Tuesday's FTB: Maple Leafs: The New Dawn

Remember when the Athletic reporters were all in on the extremely excited made for social media takes that the Leafs were not a serious team? That was then, and now in the face of months of necessary and often very intelligent work, well...

Now we're doing sober second thought. A cynic might ask if this tonal change is about access. I am occasionally that cynic.

This is the core of John Chayka: concerned first with his own process, and with a mental paradigm that is right out of business school.

“There were some clear deficiencies in the roster, I think,” Chayka said.

The Leafs GM describes himself as a “big believer” in the inversion thinking technique championed by Warren Buffett and his business partner Charlie Munger. That mental model posits that it’s often easier to solve problems by working backward rather than forward, and avoiding decisions that will lead to certain failure.

I get that is puts people off because the credo that all business things are bad and ruinous is a very seductive reductive idea. Business and economics are manifestations of mathematics performed by humans, another one of which is hockey. Hockey of course is all about failure, and how you deal with it. I keep saying that's its lesson.

Imagine how you might fail and plan in advance how to deal with it. This is not at all like the "Oh woe, woe unto me, the Leafs are so Leafy and we can't have nice things." That's wallowing in defeatism. Imagining failure, and thinking backwards is about knowing the choices you need to make to not fail.

I believe these two things, which I stole not from an investment guy, but from an author of SF novels: If you chose an action, you chose the consequences of that action. If you wish to achieve an outcome, you must make the choices that lead to that outcome.

The idea of inversion thinking is how you accept those two things and decide what the choices are you must make.

All of which is easy to say and very hard to do in an field where you really can't very accurately predict the future and if it's "a results-based business" then you will simply get fired for not doing what may well have been impossible. Why anyone takes an NHL GM job who can think at levels beyond "hur hur, Reavo sure hits hard" is actually fairly surprising.

Do read that article, there is Chayka's enthusiasm for Sergei Bobrovsky, Darren Raddysh, and Raddysh instead of Rielly in terms of their attributes, not their selves. There is also some clarity on how the analytics department has been changed, which involves deep integration with MLSE Labs.

But this stuck out for me because this is exactly what the Avs and their cousin teams in other sports are trying to do. This is the ideology of analytics as the engine of a team that the HALO conference made clear:

“You see the (Los Angeles) Dodgers and these groups where it’s like the player development informs the R&D, the R&D then informs the major league staff. The coaches are working with the managers, the managers are working with the minor league teams, and creating more of an ecosystem,” Chayka said. “[Freddie Hamilton’s] job is to help connect a lot of things that ultimately, as we’re evolving as a sports organization, I think have historically maybe fallen through the cracks.”

Maybe it wasn't just access concerns fuelling the upheaval at Chayka's hiring. Maybe a lot of it was simply this: the NHL is still a very immature league, run like family businesses in many cases, failing family businesses in some cases, and this change meant the Leaf were going to stop pretending they weren't part of a large, lucrative, well-financed media corporation. After all, those reporters all work for those places and have a lot of years of grievances.

In other news, it's new CBA day:

The most impactful NHL CBA changes coming Sept. 16, explained

I think most people know contract terms are limited to six years and seven if signing with your current team. What is less well discussed is that signing bonuses will now be capped at 60% overall.

Players that want to get eight years need to do it today.

Chayka did the rounds: