What Makes a Hockey Organization Thrive in the current NHL?

[GrandmaCookie]

Hey everyone,

I’ve been thinking about how much the NHL and hockey as a whole have evolved over the past few years, both on and off the ice. From front-office strategies to player development, there seem to be new standards for what makes a hockey organization truly successful in 2024.

But I can't seem to pinpoint what makes successful teams successful. I mean obviously you need elite talent and to draft well, but this can't be just that. Some teams have been drafting elite talent but the results aren't showing.

In your opinion, what are the key characteristics of a top-performing hockey organization today? Are there specific approaches in scouting, player development, analytics, coaching, or team culture that you think are essential for a team to thrive in this modern era?

Let's say you were to be the GM of an expansion team, what kind of players would you target and management / staff?

If you we're to be the GM of a bottom of the barrell team, how would you proceed to make them successful again?

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[hotcabbagesoup]

I don't know man. Seriously, I just don't know. We've lost for so long now that it seems we've lost any inkling of what it takes. All I see is mediocrity throughout. Go Sharks I guess. Sigh.

 

[Breakers]

Ruthless roster construction.

I think fans are irrational and will easy move on from a fan favorite.

“are you guys actually letting me go for real?”
- Marchessault in regards to Vegas management letting him go to free agency

Tampa with Stamkos and diverting the money to a 5 year younger guentzel

These are teams moving on from a conn-smythe winner and captain of the last 10 years.

 

[GrandmaCookie]

I don't know man. Seriously, I just don't know. We've lost for so long now that it seems we've lost any inkling of what it takes. All I see is mediocrity throughout. Go Sharks I guess. Sigh.

You have a great pool of young talented player. Just be patient man, Sharks can't suck forever.

 

[Chainshot]

I don't know man. Seriously, I just don't know. We've lost for so long now that it seems we've lost any inkling of what it takes. All I see is mediocrity throughout. Go Sharks I guess. Sigh.

Sabres fans look at your recent lack of success in wonder.

 

[TS Quint]

You need that core of winners. Being good just isnt good enough.

Draft well.

Being a desirable market sure helps. Being able to attract free agents is pretty important to fill the holes from trading your draft picks and losing your best 3rd liners once you start winning.

 

[GirardSpinorama]

You need that good mix of old school hockey experience/relationships/negotiation skills and new age analytics. And you need this embedded everywhere in the organization, from pro scouts, amateur scouts, to AHL, to coaching.

 

[Rorschach]

First key to having an effective team on ice starts at the very top. Is the owner capable? They need to have deep enough pockets, be willing to spend, hire the right front office staff and then let them do their work. They need all of the above. Other factors help as well, such as various taxes.

You can see Darryl Katz who has half of the above and is completely missing the other half.

The organization as a whole has to have a winning vision as well that drives every level of said organization.

 

[SnuggaRUDE]

Same as before. Get lucky and land a couple of top players from outside the 1st round.

 

[miscs75]

Tax breaks

 

[WaitingForThatCab]

Good management staff.

There are some teams that are perpetually terrible (like the Panthers were for a long time!) and it's because they have boobs running the show (like the Panthers did for a long time!). In a business, in the military, at a school, even in a social club... if you have poor decision-makers at the top, things are going to be run rather poorly. You will consistently get bad results.

It's usually not outside factors. It's usually incompetence at the management level. Corporate C-Suite, general manager position, whatever, there are a lot of people out there being paid to make decisions who really should not be.

The only thing I would add is that hockey executives are paid very well to run incredibly valuable businesses. Ownership groups should be more willing to fire these guys when they do not get results. They usually get recycled to screw up another team anyway, so no harm done.

 

[WarriorofTime]

Tank, collect superstars, watch them develop, manage the salary cap well and make good trades/free agent signings. Ride until the wheels come off.

 

[Svechhammer]

Find one thing that you are really, really good at and double down or triple down on it.

The biggest mistake I see so many teams and franchises make is that they are always chasing the new flashy thing, always trying to innovate and adjust their style to fit the game of today rather than just to know what you're good at and capitalize on it.

And this is where teams that tank so often get it wrong. In order to be bad enough that you get top spot in the draft, you basically have to completely gut your roster of players who play the way you are best at. And while you might end up with some elite talent in the draft, its going to be surrounded by a mishmash of crap that plays a disjointed style of hockey, and then they get into a cycle of always picking toward the top, and grabbing great talented players, but maybe not necessarily players that can play cohesively together, and it becomes an absolute mess.

 

[tarheelhockey]

Honestly, 60% of it is luck of the draw in the draft. It’s more than just acquiring talent, you also need to get the guy who puts in the work and stays healthy and has that next gear. That sort of thing is incredibly unpredictable. You can draft for talent all day and still end up with head-scratching busts or guys who never really got better after 20. Then some other team stumbles into a franchise player in the third round.

As for things that are more under the organization’s control, there’s something to be said for the character of your leadership group. That includes the front office all the way down through the coaching staff to your captains and key players. Everyone in the team doesn’t have to be a stand-up guy, but groups of people do tend to take on the character of their leaders — and when it gets competitive, divided groups will fall apart. That’s why you see a house-cleaning at the late stage of a rebuild, to reset the tone and get everyone on the same page moving forward. I look at organizations like Arizona and Buffalo, among many others including the Canes for a long time, and you can easily see the difference between them and orgs like Boston and Vegas who have a clear organizational culture of doing things a certain way and moving on from guys who aren’t on board.

 

[Score08]

Collin Campbell

 

[AvroArrow]

Drafting well, it's really hard to get elite players in a trade or FA. Drafting is the most important thing IMO

Then second, a strong team culture. The successful teams have a culture where guys buy in to the idea of TEAM, no single individual is bigger than the ultimate goal. Guys take small paycuts and sacrifices to keep a strong team together. People will talk about no-state tax etc. but the players themselves still ultimately buy in to the team goal.

My team for example never had that culture, everyone knows the RFA contracts the big 3 got. Then you see our divisional rivals who have been much more successful, Tampa, Florida even Boston. There is a team culture and identity.

You have to get a little lucky as well with drafting, Kucherov for example. If Tampa genuinely knew he could be this great, they would have drafted him a lot earlier than they did.

The attitude of the players you're acquiring or drafting, you can't just go for guys that score a lot. Guys need the right mentality to function well as a unit. That's something I don't think you can really teach after a certain point.

 

[Machinehead]

Having zero bad players really goes a long way.

That shouldn't have to be said but it does have to be said.

 

[Discipline Daddy]

I'll add that I don't think it's ever worth it to tank. After coming out of the tank, you have your shiny #1 overall player usually playing with a bunch of players who aren't very good. Losing begets losing, and that player will learn all kinds of bad habits, or never develop how to properly play against men after juniors.

I also think most organizations have a fundamental inability to assess defense. Despite all advances in technology, most of the data is just noise. A good hardnosed defensive player like Jordan Martinook is really important to winning hockey games. He will never score a lot of points, but he will always give full effort. The offense he yields is bonus, and even if he isn't producing, he's not giving up much defensively anyway. You want these players showing the rest of the club how to play with effort, and to have buy-in.

Conversely, Tampa's recent success feels different to this blueprint. They had skill and skill for miles, good defense, and elite goaltending. But even with the Kucherovs and Stamkoses, I do think they had lots of great role players, and a deep offense. They had lots of grit and enough good defensive players to make up, I think, for their stars leaning more towards pure offense.

 

[WarriorofTime]

Honestly, 60% of it is luck of the draw in the draft. It’s more than just acquiring talent, you also need to get the guy who puts in the work and stays healthy and has that next gear. That sort of thing is incredibly unpredictable. You can draft for talent all day and still end up with head-scratching busts or guys who never really got better after 20. Then some other team stumbles into a franchise player in the third round.

Well said. This is the 20th year of the Post-Salary Cap Era. Of the 19 Stanley Cups awarded, 13 different teams/organizations have won it all. That's about 40 % of the League (Seattle has only been around a few seasons). Two teams have won it three times, two others have won it twice and the other nine have won it once. Looking at teams that lost in the Stanley Cup Finals, you can add another 10 teams to the mix, brining us to a total of 23 teams (71.88 %) that have at least played in the Stanley Cup Finals.

From an outsider's perspective, completely zoomed out, it just largely looks like a League where you pass the Championship around and (more or less) everyone gets their turn, some just wait longer than others. Certain teams/organizations are viewed as jokes, incompetent, destined to be forever losers, until one day they aren't. And so it goes the other way as well.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can look around and see some teams that seem to have consistently made the right moves and others that make the wrong moves, and conclude these are the good, these are the bad organizations. But that's perfect hindsight bias, and while we certainly all have our opinions (see Trade/Free Agent Forum) on who is doing good or bad, it's really tough to predict with accuracy as it plays out in real time.

The sustained success teams do deserve their flowers and can be studied for how they did it. Sometimes there are lessons to be drawn, sometimes it just kinda happened for them. The Ship of Thesus sort of teams, where over a long period, they replace player by player, and by the end period, the team has none of the same players at the beginning, while all the while staying competitive throughout are definitely the ones that earn the coolest management style points, compared to "we drafted players with 1st and 2nd overall picks in back to back years that each gave consistent hall of fame level play for 20 seasons" type of deal

 

[Peltz]

Well said. This is the 20th year of the Post-Salary Cap Era. Of the 19 Stanley Cups awarded, 13 different teams/organizations have won it all. That's about 40 % of the League (Seattle has only been around a few seasons). Two teams have won it three times, two others have won it twice and the other nine have won it once. Looking at teams that lost in the Stanley Cup Finals, you can add another 10 teams to the mix, brining us to a total of 23 teams (71.88 %) that have at least played in the Stanley Cup Finals.

From an outsider's perspective, completely zoomed out, it just largely looks like a League where you pass the Championship around and (more or less) everyone gets their turn, some just wait longer than others. Certain teams/organizations are viewed as jokes, incompetent, destined to be forever losers, until one day they aren't. And so it goes the other way as well.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can look around and see some teams that seem to have consistently made the right moves and others that make the wrong moves, and conclude these are the good, these are the bad organizations. But that's perfect hindsight bias, and while we certainly all have our opinions (see Trade/Free Agent Forum) on who is doing good or bad, it's really tough to predict with accuracy as it plays out in real time.

The sustained success teams do deserve their flowers and can be studied for how they did it. Sometimes there are lessons to be drawn, sometimes it just kinda happened for them. The Ship of Thesus sort of teams, where over a long period, they replace player by player, and by the end period, the team has none of the same players at the beginning, while all the while staying competitive throughout are definitely the ones that earn the coolest management style points, compared to "we drafted players with 1st and 2nd overall picks in back to back years that each gave consistent hall of fame level play for 20 seasons" type of deal

Agreed, it's cyclical, and luck. I can't even think of a single team that replaced the entire roster and stayed competitive throughout in the post-cap era.

 

[Minnesota Knudsens]

I think a lot of it is luck. Obviously drafting a Crosby, McDavid or Matthews can change your franchise in an instant. But then you look at certain cores like Boston, where they just have guys that create a culture. Or Vegas/Florida/Tampa where they made savvy trades and managed to sign their core guys to really reasonable contracts (tax advantage plus nice places to live).

Anyway what people tend to forget is how stable the NHL is from one year to the next. All you need is a winning core, and you’re probably set for the next 20 years unless you do something crazy stupid to blow it.

 

[SEALBound]

You need to have sucked: 1. at the RIGHT time or 2. for a LONG time.

 

[qc14]

Two big ones for me:

1) It's a lot easier to accidentally be bad than purposefully be good. Because of that, you need to keep good players unless you can replace them with better ones especially when you're tanking. Think of how much of a better spot Chicago would be in right now if they still had Strome and DeBrincat or SJS if they still had Hertl or DET if they still had Hronek.

2) In a cap league, there are advantages everywhere outside of player salary (and really just AAV). Make your practice rink the nicest in the league. Have the biggest pro-scouting staff. Bring in highly paid AAAA guys to make your AHL team competitive. An owner (*cough* Carolina *cough*) can still be cheap even if they technically spend to the cap every year and I really do believe that kind of stuff catches up with you. For example, I don't think that it's at all a coincidence that the Caps have had a ton of success developing their draft picks over the last ~15 years in Hershey -- a team that they consistently spend real money on loading up with the best tweeners available. Meanwhile, the Canes have had consistently higher rated pools yet brought through much less NHL talent while cutting corners at every single turn in the AHL.

 

[BigBadBruins7708]

You need to have sucked: 1. at the RIGHT time or 2. for a LONG time.

or be better at everyone else in drafting and developing stars (see Tampa and Boston)