[How Avalanche’s use of analytics is part of club’s secret sauce (denverpost.com)](https://www.denverpost.com/2024/05/05/colorado-avalanche-analytics-success/)
This is a good article about how a team should use analytics, and clearly hightlights why you can’t really bring back Bowness next year. This part in particular is quite damning:
*Did / how the Avs use analytics help the club in its five-game rout of the Jets?*
“Yes, absolutely,” Johnson said.
*Care to share any examples now that the series is over?*
“No,” Johnson replied with a mischievous grin. “We knew there were certain things that they did well, and there were certain things that they struggled with. And we knew those were the things we were going to focus on and try to exploit.”
I have posted this before but will post it again because it shows how Bowness stubborness and attitude toward coaching basically doomed the Jets in the series against the Avs:
From Murat Ates article in The Athletic – ‘Bowness has said many times that he coaches by feel, trusting his gut, and that he’s happier to lose coaching his way than changing his approach to the game.’
Take this all together and it paints a pictue of a coach who is out of touch with todays NHL at the highest levels. He has a system that will succeed in the regular season when teams don’t have time to really focus or adjust quickly enough but will shred you in a playoff series. Bowness has shown he cannot make adjusments and even when presented with analytic evidence that things that he is doing is not working or is a catastrophic failure continues to do it. As noted above Bowness has a belief that his way is the only way. When you take all of this into consideration and add in the desire of the players to get more youth / prospects into the linuep (Bowness will always play a veteran over a young player), I just dont see how you can bring back Bowness.
by choicestk
3 Comments
Analytics aren’t everything but they’re an extremely useful tool to find out your inefficiencies/deficiencies. There’s a reason every company you interact with is always collecting data, it’s to make sense of all the chaos and make informed decisions and it should be no different in hockey. The ones that ignore analytics do it at their own peril.
was just about to post this lol
I think their use of analytics boiled down to when shuffles had the puck behind the net hook him knowing this is”playoff hockey” and it won’t be called, when ehlers is exiting the zone hook him for the same reason, basically hook everyone because refs don’t call it in the playoffs unless it’s really bad.