the best way to build a team is to cull information from a bunch of different sources, then rely on your people to synthesize it. Teams with analytics departments also have “boots on the ground” scouts. That’s how it works. Cross-disciplinary approaches are good. Arguments are good.

Whether he views data analysts as “hardcore hockey people” might be a more interesting question. The best analysts I know spend more time watching games, tweaking models, learning about the game and closing information gaps than anybody. Maybe even Pierre McGuire.

Whether he actually understands “analytics” is less interesting, because the answer is clear. He doesn’t. He doesn’t understand the work and he doesn’t understand the people who do it. He’s been telling us as much for years.

Ah, yes. The Edmonton Oilers — analytics darlings, because they’re bad. No word on which Computer Boy is telling Ken Holland to trade for a soon-to-be-38-year-old Duncan Keith. The Tampa Bay Lightning? Now there’s an old-time hockey team — because they’re good. Ignore Michael Peterson. Certainly ignore Julien BriseBois.

The best example I can think of, as a Pittsburgh-based writer, is how McGuire treated every shift and every positive impact by the Teddy Blueger line. Blueger, Zach Aston-Reese and Brandon Tanev are, very literally, analytics darlings. Their work, 15 years ago, would either be unnoticed, unappreciated or not statistically flashy enough to keep the line intact. Analytics exist to show the impact of players like Blueger, Aston-Reese and Tanev.

In McGuire’s world (as a broadcaster, at least), the nerds hate Blueger, Aston-Reese and Tanev. “No analytics can measure that,” he said on May 20, after Tanev scored the game-winner against the Islanders. Goals are pretty easy to measure, actually, and the effort/determination/character that those guys bring to the game shows up as measurable, tangible results in plenty of spots.

Tanev in particular is a treat to watch — partially because his fearlessness leads to, y’know, good stuff. If he were out there, skating like a maniac and getting caved in, what purpose would he serve? There are plenty of sayings about “effort without results,” and none of them are good. Thankfully for the Penguins, that’s not in play with Tanev.

There’s more, though. There always is; you’ve got 15 years of tape to go back on, though I’m not sure why you’d want to do that. We could keep going and maybe fully rehash an argument that should’ve been settled a decade ago. That’d be fun.

So, we’ll leave it here; McGuire can now ride his favorite hobby horse to the Senators front office. Maybe it’ll work out, and maybe it won’t. It’s not impossible to imagine him acting as a decent counter-balance in the room, whenever The Big Debates are taking place. That’s between him, Dorion and whoever else.

As viewers, though, we’re officially spared. Fifteen years is a long time to listen to a person if they don’t find something new to say.

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