Do I have to put in a spoiler warning for a film that's 15 years old?

Moneyball, the film, is a simplified and narrativized version of the reality of Billy Beane's fist toe-dip into evidence-based baseball. One of the narrative tricks is that the emotional crescendo of the film is a winning streak that any savvy viewer knows is not the judgement of god upon Beane or even the universe proving him right, it's shit happens (or rather, shit happened, since its a real event) and influences events along with his choices, good and bad.

The film tries to subvert its own use of this soaring dramatic moment of glorious winning, but it doesn't try very hard. It is a film after all. You're supposed to have fun watching it, feel things, not just think things. Affect. Effect.

The simplification in the film is that Beane and his henchman have identified a baseball system that leads to wins, and they use evidence-based evaluation of players to put the ones who can perform the system in place. This is the order in which information is used by decision makers that is key, and yet a lot of fans of sports would rather they didn't do it in this order. It's okay to measure the player, but it's not okay to measure the game. You see, if you do, you might change the way the game is played and if you do that, you might change the way the game makes people feel.

Moneyball, either by accident or design, shows that examining the game itself led to changing it forever, throwing away a whole host of sacred beliefs along the way. In the film the key to the system Beane wants is to get on base. Doesn't matter how. But in the how is were the affect resides.

If a player like Vladimir Guerrero Jr. walks a lot, it's a sign of his prowess. His plakata making the knees clack on the pitcher fearful of all that Vladdy is and he is not. A tiny little drama unfolds about power and masculinity and physical dominance every time Guerrero, or a player like him, strolls insolently or happily or cheekily to first base and jokes around with the other team's first baseman.

But for other players, the story is different. If I knew more about baseball, I'd be able to talk confidently about how the commentary has changed as the things that were revolutionary in Moneyball are now "how we've always done it", but at some point there had to be a reckoning so that a player who gets on base a lot by reading the pitches, controlling his desire to hit big, and by subverting his power and masculinity to his intellect in order to do the thing that will lead to winning is not derided right out of the game.

Controlled carry vs dump ins with hard forechecking. This is the "just get on base" of hockey. Because in baseball, you do have to hit the ball. It's a run scoring competition, I imagine the sneer goes. No shit, buddy. In hockey you do have to shoot it. But you have to get you and the puck into shooting position first.

Leafs fans have had an invaluable two-year lesson in how the discourse around this choice of system goes. And the lesson here is that the while the "way we've always done it" has changed in hockey a lot in the last decade, it's still very easy to find fans, coaches, GMs, commentators and pundits who would rather it hadn't changed and all. They want the Florida Panthers to be some relic resurrected to teach the nerds the error of their ways. They want them to have toughed their way to those Cups.

What isn't up for debate (and is endlessly debated) is that controlled carry into the offensive zone leads to more shots which leads to more goals. Period. However, just like "just get on base" really isn't the one simple trick to baseball, the reality is more complicated than that.

The nerdosphere came up with the idea about 15 years ago that if you hit a lot, you're bad because you don't have the puck. This is actually not true, and many excellent teams hit a lot, and many hit almost never or anywhere in between. This truism, that is a falsism, exists because fans who wanted to see a puck possession game needed an argument against the fans who like hits. Well, they didn't need an argument, really, they wanted one, and they wanted it to contain a nice dose of moralizing about the right affect a hockey player should have.

Dumping in the puck and then forechecking hard in the offensive zone is a little drama about power and masculinity and physical dominance. Controlled carries are described in terms of slickness and sneakiness, like it's a trick. The lithe and slippery player "broke the ankles" of the big tough guy. It's an endless culture war of duelling fables.

And if you think only one side in this war is picking their preferred hockey players and styles on affect, well, that's why we're here talking about ways of thinking. Not because Craig Berube is a "dinosaur" and so wrong, so very wrong, but because everything in the game that is "the way we've always done it" needs to come under the neutral examination of someone who does not have a side in the masculinity debate. Affect doesn't have an effect on them in their quest for effectiveness. Or that's the ideal, anyway.

Sunny Mehta is a the sort of person who can cut through this debate with the real story of what the Panthers do, how they do it, and more importantly, why they do it. And for all the posturing poses of the Panthers, their success isn't a drama about the performance of masculinity. If anything, Matthew Tkachuk and Sam Bennett have proved you can paste that stuff onto just about any hockey style.

Someone, and my faulty human memory wants this to be Mike Johnson but I'm not sure it was, in making a point about the Leafs faffing around looking for an identity, described the Panthers as a team that just is who they are and says to their opponents, try and stop us. No one can. Well, injuries can, it turns out.

The point was vividly made, but that's an affect story to describe the effect of their system, their whys and hows, as performed by the players under the direction of the coach. And what it says is that the affect that is easy to adopt, that is dramatic and powerful and tough and masculine and more than a little "fuck you" actually augments the effect of what they're doing.

Let's go back a bit to the imaginary neutral and cold, emotionless thinker looking at every aspect of the game and asking what leads to scoring a goal, more than them, do it again tomorrow. There is a pretty understandable impulse in a lot of people to want to pump the brakes on that. Emotionless seems antithetical to what they want sports to be. There can be a visceral and squirming discomfort at ideas that chip away at the emotive aspects of a sport.

If you watch baseball now, you're likely used to seeing batters brain their way to first base. But one thing Moneyball does very well is show the conflict between Beane and his manager while Beane exudes his attitude of never explain yourself. The film shows you plainly that braining your way to something is not a popular thing in the culture of sports. It's too much of a challenge to beloved mysticism.

Sports, hockey, the NHL is the entertainment business. The richest team in the NHL can't ignore that entirely, and a team like Florida absolutely can't. What the Panthers built was a team that you can look at from the stands and see all that affect, all the drama, the emotion, the style and culture and identity and you can remain blissfully unaware about how it all works backstage. This is a perfect showbiz team because it suits their audience, and that's why it grew that audience dramatically.

There's a pretty big contrast between Florida and Carolina when you sit in the stands and watch how they play, and also how they behave while playing. Since 2020, the top five-on-five Expected Goals teams in the NHL are Carolina, Colorado and Florida. And if you don't know who Arik Parnass is, maybe you should look him up. You can use evidence to find the things that lead to winning, and also do it in a way that's right for your team, your players, your business, your fans, and your goals for the future. But you can't do that without the basic understanding that effect comes before affect flowing through the entire team at all levels.

The head coach, and particularly the coaching staff, have to be in on this mode of thinking. You can build a data science team, analyze all that NHL data, build out actionable ideas on how an NHL team can get wins but if the coach wants to go with his gut and focus on how the players emote or how tough they look or how fast they skate or how happy and creative they are, you aren't going to get there.

If the hockey operations department believes in evidence right up until it conflicts with what they want to be true – their mysticism – then you might as well just close down the evidence-producing departments and spend the money on more inspirational posters.

Moneyball shows a system created by Beane and his staff stymied by the manager Art Howe. He has to be manipulated into playing the players in the way Beane wants him to. Unsurprisingly Howe did not return to the job the next year.

What the Leafs did this year could have easily got them in the playoffs with better luck on injuries, but they would never have been utilizing their players to anything like their maximum because that plan to get more goals than them just doesn't work in the long term. And in the NHL, you can only luck your way to glory if your basic game can't carry you through the long, cold winter.

Moneyball also shows scenes of baseball players sitting in front of those quaint early 2000s computers and being instructed on how to take pitches, how to just get on base. This rang really false to me, even though the players had to be instructed in this radical new thinking in some way. If the fans can sit and watch the game and never even see the ideas behind the game, I think the players can too. I think they need to.

I've recently come upon some ideas that oppose this, that I find deeply intriguing, so expect some investigation into that idea soon.

Players, and sure, there's going to be some exceptions, but most of them aren't putting on an affect as a gloss on a well designed system of play. They are being themselves, or that version of themselves that performs on the ice. They're method actors. The coach needs to be communicating the system to them, and he has to play the players in the way that works in the general sense, not what he wishes would win in a special world built just for him, but also how they as individuals can succeed. But he doesn't need to pull back the curtain on the whys and the evidence and the theory of that with the players themselves.

You can if you like think up a carefully delineated area of responsibility org chart for a hockey team that has the GM take the scouting advice and the contract advice from various assistants which he uses to assemble a team which he then turns over to the coach, who he barely ever talks to. The coach assembles the system and tells the players how to play and I would bet that happens a lot, and it's why a lot of teams with good players fail. Or fail to succeed as much as they should.

This interface in the system between getting the players and using the players, this is the layer in the cake where the structures have to mingle. The player evaluation should involve the entire operations and coaching departments. The acquisition of players, the choice of who to recall, who to play, and how to play them has to be, by some process tolerable to everyone, collaborative.

This is going to be the failure point on teams when teams are structured like military chains of command. All the terminology of strategy and objectives and tactics and win-conditions is all militaristic. It's not an accident that many sports teams are named after various military units or groups. And it's also not an accident that the century-old NHL has some traditions that don't hold up under real scrutiny today.

NHL coaching is so often performed with an authoritarian affect. And all too often, under the affect is an authoritarian thinker. If a GM can nullify the data science team just by dumping their memos in the trash, the coach can do it too by nodding along in the meeting and then doing one of those "stats aren't the be all and end all of the game" speeches that basically says, my gut is smarter than your brains all put together.

Making this complicated is that humans are not without innate abilities to see patterns in an effective way. Our evolutionary gifts for filling in the gaps don't always lead to "that cloud looks like a bunny", they often lead to correct understandings of cause and effect. In other words, a coach that has never engaged with data-driven systems isn't by default stupid. But he's not as smart as he can be, and if he hasn't got the humility to know that, none of this stuff going on above him matters.

The coach is the point at which the gatekeeping has to happen between a world ruled by rationality and one that turns into war on ice. He has to have a foot in both worlds. The players need to believe that how hard they try, how much they care, how much heart and grit and determination they have matters. Because it does. Once the cameras roll and the show is on, affect is the star of the show and their affect has an effect on their effectiveness.

You just can't ever forget, if you're in charge of all this, that affect alone doesn't win.

Analysis