With defenseman Nikita Zaitsev ready to return to the Maple Leafs lineup Wednesday after missing the past 17 games due to a broken foot, it appears Roman Polak will be a healthy scratch. Polak, a 31-year-old who has averaged a tick under 17 minutes per game, has skated in 32 games for the Leafs this season, and each of the past 31 for Toronto.
Polak's place in the lineup has been the topic of much debate. The underlying numbers paint the picture of an ineffective blue liner, whose defensive impact is negative and who doesn't contribute offensively. There are also those who feel Polak has provided a toughness and veteran leadership in a young Toronto locker room, and whose value is gained in intangible margins that a statistic can't measure.
The central question — 'should Polak be in the Leafs lineup, or not?' — is a microcosm of a much a larger, more frustrating debate that's been waged for years. In reality, it's consisted of ridiculous narratives and blind allegiances to sides that ignore logic. Immature and immaterial discourse has held hockey discussion back, disintegrating into petty arguments having nothing to do with anything of consequence.
For a decade now (yes, a full decade) more numbers and statistics and (gasp!) analytics have been used to evaluate the performance of NHL teams and players. These stats have always been used as a tool — another piece of the puzzle — to dissect and understand a very complex sport.
So no, hockey isn't in the midst of an "analytics revolution," though it finally feels like that label is also fading, because the timeline is beyond that. So why does it still feel like analyzing a player's performance with a statistic as simple as shot-attempts can be viewed as sacrilege?
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Polak is a perfect example of a current NHLer who produces polarizing debates, illuminating a major flaw that still exists within the hockey community: Not the player evaluation, but the conversation surrounding it, and the inability to put egos and machismo aside.
What should be civil discourse and constructive conversations still feels like warring parties. No other league and its media has done such a terrible job of integrating an influx of information into its lexicon of how it consumes statistical information. And there are multiple guilty parties.
Analytics will always be a tool in how hockey is evaluated, never the end-all, be-all, never a manifesto that should predicate each and every move a team makes. Anyone spewing something contrary is simply being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn.
On the other end of the spectrum is hockey's "old guard," which refuses to accept there might be another way of explaining what their eyes have told them to be one way for years, or, even worse, that their eyes have been wrong.
There are extremes on either end, and that it's literally been a decade of debate, name-calling, and petulance reflects poorly on the whole community. That teams don't more openly broach the topic is just a nod to the NHL's propensity toward secrecy, but damn near every team in the NHL has invested resources in an analytics department. And those that got in the ground floor earlier than others (like the Chicago Blackhawks) have certainly reaped its benefits.
Hockey is changing, with the game being played at a faster pace, and skill being prioritized more than ever. It's with this change that players who were once serviceable or thought to be useful because of a physical presence are either adapting to survive or being left by the wayside. Or, in some cases, players who were thought to be effective can be retrospectively viewed under a new, less favorable light.
But here are the simple facts on Roman Polak: He has been on the ice for 463 shot-attempts for this season versus 493 against. His minus-seven goal-differential at 5-on-5 is the worst among Maple Leafs skaters. The nice thing about evaluating with statistics is there no gray areas or platitudes: everything is black-and-white.
And there is of course more to evaluating a player's role or worth than the statistics. But to be so dismissive of numbers based on a philosophical standing is completely obtuse, just as it is to say only the numbers should be viewed when making player personnel decisions.
Polak is just the latest example of a player who has created such arguments, and he certainly won't be the last. But that's it has literally been a decade of this game of "who can yell the loudest" is so infuriatingly maddening. These are archaic debates that only serve to hurt the overall product, making it less accessible and preventing it from growing to new heights. It's so tired, and so overdue for these shouting matches to be put to bed, for good.
Until that day comes though, we'll be stuck in an era that, despite the bounty of new information available to us, will be still questioning the principles of math.
That it's taken a decade-plus for that day to come is a black-eye that refuses to fade.