Routes and triangles with Roope Hintz

Let's look at some simple math on the ice.

Have you ever seen the “Work Bus” episode of The Office?

It’s Season 9, Episode 4, and one of jokes is that Kevin Malone, typically a terrible accountant, is great at math when it comes to pies.

This line is from the script.

Oscar: Hold on, Kevin, how much is 19,154 pies divided by 61 pies?
Kevin: 314 pies.
Oscar: What if it were salads?
Kevin: Well, it’s the…carry the four…and…it doesn’t work.

I’m very much like Kevin, but for my brain, rather than pies, the math typically doesn’t work without hockey or sports application.

Which is why Roope Hintz is going to teach us something today about shapes and geometry (or maybe it’s trigonometry?), after his hat-trick last night against the Chicago Blackhawks.

For starters, Hintz is one of my favorite players to watch right now. He’s excitement incarnate with his speed and physical tools, he’s pretty close to the model for a “build-your-own” hockey player if you were to look for one in a video game or something like that.

But Hintz also has a basic understanding of something that other elite tooled players, like Denis Gurianov, lacked at the NHL level.