Glassman on hockey and process
Here is Matt Glassman on why hockey's culture is more process- and expected-value-oriented than other sports'. I hadn't known about that aspect of the culture.
A few notes:
- I am not an expert about soccer, but I think that, contra Glassman's conjecture, its culture is not as process-oriented as hockey's. I've read about some strikers who describe their work in these terms ("just try to create good chances"), but I don't think this "puck luck"-type perspective is nearly as universal.
- Relatedly, I doubt that the volume of scoring matters much here. Basketball is the highest-scoring major sport we have, and it is more publicly process-oriented than most--I think. I doubt that baseball became more process-oriented during dead-ball eras.
- I'm sure that Glassman is right that variance has a lot to do with it; I'd guess that it also matters what the variance is variance of. A starting pitcher, for example, famously "has his stuff" on some days. more than others. That's variance. Then, for any given quality of pitch, luck largely determines its outcome. That's more and different variance.
- Perhaps it's easier to embrace a process mindset when the latter kind of variance is just obvious. I don't know hockey well, but I'd guess that NHL-quality forwards take high-quality shots (relative to their opportunities) basically all the time.
- The phenomenology of luck can come apart from its reality. If I happen to strike a tennis or soccer ball well, I'm tempted to think "boy, I really brought my A-game for those three seconds" instead of "huh, guess I lucked into good contact." I doubt there's much room for an top-quality hockey forward to say "I hit that puck much better than I've hit the last ten."
- The third-personal experience of luck matters too. I wonder how much of this stems from the fact that the televisual experience of many hockey goals is usually not more granular than "someone is shooting... it went in." (This was even more true before the last few years of TV technology and real-time information about, e.g., the speed of the shot.) An observer can experience the broader process in a much more meaningful and finer-grained way than they can experience the goal itself, which (I conjecture) encourages the formation of a culture of process.
- A cynical-sounding summary: however accurate it is to attribute scoring to process, it's an epistemic and motivational last resort for people. (Also, it might not cohere with other parts of high-performing athletic psyches. Hockey was pushed toward this because the alternative explanations for scoring are comparatively much worse.