Sam Hinkie noted an observation about free-throw shooting percentages in basketball. If a player throughout their career shot 80% on average, the next year you could predict within a small window that he might shoot 78%. He also might shoot 82%.
But he’d never shoot 93%. And he’d never shoot 60%.
And then I began to wonder if this observation would hold true in hiring hockey HCs. If an HC has a career .500 win percentage, is it likely they’ll be in a tight window between .470 and .550?
My next question became, if this is true, why would you want to hire a career .500 coach who has 9 years in the league and hasn’t deviated from this range in win percentage?
Would it not be clear to find the next Jim Montgomery from D1, promote an AHL coach to the big leagues or grab the best coach from a European pro league?
If you know you’re getting wins in 1/2 the games with a ‘known’ guy, wouldn’t you swing on the unknown and make a bet your new guy can win more than half the games?
The answer in today’s NHL is an emphatic, “NO” at this point. But why?
I polled a few trusted colleagues and this is what they said. The first is a DM convo with
:The last point is where my other friend in the business jumped off:
If a GM picks a coach who wins just half of his games, how often is the GM fired? Are they just ‘playing not to lose their job’?
Lightbulb…
Unless you’re in the bottom of the league table, your job as GM is typically safer than a coach in the same position on the league table. A Coach that wins half his games over 3 years gets fired. The GM that hired the .500 coach is safe.
So maybe it’s that incentive structure not being aligned again.
Or maybe it’s human nature from our study from above. We’d rather take 500 for sure than bet on getting either 1000 or walking away with nothing.
Here’s my take…
GM’s are just looking to ‘keep’ their jobs. And mediocrity is job security.
That might not involve ‘playing to win’ but simply ‘avoiding losing too much’.
This is the first use of inversion that I don’t like…
Better and safe don’t co-exist in hiring the best possible people.
The best people seem risky because their upside is higher but so is the downside of looking like an idiot on an ‘unproven’ coach.
I’d rather not know what I’m getting than sign up for .500, especially in a situation that calls for a high-variance move… When you’re the worst team in the league.
If a New Wave hire blows up in your face when you’re the worst team in the league, you get a top 3 lottery pick. If the upside is you win 70% of the games the rest of the way and go on a 2018 St. Louis Blues-type run, that is worth it. Picking a .500 coach might be the WORST option when you look at it that way.
Here are some other situations where you need to deploy a high variance strategy according to
:
Pulling goalie at end of games when losing is a high variance strategy. More likely to get scored on but also more likely to score and tie the game compared to continuing at 5v5.
Underdog teams that pull off upsets in March Madness don't usually play things "straight up." They shoot more 3s, press more, use more of the shot clock, etc. to increase the variance of the outcome.
One might find himself in a poor position in the middle of a chess game. The only chance of victory is to try a "risky" move (queen sacrifice or something). It's unlikely to work but still gives a better chance of winning than continuing to play normally and getting ground down into eventual checkmate.
Even the David vs Goliath story might be considered a "high variance" move. David was at a huge disadvantage as the underdog and instead of fighting "normally" with a sword and shield, he pulled out a slingshot.
Question To-Go (Sourced by /Kevin)
Should people in management positions be risk-averse?
P.S. Last Thing from me…
If you say at the beginning of the year, “the goal is to win the Stanley Cup” with a coach that doesn’t get passed the first round and oftentimes, doesn’t have a good enough record to make playoffs… If you read between the lines it says, ‘if he goes .500, I keep my kush job in the front office and that’s good enough for me.’
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