The Vancouver Canucks have five players heading to the All-Star Game this season, all of whom are essential to the team’s success this year. But they wouldn’t have been able to be difference-makers if not for upgrading the weak links alongside them that were breaking the chain in recent years.
In the video that plays before every Canucks home game at Rogers Arena, there’s a scene where J.T. Miller hauls on a large chain that is being sucked into a swirling void of inky darkness. While it’s not entirely clear why he’s pulling on this chain, it’s understood that if the chain goes into the darkness, it’s bad. Swirling inky darkness is never a good thing.
At one point, just when it seems like Miller will be pulled into the darkness, he nods offscreen and he’s suddenly joined by his teammates on the chain. Players like Ilya Mikheyev, Noah Juulsen, and, uh, Sheldon Dries start to pull together and succeed at whatever it is they were trying to do.
It’s a metaphor, you see. If the visuals aren’t enough, actor Lochlyn Munro makes it clear in his role as, I guess, the military commander of the Canucks, authoritatively shouting, “As a team, as one!”
A chain provides an apt metaphor for a team. As the cliché goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Except, that’s not always true in sports.
Soccer and basketball: weak link and strong link sports
In The Numbers Game, a book about soccer analytics, authors Chris Anderson and David Sally presented the concept of weak link sports and strong link sports.
In a strong link sport, the chain is not as strong as its weakest link. Instead, the team’s strongest link matters far more. A strong link sport is one where the team with the best player wins more often than not.
An example is basketball, where a team’s best player can be expected to play the majority of a game, control the ball for a large portion of a team’s possession time, and score a large percentage of a team’s points. One superstar can make up for weaker players on a team, so a basketball team is more likely to improve by upgrading their best player than by upgrading their depth.
For an example, just look at the Toronto Raptors and how they bet everything on a single superstar, Kawhi Leonard, to carry them to the NBA championship. Yes, the Raptors had other good players but they didn’t become a champion-caliber team until they upgraded their strongest link, trading away their best player, DeMar DeRozan, as part of the package to get Leonard.
A weak link sport, on the other hand, is one where the team that doesn’t have the worst player is more likely to win. It’s a sport where the saying is true: the chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Anderson and Sally found that soccer was a weak link sport, which makes sense. A player in a soccer team’s starting eleven is likely to play all 90 minutes of a game but each individual player only has the ball for a small percentage of that time and can typically only get the ball through the work of his teammates. A single superstar striker can’t do anything if his teammates never get him the ball.
On top of that, an opposing team will take advantage of any weak link on the field, repeatedly attacking that player. A team with multiple weak links will rarely even get the ball in soccer, no matter how good their best player is.
The trick to improving a soccer team, then, is not to upgrade the team’s stars but to improve their depth. Certainly, star players help but improving the 11th-best player on the field can have a greater impact than improving the best player on the field.
"If you want to build a team for success, you need to look less at your strongest links and more at your weakest ones,” conclude Anderson and Sally. “It is there that a team's destiny is determined, whether it will go down in history or be forever considered a failure."
So, what about hockey?
Is hockey a strong link sport?
One study by Alex Novet at Hockey Graphs found that hockey is a strong link game, as the data showed that having the worst player in a given game or season had no correlation with winning; having the best player did have a correlation.
It makes some intuitive sense. After all, a hockey team’s worst player is typically a fourth-line winger, who might play around 8-10 minutes per game, sometimes less. There’s only so much that such a player can help or hurt a team in those limited minutes. NHL teams shelter their worst players all the time.
But there’s something about that analysis that feels incomplete. Hockey isn’t a weak link game in the same sense as soccer, where the worst player on the field/ice makes a major difference to who wins or loses, but it’s also not a strong link game in the same sense as basketball, where the best player on the court/ice can win a game all on his own.
Instead, hockey is something in between. Instead of looking for the weakest links at the bottom of the lineup and improving those, you have to look for the more important weak links in the middle of the lineup.
A team can shelter a mediocre fourth-line forward or even a bottom-pairing defenceman. If their backup goaltender is a weak link, they can limit their starts. But what happens when a highly-paid second-pairing defenceman is a weak link?
What about third-line forwards who can’t be trusted to match up against tough competition or kill penalties? What happens when your elite number one defenceman — an undeniable strong link — has to play with a veteran journeyman or a third-pairing defenceman?
While I may not have the data to look into this thoroughly, I do have a pretty compelling anecdote: the Vancouver Canucks. As we’ve seen in Vancouver over the past several years, weak links in the middle of the roster can completely undermine strong links at the top of the roster.
The Canucks show that strong link players are not enough
Over the last several seasons, the Canucks’ strong links have largely stayed the same. All of Elias Pettersson, Quinn Hughes, Thatcher Demko, J.T. Miller, and Brock Boeser have been with the Canucks for at least five seasons now. And yet, the Canucks have made the playoffs just once in those five seasons.
This season, despite not upgrading any of those five strong links — in fact, they subtracted one in Bo Horvat — the Canucks are not just good but one of the best teams in the NHL.
The issue for the Canucks is that the strong links in their chain were being undermined by weaker links right next to them — not at the bottom of the lineup, but right in the middle. And by upgrading those links, suddenly the strong links were made even stronger and could hold up a contender.
The team’s bottom-six centre depth was bolstered by Pius Suter and Teddy Blueger, turning one of the team’s weaknesses into a legitimate strength.
The backup goaltender went from a struggling journeyman to a reliable veteran in Casey DeSmith.
The team’s drastically overpaid second-pairing defenceman was replaced by cheaper, better players like Carson Soucy, Ian Cole, and now Nikita Zadorov.
These are not star players or strong links that would be seen as upgrades in a strong link game. Neither are they bottom-of-the-lineup players that would be upgrades in a weak link game. But they're essential links in the chain.
There was one strong link added or, at least, a stronger link. Instead of Quinn Hughes having to play with whichever right-side defenceman happened to kind of click with him at any given moment, the Canucks exchanged a strong link at centre in Horvat for a strong link at defence in Filip Hronek. But even Hronek is not really one of the team's stars — he just helps the stars excel.
Finding elite talent in hockey isn’t necessarily easy but it’s evidently easier than building a team around elite talent. Through the draft and trades, the Canucks’ previous management regime put strong links in place at the top of the lineup but the chain fell apart year after year because of the weak links in the middle of the lineup.
The Canucks’ new management team has done a better job of finding the right links to add to the chain. So far, at least, the chain is holding strong.
