By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Neil Paine, my former colleague from FiveThirtyEight who writes the great
diving into sports and sports analytics.I wanted to talk to Neil for a couple reasons, one being that the Four Nations just pushed hockey to the forefront of the national attention in ways that would have been completely unexpected, and another being that I’m a huge fan of his writing and his newsletter and he’s been on a real tear lately.
Neil can be found at Neil’s Substack, and at his podcast Podracing.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Neil, how's it going dude?
It's going great, Walt. Thanks for having me on. It is always a pleasure, man.
Again, I am just such a fan of your work from FiveThirtyEight days all through the Neil’s Substack era. So it is good to have you on.
You gotta have the eponymous Substack. That's what I always say.
I think that you've pulled it off. It was an audacious thing to try to supplant all other Neils in terms of Substack branding. But nevertheless, I really do think you have pulled it off.
Well, I was a little worried about Neil Armstrong. Did he pass away, I can't actually remember.
I don't think he's with us anymore. And realistically, knowing the Substack crowd, I think that Buzz Aldrin's a little bit of a better fit.
Oh, yeah. Where's Buzz's Substack? You gotta find that.
I just wanted to have you on because you cover the sports world, but you also really cover a level of depth throughout the sports world that is very fun, which means that I think you cover things that other folks don't always cover. I think that a lot of people can get very distracted by the big, big stories of NFL and NBA, you have some extremely good hockey stuff. We should talk about Four Nations and the current situation in the NHL right now. But also, I definitely want to talk a little bit more about some fun stuff that you had lately, whether it was sports ROI or your NASCAR stuff.
I guess we'll start off at the beginning. Do you want to talk a little bit about this extremely riveting moment in hockey that got this sport on the map of a lot of people who hadn't really been following it?
Yeah, I gotta admit, I was a little surprised. So for the listeners that maybe don't know, instead of the All-Star Game for the NHL, this year they decided to do a four-country international tournament that was called the Four Nations Faceoff. It's weird because it's not sanctioned in the same way that the Olympics are or like you see in other sports, the World Cup, that type of thing. It was like there's been a World Cup of hockey, but it's not regarded the same way that the World Cup in soccer is. This was organized by the NHL. It was specifically done to happen during this period of time in which the league was off for what would have been the All-Star Game.
There were even questions about which teams were the Four Nations in the Four Nations tournament. It ended up being Canada and the U.S. and Sweden and Finland. So no Russia. They're banned from international hockey tournaments because of the whole Ukraine situation. The Czech Republic, or I guess Czechia if you want to call it that now, was also excluded. That one was the controversial one, but they didn't have as many NHL players as Finland. There was talk that, “Hey, what if we did a combined Czechia and Slovakian team like the old Czechoslovakia?”
No!
That was actually a thing.
Really?
Yeah, David Pasternak of the Bruins, who is from Czechia, suggested that. It was like, We love the Slovaks. Let's get together and do it again. But that didn't end up happening. So it was those Four Nations.Predictably, the cream that rose to the top were Canada and the U.S., and they played a game in the round robin, or the earlier stages of the tournament, the U.S. won. It was most notable because there were three fights in the first nine seconds of this game. It was just an encapsulation of this rivalry between the U.S. and Canada that, of course, has been magnified by geopolitics and various other factors coming in. It sort of hit at the right time.
The championship game has those same teams waiting for each other. It's a close game throughout: goes into overtime. The Canadians get their revenge on the U.S. when Conor McDavid, who's like the best player in the world, scores the game-winning goal.
It wasn't surprising that the U.S. and Canada made it to the final. They're kind of the two best countries in hockey. That itself is kind of a story where the U.S., for pretty much all of history up until recently, has lagged way behind Canada. Canada, of course, invented hockey, or at least is the home of hockey, and the U.S. was not good at it. When the miracle on ice happened, the reason it was a miracle was because no one thought that they could win, especially that group of players against the Soviets. But the U.S. has improved a lot, and it was this collision course. But Canada was like, “We're still the king. We're still the best country at hockey.”
The most surprising thing was the ratings for this tournament, which yielded the best-watched NHL game in decades. I guess you could debate whether it is actually an official NHL game or not, but more people watched this than watched Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final and various other official NHL games. And it really spoke to the way that a bunch of circumstances came together to capture people's attention. It's great for hockey because it had so many eyes on the game, and you get to know these stars that maybe us hockey fans know, but the wider sports world didn't know.
I've had people come up and talk to me just randomly, like, “Hey, did you watch that game, what did you think of the Four Nations” in a way that has never happened before with hockey. People don't come up and talk about that typically. It was a little bit like “Hey, what did you think of the Super Bowl” type of thing. It wasn't anywhere near as many eyeballs, but it was that type of cultural event.
The downside for the NHL is it's not really something that you can plan or predict. Going into this, people weren't necessarily sold on whether it would be a huge success or whether people would be interested in it. I don't know how replicable it is, but it did stand in really stark contrast against the NBA All-Star Game, which was a couple weekends ago, as well. It had its lowest rating in a long time and was a disaster for the league.
That's not to say that hockey is more popular than basketball. The NBA is more popular than the NHL overall. But something about this format, the conditions that the championship game was played under and the drama both on and off the ice captured people in a way that a lot of All-Star Games in every sport have failed to do for a long time. There's a big debate over whether All-Star Games have outlived their usefulness, and whether we should just get rid of them. Some leagues are getting rid of them, like the NFL.
It's interesting to see that they really bottled lightning on this one, and it would be fun to kind of see how you would apply that even to other sports. I just kind of want to talk a little bit about this: the U.S. versus Canada showdown is not necessarily over in hockey. You obviously have a really, really good forecasting system and ELO system for the NHL, and the Winnipeg Jets are (somewhat inexplicably, given where they were at the beginning of the season) at the very tippy-top of it, no?
