2018-19 Toronto Maple Leafs - General Discussion

[Phileas Fogg]

Salming=Best Leaf D man ever.

You're not wrong, but I'll always be a huge kaberle fan. I think he would have excelled even more in today's game.

 

[Highlander]

Salming=Best Leaf D man ever.

I will second and third that sentiment

 

[Kaberle15]

Salming=Best Leaf D man ever.

You're not wrong, but I'll always be a huge kaberle fan. I think he would have excelled even more in today's game.

I will second and third that sentiment

 

[Frank E]

Salming=Best Leaf D man ever.

You're not wrong, but I'll always be a huge kaberle fan. I think he would have excelled even more in today's game.

I will second and third that sentiment

In his prime, Kaberle was one of the best puck handling d-men I've ever watched.  He wasn't much when not handling the puck, but the way he made guys move with his hesitations and head fakes was really fun to watch.

Larry Murphy, as underappreciated as he was as a Leaf, was another great puck manager on the back-end.

But really, Salming was a stud in his time, and I'm comfortable calling him the best d-man the Leafs have iced if we're talking about who was the best guy relative to their peers during their individual careers.

Interesting fact, the Leafs have never had a Norris Trophy winner, and the last guy that played for them that even had a Norris was Brian Leetch, for 15 games back in 2004, and he had won his most recent one in '97...and the last time a Leaf won the Hart was in 1955...Ted Kennedy.

These are unprecedented times in Leafland, ladies and gentlemen.

 

[Highlander]

Nice article in the Star by Damian Cox, not a huge fan of his but his observations are spot on especially for those who have been Leaf fans since the early 90's. 
For those of oldies that remember the Leafs actually winning multiple Cups, the sting of all those terrible years is still like a thorn in our sides.
We want to win now, not in two or three years.

 

[herman]

https://twitter.com/vaswani_/status/1033490454799675393

For the people in the ?hire the best people? crowd who are worried about white males losing jobs to affirmative action and representation...

 

[Kin]

Nobody is happier than I am to have it feel like the Leafs are doing smart things again but I have to confess I'm a little puzzled about how exactly something like that would work with regards to an inexact science like scouting. Maybe this is just my lack of experience with the subject matter coming through but are there objectively good and objectively bad scouting reports? And isn't amateur scouting less about the quality of a report and an ability to sort of try and project a player a few years out? How could you look at a bunch of anonymous reports and figure that out?

It seems to me like any such effort would result less in getting the "best" applicants by any actual metric and more about getting the ones that most fit in with what an organization is looking for. Which isn't a bad thing of course but you do sort of wonder if some of the better picks made over the years weren't a result of against the grain thinking.

 

[Phileas Fogg]

Which isn't a bad thing of course but you do sort of wonder if some of the better picks made over the years weren't a result of against the grain thinking.

Or, quite frankly, any more than half-blind luck. There's always a revisionist breakdown of the logic behind later round successful picks, and it's usually that "against the grain" logic backing them up in order for those involved to set themselves apart.

Maybe I'm being too cynical.

 

[Frank E]

Nobody is happier than I am to have it feel like the Leafs are doing smart things again but I have to confess I'm a little puzzled about how exactly something like that would work with regards to an inexact science like scouting. Maybe this is just my lack of experience with the subject matter coming through but are there objectively good and objectively bad scouting reports? And isn't amateur scouting less about the quality of a report and an ability to sort of try and project a player a few years out? How could you look at a bunch of anonymous reports and figure that out?

It seems to me like any such effort would result less in getting the "best" applicants by any actual metric and more about getting the ones that most fit in with what an organization is looking for. Which isn't a bad thing of course but you do sort of wonder if some of the better picks made over the years weren't a result of against the grain thinking.

It's just more media people falling over themselves congratulating the Leafs on being so smart, before they actually do something smart.

Here's the thing, I'm a little more concerned that they would actually have biases that would require some software to mask people's identities. 

I know I wouldn't need it.

 

[OldTimeHockey]

Here's the thing, I'm a little more concerned that they would actually have biases that would require some software to mask people's identities. 

I know I wouldn't need it.

Everyone has biases despite wanting to deny that.

Also, it's not like they used this method to pick their GM or Coach. It was used for an amateur scout way down the ladder where picking becomes more difficult as the difference between one applicant and the other may be less evident.

I'm not saying this method was groundbreaking. Just saying..

 

[Kin]

Or, quite frankly, any more than half-blind luck. There's always a revisionist breakdown of the logic behind later round successful picks, and it's usually that "against the grain" logic backing them up in order for those involved to set themselves apart.

Yeah, sure. There's always going to be an element of luck in any draft pick success outside of your real obvious ones but I guess I meant that even within an organization I think it would pay to occasionally listen to people with a different outlook than the one making the larger scale decisions.

 

[Kin]

Here's the thing, I'm a little more concerned that they would actually have biases that would require some software to mask people's identities. 

I know I wouldn't need it.

I'm not sure that's as virtuous as you think it is. If you're saying you don't have ideas formed in your head as to what makes a good employee and what makes a bad one in a particular role it doesn't so much say you're openminded as it does that you don't care about it much.

 

[Frank E]

Here's the thing, I'm a little more concerned that they would actually have biases that would require some software to mask people's identities. 

I know I wouldn't need it.

I'm not sure that's as virtuous as you think it is. If you're saying you don't have ideas formed in your head as to what makes a good employee and what makes a bad one in a particular role it doesn't so much say you're openminded as it does that you don't care about it much.

1.  I don't think it's that virtuous at all.  It's just being a smart hiring manager/employer.  Any business, like mine, that depends on input from a number of different points of view should have hiring practices that encourages hiring different kinds of people.  More specifically, to the point of the tweet, I don't have any age bias (obviously within reason), gender bias, or cultural bias.

2.  I have lots of formed ideas in my head about what makes a good employee, but they really don't have anything to do with age/gender/culture.

 

[Kin]

1.  I don't think it's that virtuous at all.  It's just being a smart hiring manager/employer.  Any business, like mine, that depends on input from a number of different points of view should have hiring practices that encourages hiring different kinds of people.  More specifically, to the point of the tweet, I don't have any age bias (obviously within reason), gender bias, or cultural bias.

2.  I have lots of formed ideas in my head about what makes a good employee, but they really don't have anything to do with age/gender/culture.

Well, I tend to think that most of the biases we have tend to be unconscious so I'm not sure stating you don't have any means all that much but I think the second point is more important. I don't think the biases that Dubas and co. were talking about were based around age or gender or culture but rather the biases that I think we would consider more acceptable that can get in the way of our evaluation of just the work product. As a for instance, a lot of people have ideas about relevant experience and how that might apply.

Especially in hockey where "That person was part of a winning organization" seems to carry a ton of weight and the peter principle gets played out fairly often, I think they were talking about a bias towards those sorts of things.

 

[cabber24]

https://twitter.com/vaswani_/status/1033490454799675393

For the people in the ?hire the best people? crowd who are worried about white males losing jobs to affirmative action and representation...

I like the approach. I wish schools would do the same thing for teachers/professors marking papers. A totally unbiased opinion free from any outside influence or pre-existing opinions/parameters.

 

[Frank E]

1.  I don't think it's that virtuous at all.  It's just being a smart hiring manager/employer.  Any business, like mine, that depends on input from a number of different points of view should have hiring practices that encourages hiring different kinds of people.  More specifically, to the point of the tweet, I don't have any age bias (obviously within reason), gender bias, or cultural bias.

2.  I have lots of formed ideas in my head about what makes a good employee, but they really don't have anything to do with age/gender/culture.

Well, I tend to think that most of the biases we have tend to be unconscious so I'm not sure stating you don't have any means all that much but I think the second point is more important. I don't think the biases that Dubas and co. were talking about were based around age or gender or culture but rather the biases that I think we would consider more acceptable that can get in the way of our evaluation of just the work product. As a for instance, a lot of people have ideas about relevant experience and how that might apply.

Especially in hockey where "That person was part of a winning organization" seems to carry a ton of weight and the peter principle gets played out fairly often, I think they were talking about a bias towards those sorts of things.

Well, I think we're going to disagree a bit on this subject.  There's a big difference between bias and preference.

I think what you may be referring to is groups making decision based on preferences based on history of hiring people from different kinds of experience makers (competing/similar organizations).  For instance, you're looking at a candidate that has been working with a particular company that has a very strong process that you believe in, and this candidate believes in those processes, so you place that candidate higher than one that has been working with a less successful organization with a weaker process, at least in your opinion, that that candidate believes in.

Bias, by definition, is usually being unfair in your evaluation.

So I'm pretty comfortable saying I'm not unfair in my practices.  I'm not so sure that MLSE was being unfair in the past, I don't really know.  But the tweet was pretty specific with the criteria of gender, appearance, ethnicity, and age, and the suggestion that they were trying to avoid making decisions based on those.  All I can say to that is, well, welcome to the 21st century, MLSE scouting department.

 

[Kin]

Well, I think we're going to disagree a bit on this subject.  There's a big difference between bias and preference.

I think what you may be referring to is groups making decision based on preferences based on history of hiring people from different kinds of experience makers (competing/similar organizations).  For instance, you're looking at a candidate that has been working with a particular company that has a very strong process that you believe in, and this candidate believes in those processes, so you place that candidate higher than one that has been working with a less successful organization with a weaker process, at least in your opinion, that that candidate believes in.

But what this is about is about isolating everything except for the work produced. In a capacity in which there is an objectively good product(which, like I said, is debatable here) then excluding all other considerations to just focus on the work has value. Nothing said here indicated that eliminating every other consideration and just looking at the work blind of any perceived biases was the only consideration, just that it can be valuable to admit that occasionally you don't know what you don't know and looking at the work done independent of whatever your biases may be.

If you hire a group of people who have experience from one particular source and it works out well so you develop a "preference" for people with that experience that is the hot hand fallacy at work. Especially in a world where not every type of experience is equally available to all people. This is sort of discrimination 101. If someone has a strong preference for hiring people with experience from a certain source(say, being on a scouting staff of a previously successful NHL team) then how does anyone become the first sort of person to gain that experience?

Bias, by definition, is usually being unfair in your evaluation.

So I'm pretty comfortable saying I'm not unfair in my practices.

But that's the whole point. Nobody thinks they're being unfair. Nobody thinks they're playing to their subconscious biases, because then they wouldn't be subconscious. You could go to the most bigoted, prejudicial person in the world and I guarantee that they would talk about "preferences" and learned experience and some sort of cooked up data that reinforces what they think rather than admitting their thought process is flawed. After all, if you were conscious of those biases, why would you continue to indulge in them?

Often, the way we arrive at those preferences are a result of flawed thinking, where we value things that aren't quantifiable over things that are. This process is about people being able to sometimes admit that you can't always trust yourself to be the most objective in your evaluations of yourself and your methods.

But the tweet was pretty specific with the criteria of gender, appearance, ethnicity, and age, and the suggestion that they were trying to avoid making decisions based on those.

Well, no. First of all it's an excerpt from an article, not a tweet. Secondly, within the highlighted text "Things like..." is not specific or limiting.

But even still, it's about Dubas and co. being able to recognize that we're all products of our environment and not everything that environment imparts to us is consciously realized. Our biases inform our "preferences" and this was an attempt to step outside of that.

 

[IJustLurkHere]

Bias, by definition, is usually being unfair in your evaluation.

So I'm pretty comfortable saying I'm not unfair in my practices.

But that's the whole point. Nobody thinks they're being unfair. Nobody thinks they're playing to their subconscious biases, because then they wouldn't be subconscious. You could go to the most bigoted, prejudicial person in the world and I guarantee that they would talk about "preferences" and learned experience and some sort of cooked up data that reinforces what they think rather than admitting their thought process is flawed. After all, if you were conscious of those biases, why would you continue to indulge in them?

Often, the way we arrive at those preferences are a result of flawed thinking, where we value things that aren't quantifiable over things that are. This process is about people being able to sometimes admit that you can't always trust yourself to be the most objective in your evaluations of yourself and your methods.

My interpretation is that it means Kyle Dubas has read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, in which there's a chapter that talks about the impact of orchestra's going from open auditions to having musician's audition behind a screen. Prior to the change, nobody would have said they were being biased, but the change in results speaks for itself.

Without plagiarising the book, here's an internet article where Gladwell describes the situation and impact: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_book_club/features/2005/blink_and_the_wisdom_of_crowds/the_biases_and_delusions_of_experts.html

Prior to the 1980s, auditions for top orchestras were open?that is, the auditioning committee sat and watched one musician after another come in and play in front of the judges. Under this system, the overwhelming number of musicians hired by top orchestras were men?but no one thought much of this. It was simply assumed that men were better musicians. After all, what could be fairer than an open audition? And weren't the members of audition committees, "experts" in their field, capable of discerning good musicians from bad musicians?

But then, for a number of reasons, orchestras in the 1980s started putting up screens in audition rooms, so that the committee could no longer see the person auditioning. And immediately?immediately!?orchestras started hiring women left and right. In fact, since the advent of screens, women have won the majority of auditions for top orchestras, meaning that now, if anything, the auditioning process supports the conclusion that women are better classical musicians than men. Clearly what was happening before was that, in ways no one quite realized, the act of seeing a given musician play was impairing the listener's ability to actually hear what a musician was playing. People's feelings about women, as a group, were interfering with their ability to evaluate music.

I don't know that anyone's being accused of being biased... I just think Dubas read Blink

 

[Redleaf]

Bias, by definition, is usually being unfair in your evaluation.

So I'm pretty comfortable saying I'm not unfair in my practices.

But that's the whole point. Nobody thinks they're being unfair. Nobody thinks they're playing to their subconscious biases, because then they wouldn't be subconscious. You could go to the most bigoted, prejudicial person in the world and I guarantee that they would talk about "preferences" and learned experience and some sort of cooked up data that reinforces what they think rather than admitting their thought process is flawed. After all, if you were conscious of those biases, why would you continue to indulge in them?

Often, the way we arrive at those preferences are a result of flawed thinking, where we value things that aren't quantifiable over things that are. This process is about people being able to sometimes admit that you can't always trust yourself to be the most objective in your evaluations of yourself and your methods.

My interpretation is that it means Kyle Dubas has read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, in which there's a chapter that talks about the impact of orchestra's going from open auditions to having musician's audition behind a screen. Prior to the change, nobody would have said they were being biased, but the change in results speaks for itself.

Without plagiarising the book, here's an internet article where Gladwell describes the situation and impact: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_book_club/features/2005/blink_and_the_wisdom_of_crowds/the_biases_and_delusions_of_experts.html

Prior to the 1980s, auditions for top orchestras were open?that is, the auditioning committee sat and watched one musician after another come in and play in front of the judges. Under this system, the overwhelming number of musicians hired by top orchestras were men?but no one thought much of this. It was simply assumed that men were better musicians. After all, what could be fairer than an open audition? And weren't the members of audition committees, "experts" in their field, capable of discerning good musicians from bad musicians?

But then, for a number of reasons, orchestras in the 1980s started putting up screens in audition rooms, so that the committee could no longer see the person auditioning. And immediately?immediately!?orchestras started hiring women left and right. In fact, since the advent of screens, women have won the majority of auditions for top orchestras, meaning that now, if anything, the auditioning process supports the conclusion that women are better classical musicians than men. Clearly what was happening before was that, in ways no one quite realized, the act of seeing a given musician play was impairing the listener's ability to actually hear what a musician was playing. People's feelings about women, as a group, were interfering with their ability to evaluate music.

I don't know that anyone's being accused of being biased... I just think Dubas read Blink

Interesting . I?d never heard that one before.

 

[Frank E]

Well, I think we're going to disagree a bit on this subject.  There's a big difference between bias and preference.

I think what you may be referring to is groups making decision based on preferences based on history of hiring people from different kinds of experience makers (competing/similar organizations).  For instance, you're looking at a candidate that has been working with a particular company that has a very strong process that you believe in, and this candidate believes in those processes, so you place that candidate higher than one that has been working with a less successful organization with a weaker process, at least in your opinion, that that candidate believes in.

But what this is about is about isolating everything except for the work produced. In a capacity in which there is an objectively good product(which, like I said, is debatable here) then excluding all other considerations to just focus on the work has value. Nothing said here indicated that eliminating every other consideration and just looking at the work blind of any perceived biases was the only consideration, just that it can be valuable to admit that occasionally you don't know what you don't know and looking at the work done independent of whatever your biases may be.

If you hire a group of people who have experience from one particular source and it works out well so you develop a "preference" for people with that experience that is the hot hand fallacy at work. Especially in a world where not every type of experience is equally available to all people. This is sort of discrimination 101. If someone has a strong preference for hiring people with experience from a certain source(say, being on a scouting staff of a previously successful NHL team) then how does anyone become the first sort of person to gain that experience?

Bias, by definition, is usually being unfair in your evaluation.

So I'm pretty comfortable saying I'm not unfair in my practices.

But that's the whole point. Nobody thinks they're being unfair. Nobody thinks they're playing to their subconscious biases, because then they wouldn't be subconscious. You could go to the most bigoted, prejudicial person in the world and I guarantee that they would talk about "preferences" and learned experience and some sort of cooked up data that reinforces what they think rather than admitting their thought process is flawed. After all, if you were conscious of those biases, why would you continue to indulge in them?

Often, the way we arrive at those preferences are a result of flawed thinking, where we value things that aren't quantifiable over things that are. This process is about people being able to sometimes admit that you can't always trust yourself to be the most objective in your evaluations of yourself and your methods.

But the tweet was pretty specific with the criteria of gender, appearance, ethnicity, and age, and the suggestion that they were trying to avoid making decisions based on those.

Well, no. First of all it's an excerpt from an article, not a tweet. Secondly, within the highlighted text "Things like..." is not specific or limiting.

But even still, it's about Dubas and co. being able to recognize that we're all products of our environment and not everything that environment imparts to us is consciously realized. Our biases inform our "preferences" and this was an attempt to step outside of that.

Like I said, we're not going to agree on this.  I'm comfortable with my position here, so I'll leave it at that.