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Originally Posted by Paulie Walnuts
The issue became that series made Peters and Treliving panic, and change how we play. A lot of the strong metrics the team had under Sutter in 2022 they had that under Peters just not the goaltending.
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Some years ago, I read a splendid article on ‘Over-controlling a Process’. It takes the research of W. Edward Deming on the subject and describes it for laypeople. You can find it posted here:
https://www.spcforexcel.com/knowledg...el-experiment/
Here's the money quote from Deming:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by W. Edward Deming
If anyone adjusts a stable process for a result that is undesirable, or for a result that is extra good, the output that follows will be worse than if he had left the process alone.
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The article shows four patterns that can result from repeatedly adjusting a process in response to (noisy or random) short-term variations. Pattern #3 produces a series of violent pendulum swings, increasing in amplitude as time goes on. This pattern neatly describes the results the Flames get when they keep replacing coaches.
Pattern:
1. The team is playing loosey-goosey. Fans and media talk about a ‘country club’. Players get to pad their stats, but defence suffers and so do overall results. (Some of this is due to random variation, but management can't tell how much and the pundits aren't even interested.)
2. The team says, ‘We need a hard-ass coach who will drill some defensive discipline into these guys.’ They hire such a coach.
3. The pendulum swings to the opposite end. Goals against go down, but scoring suffers, and results are still suboptimal. The strict defensive system is extremely demanding, physically and mentally. Players are exhausted by the end of the season and have no extra gear left for the playoffs. The first year they go along with it, but at some point it stops working as well (random variation again). Not seeing the results for so much hard work, they rebel against the coach who forced them to play this way.
4. The team says, ‘We need a players' coach who won't stifle our talented players.’ They hire such a coach.
5. The pendulum swings right back to the first extreme, and the cycle repeats.
Every time they hire a coach and implement a system, they are less concerned with getting it right, and more concerned with avoiding the particular mistake they made last time. They focus on hiring a coach who is sharply different from the last guy, when they should focus on just hiring a good coach.
One good thing about the Huska hire is that they didn't really get a chance to do that. I don't think there was any chance of hiring an established coach, because ownership was tired of paying big money to coaches who had already been fired. So they went with what they had – and that helped to stop the pendulum and break the cycle. Huska doesn't have a mandate to coach in a particular way; he just has to do the best he can. This is progress.