The Canadian Olympic team will be named on Tuesday. While it’s impossible to know how the decision-making process inside the management group is unfolding, public speculation (whether informed or otherwise) seems to describe a debate that’s taking place between two types of player: those who are perceived as safe versus those who are perceived as being more high risk.
This isn’t a new tension. Canada’s aversion to risk at the international level has been one of its defining characteristics for a long time. In the 1990s, the phrase “ghost roster” was big. The theory that Canada applied to building teams was to fill out an NHL-style roster, with the best checkers and grinders beside the best scorers. Canada experienced some success at the world junior level with this, although, outside of making Rob Zamuner famous, it didn’t work too well in Nagano.
In 2006, Canada famously left a lot of offensive talent at home. Neither Sidney Crosby nor Eric Staal made the team, despite the two finishing in the top three among Canadian scorers in the NHL that season. Canada took a lot of players with reputations as being safe players or elite checkers—players like Ryan Smyth, Shane Doan and Kris Draper. Good, honest professionals with long resumes. It’s not even that Smyth, Doan and, to a lesser extent, Draper, didn’t belong at the Olympics—it’s that Canada left behind guys who were more likely to change the game in a second.
A team that was built to protect leads found that it had great difficulty in obtaining them. Canada scored a grand total of three goals in four games against the Swiss, Russians, Czechs and Finns, and exited the tournament in disgrace. Would a team with Crosby and Staal have been shut out three times?
It sometimes seems that the thinking involved in building a winning team in the NHL has infected the thinking of those who build Canada’s teams internationally. It has to do with a misunderstanding of why teams that win in the NHL tend to have third and fourth lines full of players who are strong checkers, even if they aren’t moving a team’s goal differential.
In the NHL, teams have to do this. They can’t have four lines full of players who can create things on their own. Elite players want more ice time and more dollars than teams can offer for a third- or fourth-line role or on a third pairing. So teams have to look to different types of players to fill those spots in their lineups.
Team Canada doesn’t have this problem. Team Canada’s philosophy should be simple: It should take the players who create the most relative to what they give up. This is different than the ghost-roster concept of the 1990s, or the group of safe veterans of 2006.
You can’t know before the tournament whether you’ll need to protect leads or whether you’ll need to come back in games. Canada could just as easily be chasing a game as it could be trying to protect a lead. You can’t know. And if you can’t know, all you can do is try and maximize your odds of having a lead and of scoring the next goal.
Two of the more contentious players under consideration for the team are players who have reputations as being something less than bulletproof defensively but who create a ton of offence: Taylor Hall and P.K. Subban. It’s a test of philosophy for the Canadian team, a choice between taking safe rosters like in 1998 and 2006 or accepting that the best test of a player is what he creates less what he gives up. If the latter test is applied, Hall and Subban should be on the team.
Hall has, somewhat quietly, become an excellent player on a team that’s still trying to move past the “be terrible” part of a rebuild. He would have been an NHL all-star last year if not for some confusion amongst the Professional Hockey Writers Association as to what position Alexander Ovechkin plays. Since 2011–12, he’s made the Oilers much, much better when he’s on the ice—they have a 49.7-percent Corsi% with Hall on the ice versus 44.8 percent when he isn’t.
He also creates a pile of offence—since 2011–12, Hall is eight in the NHL in 5v5 points per 60 minutes of 5v5 TOI (minimum 1,000 minutes of 5v5 TOI). He’s not a player who depends on power-play time to create his offence. He’s not part of Pittsburgh’s glorious tradition of Warren Young, Rob Brown and Chris Kunitz either—while the Oilers have some other fine young talents, Hall is older than them and unlikely to be riding on their coattails. He creates a lot. He’s someone who Team Canada should want.
Subban is similar to Hall in terms of being on the bubble, although he’s probably an even more obvious choice. The defending Norris Trophy winner, Subban simply makes Montreal better when he’s on the ice. How does P.K. change the game? Since 2011–12, Montreal has a 51.7-percent Corsi% when he’s on the ice and a 47.6-percent Corsi% when he’s not. When Subban comes on the ice, the Habs become much more likely to get the next shot.
This is reflected in the goals for and against when Subban is on the ice. The Habs have outscored their opposition 125–85 at 5v5 with Subban on the ice since 2011. They’ve been outscored 167–201 with him on the bench. There’s almost certainly some luck in here—over time, the share of the goals that the Habs get with Subban on the ice will trend towards his Corsi%—but, as with Hall, he’s made a bad team look much better.
The best team in the world—which Canada should be—shouldn’t be looking to get a one-goal lead and then cling to it like a team that doesn’t have the talent to match up with opponents. Hopefully Canada avoids this strategy, and isn’t wondering in late February what might have been if it had taken the players who have the biggest positive impact and, by extension, give Canada the best chance at winning.
