A couple of days ago, some local radio guys were talking about the recent struggles of the Boston Bruins. Various plausible sounding theories were suggested, among them "they have nothing to play for now" and "maybe they're buckling under the pressure". Yes, both of these things were proffered within minutes of each other, without recognition that they are obviously contradictory.
The funny thing is, I - as well as some others - have been waiting for the inevitable Bruin downswing for awhile. What Boston was doing earlier this year was pretty much unsustainable by the numbers. They were, as I like to say, riding the percentages and were bound to come back down to earth eventually. What we're doubtlessly seeing now is the inevitable correction.
I point this out because it struck me, listening to the FAN960 twist themselves into pretzels in an effort to diagnose the Bruins "ills", how fallacious "psychological" explanations of team success at the NHL level likely are. I began railing against this type of stuff awhile ago when people started using the "lack of leadership" meme as a kind of post hoc explanation of the team's relatively disappointing results. This can also happens with individual player assessments, where a lack of expected performance is explained away as some kind of innate mental flaw of the guy in question. Sometimes the guy just isn't that good and is a victim of unrealistic expectations. And sometimes he's a victim of the fundamental attribution error -
In attribution theory, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or overattribution effect) reflects our erroneous cognitive tendency to predominantly over-value dispositional, or personality-based, explanations (i.e., attributions or interpretations) for the observed behaviors of others, thus under-valuing or unacknowledging the potentiality of situational attributions or situational explanations for the behavioral motives of others. In other words, people predominantly presume that the actions of others are indicative of the "kind" of person they are, rather than the kind of situations that compels their behaviour.
People are human, so Im not totally discounting the possibility of idiosyncratic or psychological processes having some effect on a guys (or teams) performance. What we have to keep in mind when evaluating players in the NHL, however, is that these athletes are the best of the best in the world - and it takes more than just physical prowess to make the show. 99.9% of the players who have problems "playing through it" or "buckling under pressure" or "have a bad attitude towards hard work" have been weeded out at this point. Which means usually what we're doing when we apply these ready-made bromides to players/teams in the NHL is casting about for easy answers when the entity in question isn't meeting our (often) subjective expectations.
