“Indeed,” said Natalie, “you could not have been better informed about us all than from my aunt’s account. One must admit that her affection for me presumed too much good in me as a child, but when one talks about children, it is one’s hopes for them rather than what they actually are which one has in mind.”
~ from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Book 8, Ch. 3.
Around this time every year the greater hockey family gathers around the Bar-B-Q and settles into the ritual gnashing of teeth over the symbols of our future. Across the way, on a big screen, impressionistic flashes light up the sky. The heroes of old parade in front of us. A montage of glory. Long forgotten affects well up in the crowd as all the ancient heroic virtues play out before them. A bittersweet warmth pervades.
Suddenly, the screen goes black. The crowd is hushed. Single images of past heroes crystallize sharp against the background. The crowd decamps into large groups, each identifying with this or that hero. The greater hockey family turns away from the screen, sees the decampments and a clamor of bickering breaks loose as the parties argue for the virtue of their champion against the others.
Amidst their caterwauling, the screen flashes bright as the sun. The crowd turns away from each other and toward the screen. The brightness fades and reveals the crystallized figures once more only to give way to a morphing haze. Slowly the images melt into new figures, the figures of persons not seen before. The crowd understands. These new figures are to inherit the destiny of their forerunners and the devotion of the followers of their forerunners. The crowd detaches from the screen, decamps once again and continues the tumult with a fresh set of names on their lips.
This little story gets at one of the problems I come across as the draft nears.
Even the most informed draft fan has, relatively speaking, little knowledge of the players up for grabs. A few fans may have extensive knowledge of a few players. Perhaps they’ve seen them play junior hockey in their town. Others will make do with boxcars, descriptions, draft rankings, NHL equivalencies, etc.
Along the way, most draft watchers will attach themselves to a player, or players. This is completely natural. Part of what makes hockey fun is the somewhat arbitrary attachment to teams and players that allows for cheering and rooting. However, because most draft watchers are operating from an extreme knowledge deficit regarding these players, they tend to consider them by proxy.
Enter the comparable.
One of the ways scouts, coaches, commentators and even the players themselves pitch a player is by making him a proxy for a previous player. This is entirely reasonable. It offers the fan a thumbnail sketch of how a player plays, his style and his strengths. It is much easier for us to conjure up an image of “Gilmour” from the collection of HNIC memories stored in our hazy memories, than it is to build an image of “Bennett” from an aggregate of numbers, short profiles and a few youtube clips. This shortcutting is, no doubt, useful.
However, it is not without it’s readily apparent pitfalls.
The biggest problem with the draft eligible comparable is that, by and large, it is aspirational in nature. That is, it projects the absolute best case scenario for the player. To a certain extent, this makes sense. In most cases in life, when a comparison in needed, we use an ideal as a standard, model, outline, pattern, etc. That is, we use an ideal so as to model desired behavior for others. This has obvious pedagogical import (we model behavior to children, hoping to cultivate them toward an ideal) as well as a psychological import (we are loath to think of ourselves and those we care for as limited in capacity or base of motives). It also is part of a long history ingrained in our Western (if you will) heritage.
“In my opinion,” I said, “when the sensible man comes in his narrative to some speech or deed of a good man, he will be willing to report it as though he himself were that man and won’t be ashamed of such an imitation. He will imitate the good man most when he is acting steadily and prudently; less, and less willingly, when he’s unsteadied by diseases, loves, drink, or some other misfortune. But when he meets with someone unworthy of himself, he won’t be willing seriously to represent himself as inferior, unless, of course, it’s brief, when the man does something good; rather, he’ll be ashamed, both because he’s unpracticed at imitating such men and because he can’t stand forming himself according to, and fitting himself into, the models of worse men. In his mind he despises this, unless it’s done in play.”
~Plato, Republic, 396c-e.
Despite the merits of the aspirational comparable (and certainly because of its pervasiveness), it remains flawed. The chances that a draft eligible player, even a highly regarded one, mirrors the career of his outer watermark are slim.
Part of the problem here is that in order for an aspirational comparable to be effective it needs to rely on a relatively small group of ideals. Too many ideals and the images blur, the ideals fail to stand out as sharply. The handiness of a select few ideals is that they are readily apparent, insofar as they comprise only the most notable of the elite. The sheer number of times I’ve heard a defensemen compared to Shea Weber are incalculable.
Take Colton Teubert, LA Kings’ draft pick from 2008 (13th overall).
Teubert was a big, nasty player, the kind that always get noticed. Sure, he didn’t score and his skating could use some work. But, did I mention “Size!” and that he hates to lose hockey games?
Here’s Bob McKenzie’s final 2008 draft ranking for Teubert supplied with vital stats, boxcars, a profile and a comparable:
(source; click photo to embiggen)
The report card in full — complete with a nod to Shea Weber — is so glowing you skip right past the crucial part: “what he lacks in offensive upside… ” [note: even this couched in glowing qualifiers].
Here’s the video of his draft experience [note: the Weber comparable persists]:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHkn-jjHEog&w=560&h=315]Teubert, of course, didn’t last as a Kings’ prospect and failed to make an impression with the Oilers’ farm team. He’s currently under contract for one more season with the Iserlohn Roosters of the German Ice Hockey League.
The point, here, is not to use the benefit of hindsight to pick on Teubert or the scouts who compared him to Weber. What’s instructive here is that Teubert was very highly thought of in his draft year and that professional scouts thought Weber was representative of his potential.
The issue isn’t that the comparable was wrong, but that Teubert, like so many of us, failed to reach the zenith of his perceived capacity. Which, given how few people do, should hardly be surprising.
The lesson, then, is not to do away with the aspirational comparable. Sure, it could be helped along the way: we could use more examples, set more reasonable targets and implore people to have modest expectations vis–à–vis player projections. McKenzie, for his part, is careful to qualify all his comparables:
TSN has also listed a “Comparable” so fans have a reference for the style of game each prospect plays. Comparing, for example, Stamkos to Yzerman is not to suggest the former will score 1755 points. It’s just to suggest that Stamkos plays the game a lot like Yzerman did.
These qualifiers only go so far, however, when there are so many players being discussed and with so little first hand knowledge. The natural tendency is to have all the information blur into the background and the few recognizable figures––the heroes of the past and present––stand out in relief and stick in our memory.
The lesson is simple: enjoy the images of future flourishing, the memories of heroes past and present. Feel free to latch onto a comparable. It conveys real information about a player’s style and capacity for development. BUT, take all of this in with a mountain of skepticism.
Damn the Fans
The impetus for this article was the sense I got reading and participating in Oilers’ debates over the 2014 draft.
Arguments over the “big four” (Ekblad, Reinhart, Bennett and Draisaitl), quickly devolved into arguments over Weber, Nugent-Hopkins, Toews and Kopitar (I’m not immune to this). Fans end up conflating their vision of the team with the established player they’d most like to build the team around and championing his draft eligible simulacrum. The actual draft eligible player, with all his current strengths and weaknesses, tends to fade into the background. The aspirational comparable becomes a cudgel with which to berate those not beholden to our chosen heroes.
It is imperative that we take the aspirational comparable for what it is: a quick snapshot of a player’s style and perceived capacity. It is equally imperative that beyond this limited role for the aspirational comparable, we treat it with extreme caution and skepticism.
[adsanity id=1808 align=alignnone /]Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
