Of all the Wayne Thomas cards, this one has the oddest expression.
It was an interesting time not to be blogging.
By not immersing myself in the process of writing things, I was able to watch ringside as one of the great battles of our era was waged. This, obviously, was the epic “hockey analytics” controversy that pitted parents versus children, siblings versus siblings and troglodytes versus numbers higher than ten. (I’m certain that this is indeed the most important thing to have happened in the past year. Had there been any other conflicts, I’m sure someone would have mentioned it.)
For those who weren’t paying attention, the nerds won. Just like in every other domain, people realized that if there is information available and tools to make sense of it, only a fool disregards something that could give him/her an edge. Knowledge is power, even in hockey.
At the same time, I do appreciate the position of the people who loathe the rise of the metrics. There is a certain romance associated with the ideals of sport – concepts like courage, perserverence, “grit,” “heart” – these are aspirational virtues and things to be admired. We want to believe that they matter, or at least that they matter more than even-strength puck possession numbers do. It hurts somewhat when they don’t.
(The concept is not unlike what happened to the Force in the most recent set of Star Wars movies. The Force was this wonderfully elegant if somewhat amorphous concept that was ruined the second it became something quantifiable and measurable. Seriously – midichlorians? The definition Alec Guinness supplied blew that out of the water.)
For me, though, as a yarn-spinner at heart, I really want data. It’s not that I don’t value ephemeral qualities, but if I want to tell a good story, I need a good picture of what happened. I need all the information I can get.
This brings me to Wayne Thomas.
A different, moderately-epic battle that happened to coincide with the Great Stats War of 2014 centred around events in the Maple Leaf crease. A goalie I rather liked (James Reimer) lost his starting job to a goalie I knew virtually nothing about (Jonathan Bernier.) Reimer was the first Leaf goalie since Ed Belfour to show a consistent level of competency. He backstopped the Leafs to a playoff appearance that they should have won, was a pleasant sort of fellow and was young enough to offer stability in net for years. This was a good thing.
When they made the Bernier deal, which was not inexpensive to do, part of the fanbase was rather upset. This has manifested itself into a really annoying tendency of Bernier supporters to jump all over Reimer when he gives up a goal (particuarly to the glove side or off a rebound) or Reimer supporters to jump all over Bernier when he gives up a goal (particuarly to the glove side or off a rebound).
My tendency is to do neither. My tendency is to think of Wayne Thomas – and this hockey card in particular. This card, very subtly, captures the entirety of another epic battle* – one that played out some 38 years ago. (*about as epic as the rest, which is, of course, not really epic)
The card is quietly brilliant. Thomas is skating left to right in the picture. As it was in real life, he’s just come into the frame of view and is just as quickly about to skate out of it. Clearly, he’s not playing tonight. The towel around his neck identifies him as the backup, destined only for the bench. He’s focused ahead, on things that we can’t see, but he can – and doesn’t seem all that happy about it. What is his future? Just ahead of him, at bottom right, the card tells us – “Now with Rangers.” Why is he heading to the Rangers? Standing behind him we see a player wearing number 29, young Mike Palmateer. Mike is setting up in the net. It’s his, now. Wayne is skating out of the picture, out of town.
Wayne Thomas had first come to Toronto in 1975. The Leafs had been searching for a reliable starter since the middle of 1971-72, when it became obvious that Bernie Parent was jumping to the WHA and a decade’s worth of certainty in net was jumping with him. The Leafs tried Ron Low, Doug Favell, Dunc Wilson, Gord McRae, Eddie Johnston. None could really run with the job for any length of time. Finally Thomas, who’d first come to prominence in Montreal during Ken Dryden ‘s year of articling, arrived in town. He’d gone through a bizarre 1974-75 season during which he’d been the Habs’ third goalie and not played a single game. Now he stepped in as Toronto’s starter and was great. He played in that season’s all-star game, got the team in the playoffs and seemed set to start for years. (Reimer-esque, I think.)
And then 1976-77 began. If there is ominous music to be played, play it.
The Leafs were awful. Thomas couldn’t win. Backup Gord McRae couldn’t win. Ten games in, with the Leafs wallowing near the bottom of the league, the call went out to Oklahoma City for a kid named Palmateer. He famously told Leaf GM Jim Gregory, “Your goaltending problems are over,” then went out and spent the next ten starts proving himself right and rescuing the Leaf season. From that moment on, he was a star in Leaf land, and Thomas was on his way to backup up John Davidson in New York.
The parallels to Reimer/Bernier seemed obvious to me, particularly last season when it looked like Reimer might not survive the season in Toronto, and if he did, then certainly not the summer. Now, as much as I liked Reimer, I could make a reasonable case for the Leafs wanting to upgrade in net. James Reimer had posted a .924 save percentage, which was great, but when you pulled it apart, his save percentage at every shot distance was below league average. The Leafs’ penchant for giving up a bunch of extra long-range shots ended up subsidizing their goalies’ stats. I didn’t like it, but I could see it. (Note – these aren’t adavnced stats, but just part of the boatload of extra information and tools available for ordinary folk to analyze it.)
When I got to Thomas, however, I couldn’t make that case. The only word I had that the Leafs even had a goaltending problem was Palmateer’s. The Leafs were losing, and badly, but how much of that was on Thomas? This became a stumbling point for me in trying to make my parallel work: was what happened to Wayne Thomas in any way fair or justifiable?
If you look at the back of Wayne Thomas’ card, you see a jump in his goals-against average for 1976-77. He goes from a 3.19 in 64 games to a 3.86 in 33. That looks bad. Then again, a year-to-year swing of half a goal or so isn’t that uncommon even for good goaltenders. What else was in play?
He was good in 1975-76, too, but all the bullet points are about 1973-74. Odd.
His won/lost record went from 28-24-12 in 1975-76 to just 10-13-6 in 1976-77. Again, though, it’s not dramatic and can fit within year-to-year variation. This isn’t indicative of a goalie who can’t win at all. (I’ve seen lots of those.)
More problematic is that recent history tells us to rely less on GAA and won/lost records, both of which are largely team stats. We try now to rely more on things like save percentage and, better yet, even-strength save percentage to assess goalie performance (I’m not dead convinced those are team independent either, but they’re at least somewhat better). This data, unfortunately, is not readily available for games played in October 1976. So the only things left to do are to hit two sources – the always wonderful Hockey Summary Project and Google’s newspaper archives. From this, I hoped to build the story of Wayne Thomas.
When looking at old game summaries, there’s not a ton of information. You can tell who scored, when they scored, how many shots were taken (if you’re lucky) and the penalties. Sometimes you get plus/minus data. The modern niceties aren’t there. There’s no ice time, no shot locations, no special-teams time. It’s possible to fill in some gaps with the original newspaper write-ups, but the process of story-telling comes down to a lot of inference-making.
What is clear is that the Leaf start to 1976-77 was terrible. They lost early and often and a lot of the losses were of the gut-punch variety. They lost games to poor teams they should have beaten, blew leads and threw away points with reckless abandon. It must have been infuriating to watch.
They started off with a 4-2 road loss to the Colorado Rockies (ecch) in the season opener and then somehow got past Boston 7-5 in the home opener. The wheels came off in Game 3 vs the LA Kings, Oct 13, 1976. The Leafs took a 4-0 lead 6:17 into the second period until a penalty to a kid defenseman named Randy Carlyle(!!!) began a string of five straight penalties to Toronto. LA converted two of the power plays and scored a pair of even-strength goals to end the game in a 4-4 tie. As it happens, Wayne Thomas wasn’t even in goal for this one. It was Gord McRae making one of only two appearances he’d make that season. That tie, however, was the first in a series of really disappointing results that would see the Leafs go almost three weeks between wins and set off alarm bells aplenty.
The Bruins got their revenge in Game 4, beating Thomas and the Leafs 5-3 in Boston Garden. Next up were the Flyers, with whom the Leafs had had great playoff battles (often literally) each of the previous two seasons. The Leafs again blew a four-goal lead, salvaging a tie on a late goal by Jim McKenny. They tied Pittsburgh at 4 for their last pre-Palmateer point, then proceeded to lose three straight games in poor fashion. They lost 5-3 in Montreal, blowing a late lead by giving up two goals 29 seconds apart in the third (followed by an empty-netter). They lost 5-2 to the Islanders at home, giving up four straight goals after being up 2-1. They lost 5-3 to Minnesota, again giving up a pair of third-period goals to lose what had been a tie game. (This was McRae’s other start.)
Coach Red Kelly and GM Gregory had seen enough. The call went out for Palmateer.
Palmateer won his first start on October 28 and would start every game until November 21, when he was pulled against Montreal. He’d start every game but one through mid-December, lost a couple of weeks to an injury I can’t find documented anywhere, then was the undisputed number one for the rest of the season.
What do the numbers tell us?
Of those first awful ten games, Thomas started eight. His stat line read 1-4-2, 4.71 GAA, .867 save percentage. He faced 30 shots per night, with the Leafs actually outshooting their opponents 256-240. McRae was 0-1-1, 4.50, .880. Palmateer, fresh from the minors, would start the next ten games, going 7-2-1, 2.10, .935 despite the Leafs being outshot 322-266 (score effects?).
Cut and dried, isn’t it? If Thomas is stopping 86.7% of shots and Palmateer is stopping 93.5%, there’s not much room for argument. You go with the kid, and the Leafs did. But for that injury mentioned above (leg, likely), Palmateer started every game he could through the New Year. He cooled off a touch, posting “just” a .919 through Dec 29, but those numbers are decent even by today’s standards. Thomas, when he played, really wasn’t bad, but couldn’t buy wins. He posted a .921 save percentage when he played, but with the Leafs giving up 41 shots per game in his appearances, his GAA was 3.30 and he only went 3-3. If anything, he was just unlucky.
Now, I have to admit that it was kind of annoying to go game by game through that season and I didn’t chase it all the way through 1977. If one eyeballs the stats, though, Palmateer and Thomas gave up goals at a roughly similar rate for the rest of the year and were both basically .500 goalies. Statistically, Thomas’ bad start doomed his season numbers while Palmateer’s brilliant start helped his. They shared duties through 10 playoff games, with Palmateer starting six to Thomas’ four.
And then Wayne Thomas was lost on the waiver wire. Gord McRae backed up Palmateer the following season.
What irks me is that when I try to answer my own question – whether Wayne Thomas was treated fairly as he lost his job as starter and was subsequently let go for nothing – is that I really don’t have an answer. From what little I can tell, from about the end of November on, he and Palmateer were largely the same goaltender.
So why was he let go?
I don’t think there was anything to suggest that Gord McRae was going to be a better backup and Thomas had shown he could more than run with things when Palmateer got injured. Nobody was making that much money in 1977 and there was no cap in place, so I don’t see a salary dump as being in play. I’m stuck thinking that Wayne Thomas was let go because he went 0-2-3 in a bad five-game stretch in October, and I can’t even prove he was at fault in any of those losses. I can tell when the goals were scored but not how or why. I can’t say that Thomas was prone to glove-hand goals or bad rebounds, or that he somehow had less heart or grit. I have no information that would tell me why the Leafs lost his starts.
So the reality is that I did all this research in order to find no answer. I think they did something dumb and/or unjustified, but can’t prove it.
This is why I’m in favour of all the stats anyone can give me. They inform my narrative. Unless I just want to make stuff up, and I don’t, I can’t tell a proper story without them.
Why on earth we spent a year arguing whether it was good to know stuff is utterly beyond me.
My Little Leaf Space 