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The Official 2026 Off-Season Thread: Revenge of the Nerds

Yeah it's important to find an analytics team who finds value in Colton Sissons at $4m.

Chayka strikes me as a guy who values player tracking analytics more than the nerdies that he should care about. This is the guy that became cripplingly obsessed with brain activity on athletes about 6 years ago, rarely hear him talk about the stuff that GMs should be focused on.

Of course this could be wrong, but that was my impression of him before he was hired for the Leafs. He said some great things early on, but then he blew $24m on fourth liners so I'm skeptical again.
 
Firing them now vs when he fired the other AGM, is telling. I don't think Chayka liked what he saw on July 1st.

We'll see who he's replaced with. Maybe this is all for nothing and they hire a super genius or dom and Metcalf is actually dumb and useless.
 
Fwiw the coach's company is for player tracking analytics. Which is useful for coaching if used correctly (huge caveat there) but it's different than the stuff that Metcalf cares about.
 
I don't know enough about the micro/tracking stats to have a particularly strong opinion, but my vibe on them is that they're a lot of noisy stuff that gets baked into the macro shot volume/quality metrics already. For example, being obsessed with the specific size of the gap a defender gives in transition if it doesn't actually lead to a meaningful reduction in shot chances strikes me as a bias confirmation exercise, but with spreadsheets because I'm a progressive hockey data person. There's a reason there's a schism in the data community, a lot of the tracking stats are just people assuming traditionalist knowledge on the sport is valid and then trying to justify it through data. It would be like if Billy Beane got obsessed with how many pitches a batter was fouling off because something something putting pressure on the pitcher rather than OBP, which has a direct correlation with runs, which has a direct correlation with wins.
 
Preston said:

View: https://x.com/i/status/2075238026519670807

Not surprised to see Leach gone. Draft looked good tho without Tre influence so that's unfortunate.

I'm guessing the entire analytics team hired by shanny in 2014 will be canned. Those guys were pioneers of the analytics movement, it's too bad. Hopefully they replace them with some smart folks.
Click to expand...

I don’t really know how to feel about this. The draft was really good. Is that because the kids selected were Chaykes/Hiller guys who got picked ahead of the scouts’ picks, or vice versa?
 
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