Playing your best players; it’s a simple concept in sports, but you’d be surprised how often teams tend to forget about it throughout the course of a chaotic game. You’ll see the boxscore at the end of the night where a superstar (eg. Alex Ovechkin or Vladimir Tarasenko) only played 15 minutes in an important playoff game, while a grinder (eg. Leo Komarov) somehow got north of 24 minutes in a regular season game, and you’ll ask yourself: “How the heck did that happen?”



I think the simple answer is: by overthinking things.



This isn’t to say that coaches are stupid. They spend hours of preparation every day game-planning for their opponents, relying on mountains of information that we in the public could only dream of having access to. With that being said, nobody’s perfect. Most of the time, coaches get things right, but sometimes this hyper-emphasis on scheming and matchups can result in your best players not...