Framework Thinking: The Figure-Out-a-Franchise Pyramid

Hockey Consultant's favorite team, the Pittsburgh Penguins, recently experienced their first 2011-12 regular season loss in regulation. (Hockey Consultant never expects her team to go an 82-game season without a regulation loss, but that first regular season regulation loss, nonetheless, is always a bit of a downer.) After the game, the coaching staff and players said all the right things. The coach didn't use fatigue as an excuse. The oldest player on the team stated—correctly—that the team didn't play the whole 60 minutes and failing to show up in the first period cost the team the game.


At this early juncture of the season, the Pittsburgh Penguins fall in the middle tier of Hockey Consultant's "Figure out a Franchise" pyramid. By constructing this pyramid, Hockey Consultant has taken a basic concept from her real-world (read: paying) job called "framework thinking" and constructed a "framework"—or model—through which one can quickly determine where a particular hockey franchise falls. The basic point of framework thinking is to be able to arrive at accurate, fast conclusions based on the minimum amount of available data. 


Take a look at how you can rank a hockey franchise based on their responses to poor on-ice performances:

             HOCKEY FRANCHISE RANKING

After Pittsburgh's 3-2 regulation loss to the Buffalo Sabres, the Penguins said all the right things. But saying all the right things puts the team smack dab in the middle tier of the "Hockey Franchise Ranking System". To become a better team, the 2011-12 Penguins have to stop talking about what they failed to do and immediately begin fixing what they failed to do.

Generally, Hockey Consultant finds the above graphic very helpful for anyone who is trying to figure out where a hockey team is and where that hockey team is going.

At the very bottom of the pyramid, it stands to reason that if a team fails to acknowledge any type of poor play, that team will never actually improve upon the poor performance. Whatever the reasons for this may be (your team is not talented enough; the owner won't let you spend money, your players are hurt and you can't do anything more), there's a reason teams down here are usually also at the bottom of the standings.

There's a stage between very bottom of the pyramid (where poor play is not even acknowledged) and the middle tier (where poor play is accurately acknowledged). This lower middle stage is tougher because a team knows that something wrong, but the team is not quite sure what, exactly, needs to be fixed. When a team can't accurately identify what needs to be fixed, the team can not improve enough. Depending on the talent and commitment level of a team, a team could still end up in the playoffs and even make noise there. Flat-out, though, if a team is here on the pyramid, that team is never likely to come close to winning anything that matters.

Most fans—and too many coaches and general managers, in Hockey Consultant's view—mistakenly view Stage 3 as the "apex" of the pyramid. We as a team acknowledged what went wrong, so it's all good.

But the top-performing franchises, year in and year out, along with the coaches and general managers who just seem to get results, no matter what, understand that Stage 3 is actually "middling". It's not enough merely to acknowledge what went wrong.

Teams that win division championships and teams that win multiple rounds in the playoffs don't just acknowledge things that go wrong. They accurately identify what went wrong, but then they fix it. Ideally, a coach fixes it as soon as it happens in a game. Equally ideally, the players adjust their performance in the game itself.

And for that stage, well, take a look at this graphic:

In early October, Hockey Consultant's favorite team is on track to make the playoffs, so they're on the right track. But they won't be on track to be an elite team until they prove they can quickly correct poor performances. And they won't be on track to win a championship until they consistently perform well, sans any poor performances (of, for example, failing to play one third of a 60 minute game).

The correlation between the two charts, of course, is never going to be perfect. Generally, though, it's not enough just to acknowledge what went wrong. Doing that should be a minimum expectation of any professional franchise.

Becoming a really good team is about fixing what went wrong as fast as humanly possible.

Becoming an elite team is about preparing for and playing the games in such a way that mistakes don't occur in the first place.

Look at these charts, side-by-side, and take a gander, month by month. If the months go by and your team is still talking about the same things without fixing them—don't expect to see them playing hockey in June.

If you're actually able to note a team's slow progression—and note: it will be slow-climb up the pyramid during a hockey season—don't be surprised when that team is playing hockey when spring turns into early summer.

But, take one last look. While you may not like the answers about a particular team, the data doesn't lie.

Hockey Consultant will have a better inkling of where her team is going when she pulls out these charts again in later months. If the Penguins are still scoring in the middle of the pack in the winter of 2012, no matter what anyone says, the team will not be likely to win the franchise's 4^th Stanley Cup.

By January and February of 2012, however, if any team starts to score somewhere in between very good and elite, you very well could be looking at teams that will be challenging for hockey's holy grail in the late spring and early summer of 2012.