There’s a lot of hate and criticism out there for Tom Rowe. People want to see him fired a la Mike Brown, the Los Angeles Lakers coach who was fired after just 5 games in 2012. Here’s the thing, though, folks. Rowe isn’t going anywhere, at least not until the end of the season. The sooner the most vehement detractors of the Panthers’ interim coach can stop their petulant demands that he be fired, the better rest of the fanbase will be.

Love him or hate him, Tom Rowe is not going anywhere, so you better get used to it.

Opening Thoughts

I’m going to open this blog by saying that I don’t hate Tom Rowe. I really don’t. I also really liked Gerard Gallant. It’s kind of hard to hate such a nice guy. I was shocked to see him fired after the game against Carolina, and I thought that the scenario under which Gallant was fired looked very bad, but was blown out of proportion, which Gallant himself has stated. The taxi photos made the situation look even worse, and the old guard of the hockey media crucified the team for it. Don Cherry called the firing “The worst firing in the history of the NHL.” It certainly was one of the oddest, at least on a superficial level.

Gerard had coached the team to its franchise-best season, but fell short in the playoffs, losing to the Islanders in 6 games (Trocheck was tripped). The ensuing off-season was one of the most active off-seasons in terms of personnel changing and front office re-tooling for any team in the league, let alone one who was coming off the best season it had ever had. One of those changes was an alteration in the structuring of executives in the organization, including the promotion of Dale Tallon to President of Hockey Operations. Tom Rowe replaced him as General Manager, a position they had shared since the Panthers announced a contract extension for Tallon back in January. Clearly, something was up in the organization, and it was definitely something strange.

I was sad to Gerard go, and I think the team is definitely going to take its lumps in the short term (10ish games, 7 of which have already past). Media scrutiny, angry fans, and a systematic change to the team’s play are hard on everyone in the organization. It’s suffering for the fans, it’s hell on the people running the social media, on the owners, the management, the sales representatives, and, most importantly, the players.

In the initial heat of the storm it’s hard exactly to judge what the hell is going on, but there is some information that we do have. I’m going to do my best in the following paragraphs to relay that as well as assuage the anger that’s been stoked by this controversial move and the lackluster performance since. That’s not to say I condone the move, but I am saying that there is a definite overreaction and blind rage coming from many corners of the fan base (if you can’t tell from the photos) that I would love to quell. These might be the same people who are still commenting to say that the new logo sucks – which almost everyone has moved past at this point, but there’s enough of these people to warrant a response, so here we go!

“The Results Under Rowe Have Been Worse than when Gallant was Coaching.”

The Panthers are 2-2-3 in 7 games under Tom Rowe. Doing the math means the team earned 7 points in 7 games for an 1 point per game average under the new coach. . Gallant was 11-10-1 earning 23 points in 22 games for a 1.05 (rounded to the nearest hundredth) points per game average. Another way to look at is Rowe is 2-5 and Gallant was 11-11. This demonstrably proves that Gallant is a better coach than Rowe because they have the same personnel and Rowe had a better record.

Except it doesn’t.

Here we go down the rabbit hole. If you think that 1) 7 games is enough to judge a coach’s aptitude and 2) .05 points per game is a significant difference then think again. I know those of you who are critical of analytics aren’t fond on statistical analysis, but stick with me here. When analyzing a set of data, it’s crucial to make sure you have collected enough to make a conclusion. For example, nobody expects a rookie who scores 6 points in his first 2 NHL games to break Gretzky’s scoring record, and the same applies with Tom Rowe. Players and teams at all levels go through up and down streaks. When the Canucks stared 4-0-0 do you think their fans started having dreams of the first undefeated season in NHL history? Probably not, and if you look at the Canucks we know that definitely isn’t what happened. Similarly, when the Predators started 2-5-1 do you think their fans started kissing the season goodbye after playing 8 games? No, and the Preds are now above .500.

I understand the frustration from fans (I have a feeling I’m going to say this a lot) who have to deal with a move that honestly makes very little sense on the surface – especially since it deals with a philosophical disagreement between the ownership and coach – and now see that they new guy isn’t performing as well as the old guy.

The brain process of a fan might go something like:

They fired this guy who was actually doing pretty well. The players liked him, the fans liked him, and he wasn’t doing awfully. He was even nominated for coach of the year last year, and we won the division! Why fire him? Oh well, let’s see what happens. Maybe being .500 leaves some room for improvement after how well we did last year. Let’s see how the interim coach does This new interim coach isn’t as good as the other guy was! Bring back the other guy!

The thing is we won’t actually known how Tom Rowe is doing until he’s played more games, because a sample size of 7 games is just not enough to make any solid judgement on Rowe’s ability to coach. I believe that once Rowe has time to communicate his system to the players, hone and tune the system, and the team gets healthier (don’t forget that Rowe doesn’t have Marshmallow right now, and that Yandle appears to be banged up. Also, Huberdeau is still out) the results will get better.

In fact, we’ve already seen some evidence of Rowe implementing new lines and mixing up the pairings on Defense against what Gallant had done.

Seth Griffith was skating on the wing with Alex Barkov and Jaromir Jagr, an initially questionable decision that led to many prime scoring chances, including the early goal that put the Panthers up 1-0. Aaron Ekblad was back with Mark Pysyk, which wound up with a goal for him as well. Probably because he was no longed tethered to the dead weight that is Jakub Kindl. Many of these changes are just Rowe trying to work around the injury bug, but he seemed to find productive line pairings in the mean time. Of course, one game isn’t enough time, but the initial success is perhaps an inkling that not Rowe is not the incompetent buffoon he’s made out to be.

I could, of course, be 100% wrong about that, but the only way to find out is to reserve judgement and wait until Rowe has had more time. That’s the real point of this article. Time will tell. It doesn’t make the current skid or the fallout from the firing any less frustrating, but it does put some of it into context.

Philosophical Quarreling

If love just love watching hockey and hate or don’t understand analytics then I’m sorry if you were hurt by this move. This coaching change is the latest battleground between the old and new schools of hockey. Love or hate it, understand it or not, the Panthers are embracing analytics in an attempt to get a statistical advantage over their competition.

This is the new NHL, and it’s here to stay. Teams have always been looking for a competitive advantage, and what statisticians in the analytic departments are doing is gathering raw data, and then determining what that data means to the club. It’s not as “paint by numbers” as you would think. All the analytics departments are doing differently than before is collecting more data on all facets of players’ games, but you still need those minds to interpret the data in a way that lines up with the vision of the team, and that’s really hard.

The analytics movement is just trying to get extra data to use to interpret players in addition to watching them play and assessing their performance visually. However, it’s still fairly easy to make the wrong decision, because building a team is still really difficult due to the high amount of variables in play. Salary, coaching, development, offense, defense, transition, forecheck, shot, vision, discipline, injury-proneness … the list goes on. There’s a lot that can go wrong, so it’s hard to make it go right, but the analytics movement is an effort to help reduce the likelihood that something will go wrong when building a team.

All this is to say:

Analytics does not a competent team make.

I will admit that it is possible to build a good team without use of heavy analytics, but it’s also possible to build a team with one. It’s not that analytics is bad and the old school is good, but rather that both can either be good or bad based on who is practicing each philosophy.

The LA Kings managed to win two Stanley Cups by embracing analytics. It is possible to win this way. Chicago did it too, and Pittsburgh did last year. “Coach killer” and “locker room destroyer” Phil Kessel is now a Stanley Cup Champ. Analytics are not perfect, and they’re not right every time, but all of the recent NHL champions have embraced analytics, and that’s big points in the analytics corner. The bottom line is if you want to win in the NHL you have to embrace analytics, but just because you embrace it does not mean you’re going to be successful.

The Panthers analytical vision upstairs did not align with Gallant’s modus operandi, and so they moved on. The timing for the move was very poor, and the optics of it were terrible, but the motivations behind it are well understood. Perhaps all the Panthers needed to make this transition smoother was a good PR team. Gallant is a great dude, and a pretty good hockey coach, too, however the Panthers want to ride the analytics wave, and Gallant just would not fit in the long-term scheme for the team, at least according to the management. I can’t really question the management’s vision other than that because I’m not in the team meeting.

Gallant is a very unfortunate and high-profile casualty for the Panthers, but Tom Rowe has openly embraced the progressive thinking that the Panthers want to embrace. Hockey is a notoriously conservative sport (just ask Don Cherry), and the Panthers want to shake it up. Doug Cifu and Vinnie Viola, the team’s owners, built their billions on progressive thinking and innovated trading techniques on Wall Street. They aren’t scared to embrace new ideas and new ideologies when running the team.

If that means running the guy who last season put Willie Mitchell and Erik Gudbranson on the literal worst pairing in the NHL and started the season with Dave Bolland as the team’s second line center out of town, then that’s what it means. Gallant needed to be coerced last year into making analytics based changes after a similarly tepid start to the 2015-16 season. After making said adjustments the team went on to win the division. I think that the ownership believed that Gallant was on board. When this season rolled around, and Gallant was back to ignoring the analytics that the team wanted, and what had worked the previous season, he was out. And I think that’s not an unreasonable viewpoint to make. (Citation)

Final Thoughts

Even if you could do without it, the trendsetting businessmen who own the team want to be trendsetting sports owners as well. It may work and it may not, but they’re going to try anyway. There is evidence that the changes backed by analytics are working, from last season’s mid-campaign adjustments to Rowe’s interchanging of lines and defense pairings, but the evidence is slim as far as this season goes, and we’ll need to see consistent results going forward to make a verdict one way or the other. Gallant is gone, and for the Panthers that means following down a path that has been proven to work, but still undoubtedly holds a lot of unknown potential.

Tempus omnia revelat.