No one wants to hear this, but it’s true: The Toronto Maple Leafs are victims.
They are weighted by their history and burdened by the richest, largest and most committed fan base in the sport. Most of all they are handcuffed by their inability to use their greatest asset – rivers of cash – to create a present that matches the echoes of their past, and reward their fans’ loyalty with a hockey team they deserve.
In a free market NHL economy, none of these things would be true.
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They could spend what they wanted, when they wanted on whoever they wanted. In a perfect world the Leafs could actually be hockey’s answer to the modern-day New York Yankees: a financial colossus that reinvests massive chunks of their unparalleled revenue on talent that helps make every day another day in a nearly unbroken history of competitive success.
They could back up one money truck for P.K. Subban and another for Steve Stamkos and have enough left for someone to play centre for Phil Kessel on the second line.
None of this will ever happen.
It is the Leafs curse (and their ownership’s financial blessing) that they operate under a strict salary cap that means that despite an operating income that exceeds what teams 10-30 on Forbes list of NHL franchises values do combined, they can spend no more on players than the Florida Panthers or the Columbus Blue Jackets.
They have an obligation to live up to a storied history even if most of it was written in a six-team league and have to make it happen in a 30-team league with financial handcuffs on.
It’s not fair to their fans, but it’s not changing.
The only option, really, is to think like a club that has no option but to be smarter, more precise and more forward thinking.
They have to think like a small-market club and then spend accordingly.
Which is why the news reported on Wednesday by Yahoo! Sports that they are creating an entire department devoted to hockey analytics should be welcome news.
After Leafs president Brendan Shanahan made the surprise hire last month of Kyle Dubas – the hockey-analytics friendly 28-year-old general manager of the Soo Greyhounds – the club hired three more analytic types: Cam Charron, a respected hockey blogger known for his data driven analysis; Rob Pettapiece, another blogger who also did some analysis for Dubas in the Soo, and Darryl Metcalf, who founded the highly respected data source ExtraSkater.com.
Less than a year ago GM Dave Nonis told an audience at a Toronto sports management conference that the Leafs have had an analytics budget for years, but often haven’t figured out how to spend it. They would listen to pitches from vendors claiming to have a secret sauce, but walk away unconvinced.
Now they have used their resources to hire guys to invent their own secret sauce. When I asked Dubas about what he could do with a $500,000 budget after doing analytics on a shoestring in the CHL, he could only smile at the prospect.
He then clearly got to work.
Typically the need to get smarter has been met by teams with limited resources who can’t spend to fix mistakes. While baseball’s Oakland Athletics didn’t invent the use of advanced statistics to evaluate players, the fact that the A’s had a fraction of the resources that other organizations had to spend forced them rely on data to find qualities that were otherwise undervalued by the larger market: players who didn’t qualify as five-tool prospects but who were adept at drawing walks, as a simple example.
A smart hockey organization would have instantly gravitated to that way of thinking the moment the NHL became a hard-cap league following the 2003-04 lockout. In a league where on-ice spending was limited, the obvious advantage was to invest in ways to make that spending more efficient.
But the Leafs have never really been that. Cutting edge? Only if you mean rusty and dull.
There were the John Ferguson Jr. years immediately after the lockout when they got older and slower (Jason Allison!) as the league was getting younger and faster. There were the Brian Burke years when the Leafs traded away draft picks, refused to undergo any kind of studied rebuild and gave out contracts and playing time to the likes of Colton Orr, which gave way to the Dave Nonis years (on-going) when the Leafs judged David Clarkson worthy of a seven-year, $36.75-million contract as a free agent.
The Leafs appeared an organization in denial about their place in the hockey universe. Their past can’t help them. And their money can’t really either, at least as it relates to procuring players. The NHL has been a Moneyball league for 11 years now, it’s just some organizations have been slow to realize it.
It’s not hard to draft Sidney Crosby or Connor McDavid. The challenge — in the absence of those kinds of stars — is to find value every where else in your organization.
Maybe the Leafs can turn the AHL Marlies into a factory that turns sleeper late-round draft picks and develops them into (cheap) third-and-fourth line NHLers that in turn can be flipped for mid-round picks that can be turned into second-liners that eventually can be traded for first-round picks that become stars?
It’s boring, but that’s the way you have to think on a budget.
How exactly the new analytics department operates will likely be a closely held secret: there is no point in trying to spend money to create a competitive advantage and then blabbing far and wide about it.
But it’s safe to say that whatever edge the Leafs do gain at the NHL level initially will be hard to measure and likely not all that long lasting. Whatever gains they make will likely be incremental.
In making a sweeping change over the course of one summer, from being one of the least forward-thinking front offices to one that has invested in being ahead of the curve the Leafs are finally spending their money on the little things because there is no opportunity to make a big financial splash.
The biggest, richest organization has finally come to realization that they have to think small.