The Leafs Geeks Podcast – Addressing Defence with James Mirtle

This week James Mirtle from The Athletic joins Ian to discuss the following topics:

3:30 – RHD Trade Targets.
14:23 – The Expansion Draft.
20:17 – Hunwick vs Alternatives in UFA.
25:03 – The Zaitsev Contract.
30:51 – The Blogosphere vs Beat Reporters.
40:18 – James Mirtle’s Beer League #analytics.

The podcast is also available on iTunes, Google Play, and a bunch of other podcast apps that I don’t know how to link.

For anyone who doesn’t know who I am, hey how’s it going? My name’s Ian Tulloch. I’ve been running this podcast for about a year and a half now. It started off as a nerdy little hobby that gave me and my buddy, Theo, a chance to catch up and nerd out on hockey for an hour every week. With Theo getting busier with law school this year though, I’ve had to bring on guests pretty much every week to take his place. Lately I’ve been trying to bring on some of my favourite writers  (ie. Mirtle, Tierney, Yost, literally anyone from Hockey Graphs, Jeffler when he doesn’t screen my calls) and dive deeper into areas of the game that you won’t get in the typical intermission broadcast – as great as faceoff talk is.

If you can’t tell by my taste in writers & some of my articles here at TLN, I’m a huge nerd when it comes to analyzing the game of hockey. With that being said, I’ve been putting a lot of effort into improving my eye test to help consolidate it with the number-heavy work that I do. I feel like you can never have too much information (whether it’s qualitative or quantitative), so I love taking in as much as I can to try to understand what’s happening and why. I might have a podcast focusing on the Leafs’ passing data, and I might have another focusing solely on systems analysis. Then I’ll throw in a goalie episode to really piss people off. I try to switch things up because when you’re doing a team-specific podcast, you tend to run out of topics pretty quickly (Auston Matthews is really good, we get it).

I hope you enjoy the show. I honestly just do it for fun at this point (it’s been awesome getting to talk hockey with some of my favourite analysts), so the fact that it’s been gaining a bit more traction lately is just a bonus. Let me know what you think! (My DMs are always open on Twitter)

Cheers ?

– Ian