Let's talk about hockey chaos theory

Happy Saturday, I wanted to write about something before watching more hockey tonight.

Greetings from East Lansing.

I’m setup in the press box at Michigan State before the Big 10 semifinal game between the top-seeded Spartans and No. 5 seed Ohio State. Michigan State is locked into the NCAA tournament already and will likely be one of the top seeds, while Ohio State is playing to extend its season.

Should be a fun night, and for those wondering, yes I will be writing about the game between the Detroit Red Wings and Dallas Stars later tonight, but that will be tape-delayed coverage for me and we will have a 20/20 here for the late-night or early-morning reader.

In the meantime, I’ve got a theory/concept I wanted to write about that’s been rolling around in my head the past couple days while I’ve been watching games at USA Hockey’s Under-17 National Team Development Program evaluation camp.

Let’s call it the hockey chaos theory.

Hockey is a chaotic sport, I would argue the most chaotic amongst the major sports in North America between the rules, concepts, and execution. Unlike basketball, more of a true outcome sport, the better team wins less often than it should, which is why the Stanley Cup playoffs are such a beautiful spectacle — we love chaos, and we should.

Teams that win the Stanley Cup, or any championship, tend to be the ones that have best dictated the chaos.

This brings me back to my individual player theory, players that advance and reach the highest levels, are those that can either cause or control the chaos. Those that get consumed by it are the ones that get weeded out as the game advances.

Nathan MacKinnon and Connor McDavid, for example, are chaos creators. Players that push and drive the game further into madness that others can’t keep up with.

Leon Draisaitl and Nikita Kucherov, for example, are chaos controllers. Players that control the madness, slow things down for themselves and others, and thrive because of it.

Now truly elite players can brings elements of both, it’s more of a bell curve than a straight line, but at the heart of it I would argue any player that reaches the NHL can probably classified to some level as a chaos creator or a chaos controller.

I intentionally used top-tier forwards in that example, but it also applies to defenders. Miro Heiskanen and Moritz Seider, who are playing against each other tonight, are both chaos controllers. Cale Makar and Thomas Harley are chaos creators.

As a general rule of thumb, the chaos creators tend to be the ones fans gravitate too, while the controllers tend to be more beloved by coaches. But you need both to win, and when you think about the Florida Panthers back-to-back Stanley Cup championships I often point to the strong balance between creators and controllers, where Aleksander Barkov and Gustav Forsling (controllers) had their ideal foils in Matthew Tkachuck and Sam Reinhart (creators).

When I look at the top contending teams in the NHL this season, I see balance amongst chaos creators and controllers. While there are other teams that probably lean too far in one direction with their personnel and have yet to find the proper balance — Detroit, for example, needs more chaos creators, it’s a team of players that want to be chaos controllers.

We use NHL examples for this, but it’s something that really sat with me while scouting players this week at the NTDP evaluation camp. While you are looking for other specific skills — skating, shooting, etc…. — for me my list of standouts ultimately ended up being the players that best found roles as either creating or controlling chaos during the camp.

I’m not sure the best way to quantify this on a large scale, which is one of the reasons I’m throwing the theory out there and I’d love to hear some thoughts on ways to better dive into this beyond my anecdotal musings.

Either way, thanks for reading, we’ll have more published this evening/early tomorrow.

Enjoy the chaos everyone.