Takeaways from the Florida Cup

I’m sure this won’t be the only “true takeaways” from a cup article that you’ll see or read in the coming days. There are plenty of things to learn from this team especially one that’s been so successful for so long and come by their Stanley Cup win in such a dominant fashion. I can’t say I have a particularly unique perspective among plenty of the Twitter analysts or real journalists or even former NHL coaches, but I feel the need to express myself all the same.

The Humanity of Team Sports

I was struck by a few things as Florida went back to back but I think there are some throughlines that I can connect before pulling it back to winning. What resonated with me the most was something Paul Maurice said and a similar sentiment echoed by Matthew Tkachuk, and I’ll use that to set the table.

I am paraphrasing, so forgive me, but Maurice mentioned something that Evan Rodrigues said to him about joining the locker room and finally feeling like he had found a place he belonged, where he didn’t need to be anything other than what he was. Previously he wasn’t tough enough or didn’t score enough or whatever.

Matthew Tkachuk talked extensively about how the locker room was special and cohesive, a sentiment that has been echoed by Maurice and Zito and I’m sure plenty of interviews in the wake of the Cup wins. There’s a certain afterglow of winning, or of accomplishing lifelong goals even if for the second time that means pretty much everything you say will be positive. Your opponent was incredible, your teammates the best thing that ever existed. For now, though, let’s take it at face value.

Every offseason, Maurice does a "culture survey" for his team. Last offseason, one of the players reported that when they walked into the Panthers' dressing room for the first time "it felt like I'd been there for 10 years" with the team.

"That room that we have is so welcoming. Your personality fits almost no matter what it is. The more unusual your personality, the more you're going to fit in our room," Maurice said. "As long as you do those four or five things you need to do, everybody gets to be themselves."

I think there’s very real power in a familial type, brotherhood bond inside a locker room and one that can help translate to winning. I think this is perhaps a secondary characteristic, which I’ll get to in a second, but I think this distributed or equal vibe is visible throughout the Panthers especially with respect to the Edmonton Oilers. I think having good people in the locker room is part in parcel.

The entire team must have ownership in creating wins. Your best players will be your best players but if the bottom of your roster is playing just to kill time, or without a clear objective that points them to contributing to a team win, it creates a sort of toxic spiral that has a corrosive effect.

I think, unfortunately, Edmonton were victims of this very force. Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl were the entire team and it feels like everyone knew it. Although I think the next wave of players, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Matthias Ekholm and Evan Bouchard were definitely good enough it seemed as if every other player on the roster existed only with how their skillsets could be used by McDavid and Draisaitl.

I think that problem was exacerbated by some player acquisitions in the pursuit of wins, namely Evander Kane, Corey Perry and Jake Walman. I don’t want to appeal to the broader hockey culture of players who are selfish for celebrating their own accomplishments, and don’t want to pretend that there aren’t shitty off-ice antics coming from a gigantic amount of NHLers, but I do want to the spotlight two of those in particular were moved from hockey teams gleefully and it had little to do with their on-ice talents. I think both expressed their off-ice character with a complete lack of mental fortitude as the Oilers completely crashed out at the end of Game 3.

Is that associated with the leadership of the stars? With coaching? With the second wave of players? Honestly, I think the answer is yes but it starts at the top.

Empathy and Brutality: How Bill Zito’s Panthers Became the NHL’s Model Franchise

Sean Shapiro, perhaps one of the aforementioned real journalists I was alluding to, brought the heat with respect to Bill Zito. I think empathy, emotional intelligence and flow from him through the rest of the org. Through those skills comes confidence. Heck, maybe it’s even the other way around.

One of the things that stuck with me from that conversation with Zito was about how much he hated trading players away. We were talking in a suite at at the arena, and he took a long deep sigh before saying, “it’s really the worst part. You come in and you have to be the person who decides to flip someone’s life upside down, make them tell their family that they have to go to faraway place, that kids have to move away from friends. That hurts every time.”

What I can say is different is the approach of Stan Bowman. A person with a history of forgoing humanity in the pursuit of wins who has now built a team that reflects some of those characteristics. I’m sure we’ve all seen Connor McDavid screaming at his Oilers locker room. We’ve now seen Evander Kane and Jake Walman completely lose their minds.

We’ve seen Florida, staut and confident in their emotional intelligence, dominate with relentless pressure with contributions from literally everywhere in the lineup. Real high quality confidence that I think would have held well even in the face of defeat.

Look, I bring up so much of this because it all personally resonates with me. More often, I was the Connor McDavid yelling and trying to will something out of a group of people because I wanted something badly and thought it reflected on me poorly that I couldn’t make it happen.

I was more or less a solo effort, captaining, coaching and doing all of the logistics for a college ultimate frisbee team at Ohio State. I struggled a lot, especially with the weight of importance of the sport. It’s a club sport filled with people who have a lot of better things to be doing, quite frankly.

Still, I, like Zito, struggled with the weight of “roster decisions”. Young kids were coming to play frisbee in their free time and it was up to me to juggle the current players’ desires to win, the lack of free time and attention they really had to give and the fact that there’s around 100 people every year who want to join and I’m the person most responsible for killing “careers” before they even start.

Perhaps making it too important was the fatal flaw but it’s at least nice to see some struggle from someone else at the top of something.

Something else that I experienced, at the very least, was both players like Connor McDavid and some I had much closer experience with that, in my opinion, were much more like Matthew Tkachuk or Aleksander Barkov. My club group, which I had come to lead after a bunch of personal growth, was called High Five. That team felt a lot like what I’m reading about the Florida Panthers locker rooms.

Some of the best players in the game but also some of the best people. I am continually inspired by my teammates by some of my best friends. I could go on about their defensive creativity and genius, they unimpeachable character and how it elevates their play in crunch time, how their relentless love for the game made spending entire summers driving to practice in a different state or flying to tournaments across the country and world worth it but I fear mentioning their names wouldn’t hold altogether that much weight in this space.

Ultimately, though, we didn’t win that much. We lost our underdog mentality and let it get to us but having moved on from that team, I will say that I never really appreciated what we fully had going.

I suppose that’s the genesis of it all and why I’m writing it now. Watching the battle of top athletes, of the room and energy and brotherhood and friendship coming out of the Florida lockerroom has me pining for those days. It has my brain matching patterns from the past and hoping that my personal experience there for some reason lends me some insight or perspective.

In any case, I came up with a sort of shorthand and I think I keep seeing it repeat itself. There are people who win as a byproduct of being who they are and how they work within the people around them. There are also people who think winning is the only thing. I think these are process and results oriented people but oftentimes I find that the first group find more success, especially over the long term, either way. They win as a byproduct of their approach and magnitude but they win another way but firmly enjoying where they are, win or lose.

I still think this all points back to my very romantic idea of sports. They’re really just life, distilled down and put on an accelerated time scale. The beginning of a career in the NHL and the retirement is it’s own little life and death. Winning and losing happen frequently as do spectular times in life and terrible ones.

Strange then, to me, that I found a similar approach from the new pope:

In our competitive society, where it seems that only the strong and winners deserve to live, sport also teaches us how to lose. It forces us, in learning the art of losing, to confront our fragility, our limitations and our imperfections. It is through the experience of these limits that we open our hearts to hope. Athletes who never make mistakes, who never lose, do not exist.

I’ve now moved through perhaps a strong tangent but I’ll circle back. The way you handle your business, the people around you and your life, might be reflected in your sporting. I don’t think Connor McDavid or Leon Draisaitl are bad people, though it’s much easier to point the finger at other members of the Oilers organization, and it’s understandable that they are overly focused on winning and building their legacy but I think the Barkov approach is always going to be a bit more enduring.

I think good people or excellent people have a tendency to find success rather than chasing it outright. People who know that every single person in the org is important and worthy of the same consideration and respect are ones who have already better confronted and acknowledged their own fragility. This isn’t the false humility that NHL media deflection culture propagates but a real one that isn’t rooted in anger.

Ultimately, though, this is why sports are so appealing to me. They’re a vessel through which to observe humanity. To learn about ourselves and, in reflection, ways to improve. To be better, happier, kinder and trusting that the success will follow along the way.

Starting at the Top

The Florida Panthers have been a tactical treat to follow but I think we’d be remiss to think that they won because of their tactics or coaching. It was good, to be sure, but I think it goes a bit deeper.

I dont’ want to say Paul Maurice had nothing to do with it, success of this magnitude comes from total alignment from top to bottom and through contributions everywhere. Without the team and players put in front of him he wouldn’t have had anything to work with.

It’s easy to look at Florida’s wins and say “forechecking wins hockey games”, or “being big and heavy” is what wins or even the unfortunate conclusion that “meanness and soft-cheated and gaming refs is what wins” but frankly I don’t think any of that matters if this team isn’t built on players like Aleksander Barkov and Matthew Tkachuk.

Those two win matchups and they win games. Matthew Tkachuk, at the time of his acquisition, put up the single best playdriving season (according to Evolving Hockey’s RAPM metric) recorded since analytics became widespread in 2007. Every other facet of organizational value springs from the dominant skillsets distributed in the top six for this team.

That’s the first takeaway, you need elite, top of the NHL talent and you need players who dominate possession first and foremost. From there, put them in a system and surround them with players that complement those skills and that drive value from everywhere.

But how did Florida find all of these players? It starts at the top: Not only Bill Zito, who is magnificent, but because of his trust in his analytics forward AGM Sunny Mehta.

My exposure to Sunny Mehta came from his speech at the Sloan Analytics conference and on this panel. At the time he was post-director of New Jersey’s Analytics. I was consuming all of the analytics content I could possibly find.

But I digress. If you started the video already, you probably already know the surprise. Who sat next to Sunny Mehta but then AGM of the Columbus Blue Jackets Bill Zito.

Here’s Zito’s face when Sunny Mehta claims that he thinks there are a ton of teams not prepared for the incoming puck and player tracking data (he’s clearly an active listener but following Zito’s facial expressions through this first statement is hilarious). What do you know, Zito gets the job in Florida, hires Mehta and I think we can claim with certainty that the Florida Panthers are one of the teams fully bought into analytics.

I appreciate you’re probably very frustrated [Zito to Mehta] on some levels but I’m a little bit more excited because I don’t have your acumen for the numbers

It’s just far too easy to see this exact dynamic underpinning the Florida Panthers’ management right now. Zito as the magnanimous emotional intelligence leader, knowing what he doesn’t know, operating with full trust of Sunny Mehta the analyst and talent identifier.

If you don’t believe me, listen to Jeff Marek.

Since this is primarily a Blue Jackets focused publication, worth mentioning that Bill Zito says in the panel that the Blue Jackets were a team, in 2019, that were interested in using analytics to find an edge. They have Zac Urbak in the front office they have the previous Florida Analytics regime in Cam Lawrence and Josh Weissbock, at least as consultants, on the payroll.

To fold it back to Sunny Mehta though:

I think the advent of data like that will have the effect of increasing variance. In terms of the things that people can do with it. It’s not necessarily clear to me that it’s gonna increase the expected value. Good analysis is still good analysis. The data doesn’t make the analysis.

The Blue Jackets front office is still the one that traded Pierre-Luc Dubois for Patrik Laine, Josh Anderson for Max Domi and sold Vladislav Gavrikov for futures and then spent them + a little more for Ivan Provorov and also traded a pick, paid to move on from Laine and then couldn’t make the value back and signed Olivier to a long term deal based on personality and contract year career best goalscoring (not inherently wrong if you think Florida’s vibes drives winning).

That isn’t to say the Blue Jackets are required to make changes, continuity is good and learning from mistakes is even better (hockey is too random for the above type of mistakes to never happen), but you have to wonder if there’s not some room in there for more brilliance. Bill Zito came from here, hopefully the analytical quality didn’t leave with him.

Maybe it’s just increased integration of the analysts already in the office, I can’t be sure. You’d think Waddell would know what high quality analytical process looks like and if he believes there’s high quality people, you’d think he’d be right.

Now, I’ll take a moment to point out that Chris Boucher, then of SportLogiq, is now the Montreal Canadiens’ Director of Analytics, the panel host Tyler Dellow is now the Assistant General Manager of the Carolina Hurricanes and Meghan Duggan is the New Jersey Devils’ Director of Player Development.

To step back for a second, Sunny Mehta is probably the reason I’m doing this writing here today for something he said later on the panel when asked by the audience what he thinks is the biggest overlooked factor for the online hockey analytics community when it comes to player evaluation.

Domain knowledge. Predictive value and domain knowledge.

The scientific method starts with hypothesis. You have to understand the game, you have to understand why the things you’re seeing are the way they are.

I’m familliar with the scientific method from being trained through neuroscience research in college but hockey was more of a sport by feeling and applying my perspective gained by playing my own certainly different sport. I had experience with biomechanics and the neuroscience of motor control but Mehta made explicit that I needed to understand hockey on it’s level first if I wanted to do any interesting work.

From that point, I looked into and read everything I could to actually learn about the game of hockey and how it’s played. I read Tape to Space for analytics and systems, Darryl Belfry’s books for tactical knowledge but mostly I committed myself to doing as learning. I’d sit down to try to write the tactical story of each and every game and by doing so learn what actually creates wins or how to better measure hockey games.

I’m getting there. I understand far better, I’ve watched closely for an entire year and hand tracked that information. Now I need to develop some more skills so that I can start moving toward answering the new questions I have.

The Skills That Separate

I think those players express a certain skillset that has now become an organizational tentpole and it’s been something that I’ve been trying to better define for quite some time. It’s something that most players on the Panthers have.

Is it physicality? Sure in part. But it’s also intelligence. Aleksander Barkov is probably the best puck protector in the league. Why? Well he knows first what he wants to do as one of the best puck thieves and knows how to prevent giving signals that trigger puck takeaways but he also understands momentum and trajectories and how to shape his to avoid or manipulate yours. He’s dominant on the backwall and at dragging a defender too him and then exploiting the space he just created.

Sam Reinhart, in many ways, is the same. He’s a hockey genius who uses those momentum forecasting and body awareness skills to strip pucks and jump forward into space to work off of Barkov. When he and Barkov start exchanging passes, the defense is toast.

Matthew Tkachuk is an absolutely elite physical and playmaking talent but who doesn’t possess incredible footspeed. He doesn’t need to, partially because he knows what’s going to happen before everyone else, but also because he understands these same things. He can feather a puck through layers of the defense because he knows where they can’t defend and he can identify a puck trajectory, with his soft touch passing skills, that intercepts his teammate (often Sam Bennett who is excellent at reading the attacking space as well).

Their knowledge, and the continued examples of these three elite players, has matriculated into the games of Carter Verhaeghe, Sam Bennett, Anton Lundell and Eetu Luostarinen. These are good players on their own, but they’ve all become masters of taking away time and space, winning the body (not necessarily through crushing hits but not opposed to it either) and winning the puck.

This is all expressed most perfectly by their acquisition of Brad Marchand. He too has been one of the elite spatial and body interaction understanders in the entire league. It’s an institutional knowledge that might also have come from a player like Brad Marchand and rubbed off on an elite senser in David Pastrnak too.

This detail, of controlling the defensive stick with body positioning, is something that is noticeable across the Bruins’ top players. Brad Marchand is constantly positioning in a way that is inconvenient for sticks and I believe Pavel Zacha is picking up some of those maneouvers as well. Perhaps this sort of “deck stacking” is how he’s been able to break out next to skilled offensive players.

I wrote this blurb in my first game breakdown against Boston in January of 2024. Brad Marchand was an inspired playstyle aligned fit for the Florida Panthers. You are welcome to believe that his Rat attitude was important juice alongside Bennett and Tkachuk. Perhaps that mirrored the Florida on-ice pressure with some psychological pressure on the mental battleground, both of which exposed cracks in the Oilers’ foundation but it starts with the on-ice first.

"Bodychecking is part of the game of hockey. When you play the game the right way and pay attention to all the details, checking is going to be part of it. It's not to intimidate. It's not to injure. It's literally so that you can't get into the play if I bump into you," Zito said. "It's just chess, except with time and space. So it's effective."

Listen to Zito. This team understands that hockey is about time and space. Exaggerating yours, shrinking theirs. This sort of body intelligence, the use and skills within the Brain-Body-Stick-Space-Possession axis, is how the Florida Panthers built their advantages.

They played possession hockey, chipped the puck out when it wasn’t an attacking situation, and worked hard to recover it (and quite critically recognized that defensemen should join the pressuring and spatial play up ice if there were the appropriate person). They moved as a unit and stayed connected. Their hustle shrinks space and then they exploit your lack of space to create loose pucks and turnovers. (This should be good for the Blue Jackets who scored a boatload of offense from turnovers in the regular season and who brought a ton of aggression and defense activation up-ice).

I mention this, partially because this is a copycat league and I don’t want us to take away that dumping and chasing is the way to go and forechecking is actually the truth and the only way to win.

I mention it to point out that when defensive pressure and intensity is ramped up, perhaps “speed” isn’t the way to break through but rather teamwork and the ability to play through this spatial pressure by manipulating the bodies and letting the puck be fast instead. Perhaps being fast has an unintended effect of shrinking your own time and space and not giving you or your teammates enough time to exploit the space you’ve created (which is only behind you unless someone is matching).

Connor McDavid, the unanimously most “skilled” player resorted to extended carries and was rendered ineffective by a fully aligned Panthers effort filled with elite players. Does this mean speed and puck carrying is bad? No not necessarily, he was great in the first two games, and has carried the team (although Leon Draisaitl is perhaps more aligned with the Panthers’ style) to two Stanley Cup finals.

I mention it because I think we saw similar “skilled” but inefficient performances from him, where he was overly puck dominant and chose speed over breakdown creation, in the Four Nations faceoff too. He and Nathan MacKinnon have struggled to find the playoff success that their extraordinary skill, point totals and ice-tilting dominance might suggest.

I think, they often play themselves a little dumb. They play too fast at the expense of spatial advantages and teammates. They’re not playing hockey, reading the defense, creating uncertainty and leveraging it into huge breakdowns, they’re playing carry the puck and skate fast and hope that’s enough. They look like how I play NHL24, just speed down at all times. My advice there would just be downshift sometimes and play and read off of your teammates and defense. Speed is a tool to be used to create time and space, going too fast is just as harmful as not going fast enough. You’ve got to find the Goldilocks zone and feed your teammates opportunities in the slot.

(Side note, though there’s excellent finishing, each of the listed players are transformational playmakers and passers too. Passing is one of the most critical skills in hockey. Right now, the Blue Jackets might have a bit of a deficit in their highly drafted talent (Fantilli and Lindstrom and at least consistency from Kent Johnson) and whether that’s addressed through the draft or otherwise, should probably be a point of focus).

Notice, perhaps, how a team with Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner was much nearer equal to the Cup Winners. These aren’t particularly fast players but they love working together to create space and advantages and they’re both great defensively.

I don’t mean to make this about something that it isn’t. Those are great players who have, or are certainly good enough to, be the best players on Stanley Cup winning teams. As it comes to market advantages though, perhaps the rest of the league is too focused on “speed” without understanding that the puck will always move faster than the players. Two players working to break a defense is always better than one. Five is the best. The most space in the slot exists after an unexpected or well timed takeaway into countering. If you can create goals without huge time and space, you’re unbeatable.

That should ultimately be the perspective. Does skating fast with the puck with blinding puck skills create time and space? Does it work when you don’t have time and space? Can you find the winning line between those two. Can your players gets stops? Can they create advantages from zero? Can they finish when they have an advantage?

Perhaps by overindexing on speed at the top of the draft, we’re overlooking players who can succeed in intense situations and instead finding players who avoid intense situations at lower levels. I posit that Florida, whether emergent or discovered from having Barkov and Tkachuk or designed by Sunny Mehta/Bill Zito/Paul Maurice, has found the line between skill and tactics therefore has found three consecutive years of excellent playoff success.

At the end of the day, Florida won because they were way deeper throughout the lineup and because they wisely deployed analytics to create their depth. In fact, their command of depth via low-cost acquisitions and unstoppable roster should serve as an embarassment that the rest of the league’s GMs allowed it to exist. Edmonton may have had two of the best players in the league, but Florida countered that with Barkov, Reinhart, Forsling, Tkachuk, Bennett, Verhaeghe, Lundell, Luostarinen and Marchand.

The Florida Panthers found good players with excellent skills in specific situations. They found the best way to win with those players and they didn’t spend extra on things that don’t matter. They created a fully bought in locker room full of inclusion, personality and equality.

If the Blue Jackets want to win a Cup, or multiple, they only need to do the same.