[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRYyaO_gyNc&w=560&h=315]
I don’t have time right now, otherwise, I write a proper post addressing this matter.
In John MacKinnon’s Edmonton Journal piece on Tyler Dellow, he makes a faulty claim that, I believe, has yet to be challenged (despite the numerous challenges it has so rightly received).
in nuce, MacKinnon claims that Dellow is a devotedly cynical person, for whom intemperate commentary was a means to fame, which was a launching pad for a career.
The key empirical claim is the following:
The dead giveaway that Dellow had other career plans came during Eakins’ first season as Oilers head coach, when Dellow was either silent about or unfailingly supportive of the rookie head coach, even as the team flailed away on the ice. The historically tough critic was giving Eakins a pass. In fact, he was lauding Eakins. Why? We were to find out.
What this tells me is simply that MacKinnon did not read Dellow’s work.
In analytics’ circles, Dellow’s biggest hit in 2013-14 (Eakins’ first season) was a series of posts that identified a problem (Hall’s evident depreciation in underlying numbers), gathered evidence (analytical information; interviews from Eakins and MacTavish on Hall’s usage; and Dellow’s own video research), and proposed a very credible, well-grounded theory for Hall’s lack of success (i.e., that Eakins/MacTavish had coached Hall to dump/tip pucks into the offensive zone in the interest of mitigating turnovers). That’s the short hand of a very long, incisively argued series of posts.
Here’s the problem. To those who read Dellow’s work, this is what an “unsparing critique” of the Oilers looked like. It looked like an intensive, empirical, critical examination of the on-ice and off-ice decisions made by the Oilers.
And, as I mentioned, the most prominent such attack from last year was directly targeted at the decisions of Dallas Eakins.
It is greatly to the discredit of MacKinnon et. al., that they have no grasp of what it is Dellow actually does, what he actually wrote for the public, and what an impact his research has had on the thinking of those in the hockey community willing to engage his thought.
The suggestion that Dellow stifled his “unsparing criticism” of the Oilers (especially Eakins) in order to curry favors and corral a job offer, is not only inaccurate and unseemly for its inaccuracy, it points to a greater problem at work.
MacKinnon et. al., can’t see beyond a twitter personality. To them, Dellow’s expertise lied solely in “barbecuing” the Oilers’ and the Edmonton media. They quite literally have no idea about the actual work Dellow produced and have mistaken him for a court jester.
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