Marlies Talk 15/16 - Is Sheldon worth Keefe'n around?

[Highlander]

I just love the Leafs managment structure/system. Obviously Dubas was an OHL GM, makes the leap to the AHL and has Lou to mentor him for three years so he slides seamlessly into the Leafs GM. Bloody brilliant to have a mentor/apprenticeship system in place and guarantee continuity for the coming years.
Now just how are going to keep Keefe around with Babs locked up?

 

[Frank E]

He's basically saying the he needs luck to win a first round series.

That's not genius talk to me.

He seems like a reasonably intelligent person to me, and he has a lot of money and smart people to help him succeed.

I hope he's successful, but let's wait for a strong track record and result before we anoint him.  He himself admits he's got a lot to learn.

 

[herman]

He's basically saying the he needs luck to win a first round series.

That's not genius talk to me.

He seems like a reasonably intelligent person to me, and he has a lot of money and smart people to help him succeed.

I hope he's successful, but let's wait for a strong track record and result before we anoint him.  He himself admits he's got a lot to learn.

Genius recognizes what elements are out of his direct control and structures the environment and situation to aim probabilities in his direction, rather than bullishly assuming he knows best.

i.e. Luck plays a big role in the small sample size of a 5/7-game series, so Dubas spent the money to ensure the players are perfectly fed throughout the season, rested on every road excursion, given sufficient development attention on foundational skills, linked the coaching to Babcock's proven track record of generating shots.

 

[Kin]

i.e. Luck plays a big role in the small sample size of a 5/7-game series, so Dubas spent the money to ensure the players are perfectly fed throughout the season, rested on every road excursion, given sufficient development attention on foundational skills, linked the coaching to Babcock's proven track record of generating shots.

Which seems fair enough if the aim is for the Marlies to be really good. But, and I'm definitely playing Devil's Advocate here in case Patrick reads this, are these things good from a developmental standpoint? I buy the consistency in coaching philosophy/developmental attention elements as being hard to see as negatives but the food/lifestyle stuff seems like more of an unknown that I think Frank is right, we should wait to see the results of them before we get too excited about what they've actually done.

 

[herman]

i.e. Luck plays a big role in the small sample size of a 5/7-game series, so Dubas spent the money to ensure the players are perfectly fed throughout the season, rested on every road excursion, given sufficient development attention on foundational skills, linked the coaching to Babcock's proven track record of generating shots.

Which seems fair enough if the aim is for the Marlies to be really good. But, and I'm definitely playing Devil's Advocate here in case Patrick reads this, are these things good from a developmental standpoint? I buy the consistency in coaching philosophy/developmental attention elements as being hard to see as negatives but the food/lifestyle stuff seems like more of an unknown that I think Frank is right, we should wait to see the results of them before we get too excited about what they've actually done.

It's difficult for me to see how healthy eating and monitored fitness would be detrimental to a player and his career longevity, especially at this stage of development where younger players don't necessarily know how to take care of themselves optimally.

Having heard Jeff O'Neill's horror stories of what hockey players will eat while on the road in the minors (or any student living away from home/sans billet), I can only see this as an advantage. The players in our system get to take all of these instructions and experiences with them as they move on with their careers. For a teenager, simply experiencing that healthy food can be tasty too is not a small thing.

Further benefits can be extrapolated: better nutrition, fitness, and rest should lead to fewer wear and tear injuries (and faster recovery), and I suspect a lot of the lifestyle rules are meant to curtail situations that could lead to poor decisions (e.g. drug abuse). Clune's inclusion in the locker room was certainly a deliberate move for his experiences in that regard.

It's another way to maximize the advantages of our team's wealth where it cannot be checked by a league salary cap, and an investment into the big club's future.

 

[GhostofPotvin29]

He's basically saying the he needs luck to win a first round series.

Well lots of people have shown how hockey is one of the sports most prone to randomness so it's not wrong.  And he didn't say they need to be lucky to win a first round series, but that in a short, 5-game series whichever team wins will need to be lucky as well as put themselves in a position to benefit from any good fortune (i.e. by outperforming the other team in the areas that they can control).

 

[Kin]

It's difficult for me to see how healthy eating and monitored fitness would be detrimental to a player and his career longevity, especially at this stage of development where younger players don't necessarily know how to take care of themselves optimally.

Having heard Jeff O'Neill's horror stories of what hockey players will eat while on the road in the minors (or any student living away from home/sans billet), I can only see this as an advantage. The players in our system get to take all of these instructions and experiences with them as they move on with their careers. For a teenager, simply experiencing that healthy food can be tasty too is not a small thing.

Further benefits can be extrapolated: better nutrition, fitness, and rest should lead to fewer wear and tear injuries (and faster recovery), and I suspect a lot of the lifestyle rules are meant to curtail situations that could lead to poor decisions (e.g. drug abuse). Clune's inclusion in the locker room was certainly a deliberate move for his experiences in that regard.

It's another way to maximize the advantages of our team's wealth where it cannot be checked by a league salary cap, and an investment into the big club's future.

Well, I guess the argument would be that it's fundamentally a darwinian concept of selection vs. the idea of a rising tide lifting all ships.

Let's keep in mind that the people we're talking about aren't like your typical students. These are, for the most part, 21 or 22 year olds getting paid fairly handsomely who've dedicated themselves to being professional athletes. When I was a student I ate a two dollar slice of pizza every day not because I was lazy(although I was) but because after rent/tuition/books/bills I was living on something like 200 bucks a month. These guys are earning, as the article notes, at least 70,000 dollars a year. These guys have million dollar contracts and fame to incentivize their proper nutrition, shouldn't that be enough?

So to me the question is, does making the AHL a super cozy and comfortable place to be lead to a degree of complacency. If one of these guys doesn't make the Leafs should he be really bummed out about another minor league season in ratty hotels/lousy busrides or should his lifestyle largely stay the same? Jeff O'Neill was never in the minors(well, one game) so I assume the reference is more to his Junior hockey habits which an NHL team can't control but even if they could would standing over his shoulder and telling him to try a salad every now and then have resulted in a player who did that on his own? These guys aren't going to be eating in the school cafeteria all of their lives, so couldn't there be something to finding out early on which of them are individually driven to succeed on that level and which aren't?

Again, I fully admit I'm not really against this idea in any meaningful way, I've long since thought that there was a lot of wisdom behind the European soccer models of youth academies. I just think there may be a careful balance between giving these guys all the tools they need to succeed and being the stern parent forcing them to play piano two hours a day. If you'll forgive me extending the analogy, when I was that Pizza eating student I was in a little rock band playing around London Ontario and part of the reason I ate so poorly is that a lot of my time/energy/money went into the care/maintenance/mastery of the bass guitar. What makes for better music, the kids who practice violin every day in academies in Vienna or the kids in Seattle or North London or Dublin who play guitar every day because they've got nothing else to do and decide to make that their lives?

Again, I probably lean the same way you do on the issue and I recognize the limitations of music vs. sports as an analogy but I don't know if it's so cut and dried that we need to declare it a masterstroke before we see the results of it.

 

[herman]

Well, I guess the argument would be that it's fundamentally a darwinian concept of selection vs. the idea of a rising tide lifting all ships.

Let's keep in mind that the people we're talking about aren't like your typical students. These are, for the most part, 21 or 22 year olds getting paid fairly handsomely who've dedicated themselves to being professional athletes. When I was a student I ate a two dollar slice of pizza every day not because I was lazy(although I was) but because after rent/tuition/books/bills I was living on something like 200 bucks a month. These guys are earning, as the article notes, at least 70,000 dollars a year. These guys have million dollar contracts and fame to incentivize their proper nutrition, shouldn't that be enough?

So to me the question is, does making the AHL a super cozy and comfortable place to be lead to a degree of complacency. If one of these guys doesn't make the Leafs should he be really bummed out about another minor league season in ratty hotels/lousy busrides or should his lifestyle largely stay the same? Jeff O'Neill was never in the minors(well, one game) so I assume the reference is more to his Junior hockey habits which an NHL team can't control but even if they could would standing over his shoulder and telling him to try a salad every now and then have resulted in a player who did that on his own? These guys aren't going to be eating in the school cafeteria all of their lives, so couldn't there be something to finding out early on which of them are individually driven to succeed on that level and which aren't?

Again, I fully admit I'm not really against this idea in any meaningful way, I've long since thought that there was a lot of wisdom behind the European soccer models of youth academies. I just think there may be a careful balance between giving these guys all the tools they need to succeed and being the stern parent forcing them to play piano two hours a day. If you'll forgive me extending the analogy, when I was that Pizza eating student I was in a little rock band playing around London Ontario and part of the reason I ate so poorly is that a lot of my time/energy/money went into the care/maintenance/mastery of the bass guitar. What makes for better music, the kids who practice violin every day in academies in Vienna or the kids in Seattle or North London or Dublin who play guitar every day because they've got nothing else to do and decide to make that their lives?

Again, I probably lean the same way you do on the issue and I recognize the limitations of music vs. sports as an analogy but I don't know if it's so cut and dried that we need to declare it a masterstroke before we see the results of it.

Solid points, and I get what you're saying re: Darwinian selection vs. elevating the whole group by force. Not knowing the precise mechanics of how they go about their program other than what Mirtle has written, I can't say for certain whether players are forced into it, or are simply appreciative of it. It certainly would be good to know which players have that intrinsic motivation; my guess is that those are chafe against the diet (and other career longevity programs) would be revealed anyway and weeded out eventually.

Either way, it is still a distinct advantage over many other AHL teams and I think the way the season has played out already shows the fruits of that investment. Normally playing youth heavy teams in the AHL don't exhibit this level of success.

 

[Kin]

Either way, it is still a distinct advantage over many other AHL teams and I think the way the season has played out already shows the fruits of that investment. Normally playing youth heavy teams in the AHL don't exhibit this level of success.

Well, I don't want to be overly contentious but again I'd pump the brakes on both of those theses just a bit.

For starters, again, I don't agree that what we've seen this year is conclusive of anything but secondly I think there's a lot of caveats behind the idea of the Marlies being an especially young team to earn AHL success and that being proof positive of outside the box thinking re: development or conditioning.

I read the article about the Marlies and their average age relative to other top AHL teams and I think you'll grant me that average age is kind of a tough concept for a AHL team if the only way we're looking at a AHL team is as a feeder team for the NHL. I say it a lot, I'm not a Marlies fan. I'm a Leafs fan. My only interest in the Marlies is in how their success might translate into success for the Leafs down the road.

So to use an extreme example, if you had an AHL team where you had ten guys who were 20 years old and the other ten who were 40, the average age would be 30. A team split where ten guys are 20 and the other ten are 28 would have an average age of 24. In that scenario team
B is the "younger" team but it doesn't matter from a NHL perspective. AHLers who are 28 aren't prospects so who cares if they're younger than 40? It's immaterial to their future success. TJ Brennan is still a young-ish guy but who cares? It's pretty safe to say he won't do anything for the Leafs. Likewise, I guess it's good that a Z grade 23 year old "prospect" like Leivo is out there instead of a 30 year old but that doesn't really matter to a Leafs fan.

The other major consideration is, let's be real, the Marlies success is in large part based on the play of young players who should have been in the NHL but weren't because the team was tanking the year. Nylander, Hyman, Soshnikov...all of those guys could have been Leafs this year and probably to their benefit if it weren't for the fact that the team was such a trainwreck. Other teams don't win with young AHL teams because there's really not that big of a difference between 28 year olds and 22 year olds in the sense that the best of the players that age are going to be in the NHL. Typically your 22-23 year old AHLers are so-so prospects so older AHL teams generally being better is just a case of "not very talented but experienced" triumphing over "not very talented but inexperienced".

The Marlies success this year relative to their average age owes a lot to both of those things. They kept talented young players down who shouldn't have been there and a lot of their guys who aren't real prospeects aren't old-old. You say that's evidence of their meal plan/nice digs/tons o  coaching paying dividends in terms of development, all I'm saying is I think it could more be the result of a larger organizational strategy(the tank) resulting in abnormalities like a better than expected AHL team.

Again, I like Dubas, I think he's a smart guy and as a Leafs fan I prefer by miles hearing what the team is doing and saying "huh, that's new and interesting" than sort of rolling my eyes at Burke's plan to punch the puck into the net but as someone who's seen similar sort of analytical revolutions in other sports I know that a lot of the things that seem like smart, fresh approaches end up resulting in nothing tangible. Alls I'm saying is this particular strategy is, for me at least, a wait and see thing.

 

[hockeyfan1]

I am impressed with the initiatives the Leafs organization has undertaken for the Marlies.  Particularly in how the players are treated -- food/nutrition/conditioning/amenities/advice/etc., etc.

Add to the mix the core talent and one has an AHL team worthy of providing the success it needs/requires not only for itself but for it's parent co.

GM Dubas certainly knows what he's talking about.

 

[WhatIfGodWasALeaf]

Can we talk for a second about the absurdity that is Sheldon Keefe not winning AHL coach of the year?

He's a rookie and look at what his team has done, I mean come on.

 

[Kin]

Is it safe to assume that the AHL coach of the year is plagued by the same fundamental issue as every other Coach/Manager of the year award?

 

[CarltonTheBear]

Can we talk for a second about the absurdity that is Sheldon Keefe not winning AHL coach of the year?

He's a rookie and look at what his team has done, I mean come on.

Good, we don't want him getting any more attention right now!

Albany had a pretty great season too, and their roster doesn't seem nearly as stacked as ours.

 

[GhostofPotvin29]

Can we talk for a second about the absurdity that is Sheldon Keefe not winning AHL coach of the year?

He's a rookie and look at what his team has done, I mean come on.

Good, we don't want him getting any more attention right now!

Albany had a pretty great season too, and their roster doesn't seem nearly as stacked as ours.

The Marlies roster was stacked but they also had some insane turn-over during the season yet never really stopped winning.

I'm fine with him not winning it, though.

 

[herman]

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Instead of an ECHL feeder team, what if we had two AHL teams: Toronto Marlies for the near-term prospects and the Whatever Arenas/St. Pats for the longer-term prospects... Or a balanced approach so top prospects get chances to slot into top-6/4 roles.

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The Tottenham Marners of England Hockey? The Kalmar Utter (Otters) of the SHL?

 

[bustaheims]

Instead of an ECHL feeder team, what if we had two AHL teams: Toronto Marlies for the near-term prospects and the Whatever Arenas/St. Pats for the longer-term prospects... Or a balanced approach so top prospects get chances to slot into top-6/4 roles.

With the 50 contract limit, all that really serves to do is weaken the Marlies. Of those 50 contacts, 23 are ear marked for the NHL (more, once injuries start to come into play), so you'd have 27 players on NHL contracts to split between two rosters - if the team maxed out (which is generally a bad idea). Some of those prospects simply won't be ready for the AHL yet - they won't be developed enough physically, or they'll have other aspects of their game to work on - and will be better off in the lesser league. On top of that, the Leafs aren't always going to have this kind of prospect depth. This seems like a long-term response to a short-term situation.

 

[herman]

Instead of an ECHL feeder team, what if we had two AHL teams: Toronto Marlies for the near-term prospects and the Whatever Arenas/St. Pats for the longer-term prospects... Or a balanced approach so top prospects get chances to slot into top-6/4 roles.

With the 50 contract limit, all that really serves to do is weaken the Marlies. Of those 50 contacts, 23 are ear marked for the NHL (more, once injuries start to come into play), so you'd have 27 players on NHL contracts to split between two rosters - if the team maxed out (which is generally a bad idea). Some of those prospects simply won't be ready for the AHL yet - they won't be developed enough physically, or they'll have other aspects of their game to work on - and will be better off in the lesser league. On top of that, the Leafs aren't always going to have this kind of prospect depth. This seems like a long-term response to a short-term situation.

I think you've pretty much covered it. The Marlies are also not a profitable entity overall (to be fair, I don't think they've fully monetized the operation).

I'm a bit more tickled by the idea of MLSE owning a Euro team.

 

[Kin]

 
I'm a bit more tickled by the idea of MLSE owning a Euro team.

Are there rules against a NHL owner/organization owning a Major Junior team? Because if so, and I have to figure there are, you'd think the same would apply to a Euro team.

 

[L K]

Andreas Johnson is making his AHL debut in the game.

Albany leads 1-0 after the 1st period.

 

[Joe S.]

Didn't the leafs make a deal when they traded for svehla to invest in his team? Kladno or something? I know this is an ancient story... But I remember something about the leafs owning part of that team.