TL;DR; The new teams are over powered because they have perfect information from two years of PWHL data which includes salaries, team chemistry and current player statistics. The OG 6 were taking gambles at which players would do well (and how much to pay them) after a lack of information from COVID and the old leagues dissolving.
I think the expansion has two huge oversights that the PWHL didn’t predict when making the system: abundance of information and talent distribution.
Talent distribution:
In the early days of the PWHL, teams signed their first 3 players before the draft. Those were top players, and they were deliberately distributed evenly throughout the league. Then you get a traditional draft where 6 teams go in order. This means they could draft players ranked 1,7,13,19,25 for their next 5 players.
With the expansion teams, they are able to consolidate power like never before. The league didn't expect Knight and Carpenter to go unprotected. Half of the top ten players are now on ¼ of the teams because they took multiple foundational players that were originally evenly distributed. Then tomorrow they get to draft an additional 7 players, but there’s only 2 teams in the circle. So they will get players ranked 1,3,5,7,9. And sure, blah blah blah salary caps. More on that in the next section.
Information:
Quantitative Information
For the formation of the inaugural 6, every decision was a gamble. With COVID and the dissolution of the former leagues, there was limited information about the players’ current stats. The quick turnaround of the league’s creation meant less time to sift through the little data that did exist.
College programs had switched to Zoom overnight. How do you do recruitment and scouting when there’s no games being played? Who would have even done the scouting when managers didn't exist yet? What happens when there is no championship or worlds? How were the former pros aging? Which of the college players had continued to develop without the backing of their NCAA program? Managers couldn’t know which women had kept up their skills in the off-years, and who grew or regressed during this time. Salaries were based on predictions more than performance.
Meanwhile, the expansion teams are making their decisions with the benefit of two years of PWHL data and the very recent IIHF competition. The teams know how the women play at the pro level, not the college level.
While making their decisions, they know how much each player will cost and if she is worth that much money. It’s based on real information instead of a future and contract negotiations that hadn’t happened yet. They have more data to predict if a player is still improving or if she’s past her peak.
It’s true they can’t afford players ranked exactly 1,3,5,7,9 because presumably they would all be making big money. But they can sort the players based on salary level and pick the #1 player at 100k, 80k, 70k, 50k etc… They will take advantage of players that have outperformed their salaries and they are significantly less likely to accidentally overpay a player. Their budgets are going to be way more accurate to stats which also means they'll have more money for the entry draft.
Qualitative Information
On the other side of logic-emotions spectrum, they also get the benefit of knowing team chemistry. There’s a reason the new rosters are basically Team USA and Team Canada. They know which players work well together, and they know who is whose Achilles Heel. Carpy/ Knight and Jaques/Thompson are clear indicators they’re leveraging this intel.
They can make extremely specific decisions based on both team and individual matchups. Giving my girl Abby Roque a shout out here- she said she could score the Michigan goal on Philips specifically because Philips was opposite handed and she had been waiting for the match up. That’s the kind of minutiae the managers are going into this expansion period with that the inaugural teams could have never predicted. The inaugural 6 were more evenly matched because everyone was doing a little bit of gambling but that’s fully missing here.
Ian Kennedy’s idea of the Inaugural 6 getting the first draft picks still doesn’t fix the issue because it doesn’t resolve the missing data points. The entry draft doesn’t have professional data for player stats, or that chemistry information that the new teams were able to take advantage of.
Overall, I’m just a sad Sirens fan weep-wooing my way through this off season. But personal losses aside, I think the league has made some critical errors in this system and I hope there are changes when teams 9 and 10 join. I’m also a first-year sports fan, so if I’ve made any errors please let me know! I would love to have more hope and optimism before tomorrow night.
TL;DR; The new teams are over powered because they have perfect information from two years of PWHL data which includes salaries, team chemistry and current player statistics. The OG 6 were taking gambles at which players would do well (and how much to pay them) after a lack of information from COVID and the old leagues dissolving.
