Elliote Friedman has probably his best "30 thoughts" piece up today. The most interesting portion is the bit on scouting and why players may fall or rise during the event, specifically in relation to consensus rankings:
"(Central Scouting) focuses on physical ability - not mental ability, work ethic or character," says number three. "It's up to regional scouts to sort through rumours and innuendo. If something is said about a prospect, you need them to determine if this is real or a negative vendetta. That's why these regional guys are so valuable."
"They don't look at character, or what guys are like in the room or on the bench," adds number one. "They have a different set of criteria."
This observation fits well with that I gleaned from Joyce's Future Greats and Heartbreaks: teams spend a lot of time and energy (in my view, an inordinate amount) looking into players "intangibles" - there are large portions of the book dedicated to investigating individual guys backgrounds, their attitudes, their personal histories, their relationships with coaches and teammates, their demeanor, etc. In fact, aside from individual on-ice performances that stood out (for good or bad reasons), most of the book is filled with this type of material. I considered that this may be because 1.) Joyce is a journalist and a writer, not a scout and 2.) it was done to give the work a narrative backbone.
However, in light of Elliote's piece today, it seems that a lot of scouting in the NHL is indeed focused on sussing out "what kind of guy" a player is, rather than, you know...if he drives results on the ice.
Which is fair enough. Prospects represent a lot of time, effort and money and it would seem negligent for club's to focus entirely on on-ice performance and exclude potentially confounding factors. Hockey players are people, after all, and a team has a social dynamic which may effect performance. One wonders to what degree scouts are weighting these factors though and, more importantly, how much they actually predict future performance. Not only are some personal factors largely unimportant when it comes to hockey ability, but one has to keep in mind that 17 year old kids are hardly fully formed adults and projecting their future selves (and not just their future hockey performances) is a dicey proposition. Today's snot-nosed punk may become tomorrow's captain.
Another reason investigating personal factors may be a concern in scouting is human perception isn't great at filtering the signal from the noise. To put it another way - having a mountain of info is not necessarily a good thing. Not just because the relevant data may be merely lost amongst the flotsam like a needle in a haystack, but because potentially unrelated bits of info can actually influence evaluation. In psychological circles, this is called "the dilution effect" and it's defined as the tendency for neutral or irrelevant info to weaken a judgment.
Here's an example - Who is the better prospect?
John spends 30 hours a week practicing, both on and off the ice.
Ivan spends 30 hours a week practicing both on and off the ice. He has two brothers and one sister. He visits his girlfriend in another town at least once a week. He enjoys reality television and spends a lot of his free time watching "Survivor" and "The Bachelor".
This exercise is a variant of studies executed by Henry Zukier. The results typically show a majority of subjects conclude that "person A" (John) would be superior to "person B", even though the relevant, diagnostic info for both is the same.
To bring this back to Joyce, "Future Greats" was written during the draft seasons of guys like Akim Aliu, Patrick Kane, Sam Gagner and Phil Kessel. Reading much of the material with the benefit of hindsight, most of the player biographical stuff struck me as unimportant bits of trivia. Interesting in narrative form, but largely unimportant when it came to predicting future success in the show. Phil Kessel in particular seemed to struggle through stuff like the combine and interviews, but has turned out to be a pretty effective NHLer.
