15. Jack Han and the Crossroads between Drafting and Developing

When young people reach out to Jack Han with questions about how he broke into the hockey world, or for advice on how they can, they typically have their sights set on one of two jobs—that of a scout or that of a player development coach.

His advice usually surprises them.

“If you’re looking to become a good scout, become a better player development coach. And at the same time, if you want to be a better player development coach, then learn how to be a better scout too because then you’ll learn to really observe and really have a mental model of what you look for in a player and how to build a profile in a player,” he’ll tell them. “Those are two things that I think really feed into each other. Even now, most teams have those two things separate, where your scouts and your player development guys don’t really talk to each other all that much. For me, having that two-way conversation is essential because you’re constantly handing players off to one another.”

There are few in hockey who have worked to bridge the gap between scouting and player development quite like Han has. And even fewer are more intimately familiar with how the Leafs are trying to merge the two than he is.

From August 2017 to May 2020, he worked in three different jobs within the Leafs organization. While his title changed, going from Leafs player development analyst to Leafs hockey operations assistant and then Marlies assistant coach, the job was always the same—he was the go-between for Leafs assistant-general-manager-turned-general-manager Kyle Dubas, his player development department, and his scouting department.

It was a job that was originally created by Dubas specifically for him. And it was a period of time in Leafs history that saw the organization throw out the old in favour of the new, beginning with Brendan Shanahan’s “scorched-earth” organizational overhaul, which was marked by the replacement of much of the staff he inherited and included new voices like Dubas’ and eventually Han’s.

In the summer of 2021, a year removed from his decision to leave the Leafs organization on his own terms, Han paused during a trip to California to visit his parents to reflect on his time with the Leafs and offer rare insight into the inner workings of the organization from the draft to the NHL.

“What do you think of analytics?”

That was the first question that Lou Lamoriello asked Han in his job interview. Han was seated in a conference room at 8:30 am on a summer day in 2017 interviewing for a role that the Leafs were calling “player development analyst.” There were two people seated across the table from him. There was Lamoriello, then the team’s general manager, and there was Dubas, then the team’s assistant general manager. He knew Dubas reasonably well by then. In January of that year, Dubas had begun following Han (then an analyst with McGill University’s women’s hockey team who had begun to also do some of his work publicly) on Twitter and had reached out a couple of times to pick his brain on different topics. That March, after a heartbreaking double overtime loss in the final at nationals to the University of Alberta, and a night of drinking and goodbyes with the Martlets (who’d outshot the Golden Bears by a margin of two-to-one only to lose off of a shin pad deflection, Han will tell you), it was Dubas who’d texted a hungover Han while he was on the bus back to Montreal to say that he’d like to speak with him in more detail about a role he had in mind for him with the Leafs. After playing phone tag with their availabilities and a couple months of radio silence, it was also Dubas who, shortly after the 2017 NHL draft and the Leafs development camp that followed, finally got back in touch to say, “OK, let’s get you a flight booked, I’d like to bring you in for an in-person interview.”

But Han and Lamoriello had never met, or even spoken, before they were introduced in that room. Han didn’t know that Lamoriello would be a part of the interview either, because Dubas had given him no indication that he would be.

But Han was familiar with Lamoriello. He was familiar with Lamoriello the hockey man, the mystique that he had created about himself, and the way he ran his teams, because he’d gone to middle school in New Jersey and had grown up watching the Devils teams that Lamoriello built. But he was also familiar with something else about Lamoriello—that once upon a time, Lamoriello was a high school math teacher. He knew that because before he’d left for Toronto, longtime hockey journalist and family friend Michael Farber had told him as much.

“You know, if you ever meet Lou, he has this reputation of being very traditional, of being very anti-analytics, but he was actually a high school math teacher and he’s really way more of a numbers guy than you think,” Farber told him.

“Hmm, that’s interesting,” Han replied, tucking away that information.

So, when Lamoriello sat through the first few minutes of Han’s job interview in complete silence, and then delivered what Han describes as a “point-blank, very vague, loaded question” from a “very cagey guy,” he knew how to answer it.

He launched into an answer about calculus.

“Calculus,” he said, “is a way for you to decode what a curve’s properties are.”

In a hockey application, he explained, calculus can be applied in a few ways. One, he said, was in mapping out player aging curves.

“You start out, you’re 16, 17, 18, you’re in juniors, you’re quickly improving, you hit your early twenties, that’s probably your early peak, and then you hit your late peak around 25–27, maybe a little bit later, and then after 30 you’re declining,” he explained. “And every player has an aging curve, and every age curve looks broadly the same—but then there’s a lot of variation among individuals.”

Another, he said, was in measuring things like their Wins Above Replacement (or WAR) relative to their aging curve.

“So if Connor McDavid is 20 years old right now, we can expect his curve to go up. There’s a certain shape to it. Then, if you look at the first derivative of the curve, you get a trend,” Han said. “And that is essentially analytics because you create a model, you put in a player’s past results, and then you get an estimate of his future outputs and you can fit that player’s future results on a curve. That’s what we’re looking to do—we’re looking at your past performance compared to your immediate peers and then we’re trying to predict what you’re going to do in the future. Which is a pretty neat way to do things. And I think there’s a lot of value in that.”

And then before he finished and left Lamoriello to comment on his answer, he paused and said one last thing.

“But I also believe that that outlook is incomplete because what you need to care about is not only what your value is right now and what your future outlook is, but you’re also looking to influence what your future outlook is. So, are you eating well, are you sleeping well, are you making technical changes, are you expanding your game tactically? And that’s the second derivative,” Han continued. “And as an organization, as a coach, and as a player, you’re able to influence that day-in and day-out. And there’s a reason why we always have a margin of error when we talk about a player’s future outputs because we don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe injuries flare up, maybe he trains a different way, maybe he finds a new skills coach, maybe the family situation changes, maybe he’s just not happy. But that second derivative, we’re able to influence and for me, that’s what I want to learn more about. That’s something that I feel is really important in a way that maybe isn’t captured in just looking at an aging curve or WAR.”

When Han was finally done, Lamoriello sat back in his chair for a moment, just kind of stared at him, and then spoke from the awkward silence.

“That’s a perfect answer,” he said.

* * *

When Han got the job, he knew that his answer to Lamoriello’s question likely helped seal the deal.

He also knew that both the time was right and the Leafs were the right fit. The time was right because he’d decided heading into the 2016–17 season at McGill that his third year with the program (which also coincided with the departure of the team’s star, Melodie Daoust) would be his last, he had prepared to pass off his role to his successor, and he wanted to go all-in on breaking into pro hockey in analytics, scouting, or coaching. He knew that the Leafs were the right fit for him because he felt like he could help them in their pursuit of a holistic top-down organization where every department was on the same page. He’d told himself that he would pick his own boss; he’d followed Dubas’ ascension closely enough that he knew he was different (a word he also uses to describe himself); and he felt that if they had the chance to work together that he would jump on it.

For much of his first season with the Leafs, Han spent his time watching the team’s drafted prospects, breaking down their shifts, tracking and collecting data on them, quantifying their progress, discussing it with player development leads Scott Pellerin and Stephane Robidas, and getting on the ice with player development consultant Darryl Belfry to serve as his video assistant, filming the prospects’ skates on an iPad.

In March of that season, Dubas then began to send Han names of players he was interested in for the 2018 NHL draft so that he could track their games, send him findings from the data, break down the tape, and provide his opinion on their stylistic fit for the organization. When he was done with one batch of four or five names in one week, another followed at the start of the next. The lists themselves were diverse, ranging from top-10 prospects to second-round targets, late-round picks, and undrafted overagers.

“I really got a mix of everything and then I just kind of went about it with the same process I used for our drafted players. And the process itself was something that I came up with on the fly because I was in a new role, so I actually had a lot of freedom and I just went off what I was doing at McGill in terms of the video and the analytics pieces and I evolved it a little bit. So by the time the draft rolled around, I actually became really familiar with a lot of the players that were going to be in our wheelhouse.”

The idea itself, which Han believes Dubas took from a leaked presentation that former Canucks general manager Mike Gillis gave to the Penguins, was Dubas’ way of getting a second opinion on some of the players independent of the team’s scouts. It was also, Han believes, part of some behind-the-scenes maneuvering that was happening at the time between Dubas and fellow assistant general manager Mark Hunter (who Dubas knew was viewed as a super scout of sorts) to position himself as the heir apparent to Lamoriello.

“[Gillis] talked about having two different scouting teams go head-to-head and that was what we did that spring and summer, basically,” Han said. “It was just me and Kyle doing our own homework on these guys so that he had his own book.”

During that process, one player in particular left a “really strong impression” on Han—overager Joey Keane of the Barrie Colts, who’d posted 44 points in 62 games in the OHL that season. Across a five-game segment of evaluation, which included watching all of Barrie’s shifts instead of just Keane’s, Han found that when Keane wasn’t on the ice, every single transitional metric suffered, from controlled exits and entries, to exits and entries against, to shots for and against.

“He just had this dominant effect at tilting the ice for Barrie,” Han said. “Even though his point totals weren’t huge, I just thought that this was the kind of player that statistically would project really well because he was able to be dominant at 5-on-5. And this was a guy who’d went undrafted and would possibly be available in the third, fourth, or fifth round and beyond. I really thought that this guy would be someone who would play the way that Kyle envisions but also just be someone who brings value in a whole spectrum of areas.”

By the time the Leafs’ pre-draft combine rolled around, and they’d welcomed a couple dozen players to Toronto (including Keane, would-be third-round Leafs draft pick Semyon Der-Arguchintsev, would-be Predators fifth-rounder Spencer Stastney, and future Leafs signee Pavel Gogolev), Han decided to put his affinity for Keane to the test by approaching Belfry to ask him to identify the player at camp that he liked the most without knowing who that player was.

“OK, there’s one kid here who I think will be a really good NHL prospect for us. I would like for you to guess who that player is,” he told Belfry on the morning of the combine, before one of his skates.

“Alright, I’ll keep an eye out,” Belfry answered.

Midway through the session, Han skated over to Belfry.

“OK, so the guy that I’m thinking of, do you have an idea of who that might be?” he asked.

“Spencer Stastney,” he said, pointing at him with his stick.

“No, take a second guess,” Han answered.

“This guy’s skating is projectible,” Belfry answered quickly, pointing at Keane.

Though the Leafs never ended up picking Keane, who was drafted 88th overall by the Rangers that June (12 picks after the Leafs selected Der-Arguchintsev) and has since played two games for the Hurricanes, who traded for him, in the NHL, that experience allowed Han to trust his instincts.

“In my mind, if I’ve already identified this player and Darryl’s also able to identify him quickly, then we’ve really got something because that’s where the quantitative and the qualitative side really come together, and we could be really confident taking a chance on this player. At that moment, when Darryl pointed him out second, I really thought if we could somehow sneak this guy into one of the later rounds that we would really have something,” Han said.

* * *

Following the Marlies’ Calder Cup championship at the end of Han’s first season with the organization, and Dubas’ promotion to general manager on May 11, 2018, Han’s three-pronged role within the team began to evolve into the 2018–19 campaign.

After the 2018 NHL draft in Dallas, that expanded role included a more hands-on involvement in the development of the Leafs’ prospects through that off-season’s summer camps and into a new Marlies season in the fall.

One of the first players he left his mark on was 2014 seventh-round draft pick Pierre Engvall, who’d come to Toronto via a season with HV71 in the SHL late in the Calder Cup push and was just beginning his first full season in North America.

After breaking down a great deal of Engvall’s tape before he arrived with the Marlies and then watching him throughout the Calder Cup playoffs, Han concluded what nobody else within the Leafs organization had yet tabled: “We should try Engvall as a centre.”

He came to that conclusion after having read voraciously about Pete Mahovlich while growing up in Montreal.

“I had never seen Pete play…he was a winger growing up but he got moved over to centre because he was a big guy, he was like 6’5” like Pierre, and he skated really well, like Pierre, and he had a really good ability to protect the puck, like Pierre. So he went from a decent left-wing prospect, he got moved over to centre, and he ended up being probably the most productive centre who played with Guy Lafleur and Steve Shutt. So I was like, ‘Hmm, Pierre looks like what I figure Pete Mahovlich was and we don’t have any centres who are close to ready; we don’t have any high-end centre prospects, so that could be interesting,’” Han said.

After reviewing some more of Engvall’s game, Han then went to Marlies head coach Sheldon Keefe with the idea in October of the 2018–19 season.

Initially, Keefe was resistant, in large part because whenever Engvall had taken draws as a winger, he’d been terrible at them.

Eventually, with some prodding and consideration, Keefe then began to turn to Engvall as a centre every once in a while, after a penalty kill or for the odd neutral-zone faceoff.

“He would just tell Pierre, ‘OK, I’m going to send you out with two wingers, you just go play centre for a bit,’” Han said of the decision to give him the odd shift down the middle.

Han remained insistent that they give him a longer look, though. At the midway point of that season, a whole slew of things eventually came together to allow that to happen when the Marlies lost centres Sam Gagner (to a recall by the Canucks) and Chris Mueller (to injury).

“We essentially had like Adam Brooks and then nobody,” Han said of the way things played out. “So I just I kept alluding to it or bringing it up to [Keefe]. And he was smart about it. He kind of eased him in that way.”

The move proved pivotal for the 2018–19 Marlies, and for Engvall’s development, eventually giving a Leafs organization short on centre depth beyond Auston Matthews and John Tavares a versatile depth option. A year after he made the move to the middle, Engvall was recalled by the Leafs and quickly signed to a two-year contract extension when he was successful.

* * *

In advance of Han’s second draft as a member of the Leafs organization in 2019, and under Dubas’ guidance as general manager for the first time, Han was invited to Buffalo for the league’s scouting combine and then Vancouver for the draft itself so that he could factor into some of the team’s new processes for decision making.

One of those new processes was, for the very first time, the Leafs’ attempt to test the functional intelligence of the players who were at the combine.

The goal was to try to evaluate their hockey sense and learning ability. The plan—after discussions between Han, Dubas, Dr. Meg Popovic (who had been hired in August of the year prior as the team’s director of athlete well-being), and other members of the Leafs’ development staff—was to get Han in the room at the combine with his laptop, show the players clips of the Leafs and the Marlies, and then ask them what they see coming or would have done on a given play.

Two days before the combine, Leafs skills coach Adam Nicholas, who also worked with the Chicago Steel, then reached out to Han when he noticed that Steel overager Nick Abruzzese was on their combine interview list.

“You’re really going to love this guy, he’s really going to blow your socks off from a hockey sense point of view and from an intelligence point of view,” Nicholas told Han.

In the lead-up to the combine, Han then went out of his way to do some video analysis of Abruzzese, a double overager who was committed to Harvard, to see it for himself, only to come to the same preliminary conclusion about Abruzzese’s smarts.

On the day of the combine, he also kept in mind a common adage of Belfry’s—“If you have a player that’s special or elite, you’ve got to find a way to stretch him; you’ve got to find a way for him to show you something new and force him to elevate.”

By the time it was Abruzzese’s turn, Han found himself thinking two things.

The first was, Well I’m expecting a lot out of Nick Abruzzese.

The second was, I’m looking for a lot because he’s going to have to override his poor results earlier on. And for him to be even a possible NHL player, he’s really going to have to outperform his statistical profile to date and he’s really got to show me a lot of projectible traits.

After going through one process with the first several players the Leafs had interviewed that day, Han then decided to flip the script on Abruzzese and make his job a little harder.

After the usual process had played out and the floor was left to Han to question Abruzzese, he told him that every other player had been given the opportunity to watch a series of clips once and then on their second time through they were allowed to tell him to pause whenever they had an observation, but that he would not get that opportunity.

Instead, Han told Abruzzese that he was only going to play the clip once, that Han was going to have control of when to stop the clip, and that whenever he did, he wanted Abruzzese to predict what was going to happen next, whether that was where the puck was going, who was going to get it, whether it was going to be a shot or a pass, or how the defenceman was going to react.

“They got a very open-ended question,” Han said. “I was basically asking him to predict the future. That’s how I wanted him to elevate. So he doesn’t know the players, he doesn’t know the system, he doesn’t know the opponents. I’m really just looking to test his crystal ball and see how good it is.”

In the first clip Han began playing, the first unit of the Marlies power play was coming up the right flank when Han hit pause almost immediately.

Abruzzese didn’t hesitate with his analysis, jumping right into it.

“Number 27, that’s Jeremy Bracco and knowing Bracco, he’s probably going to go for a seam pass,” Abruzzese said.

When Han pressed play, Bracco attacked downhill and hit a seam pass.

A few seconds later in the same clip, when Han paused it again, Abruzzese called the play a second time.

And a few seconds later, he did it again.

“He was spot-on every single time. I stopped it three times and all three times he was able to predict where the puck was going,” Han said. “So right away, that for me shows that in terms of hockey sense, he was going to be elite. That’s a hard thing to identify if you don’t know what you’re looking for or how to tease it out, but that exercise was what we felt was the simplest way, and the most impressive player in that exercise was Nick Abruzzese.”

A month later, the Leafs selected Abruzzese in the fourth round of the 2019 NHL draft. A season later, Abruzzese posted 44 points in 31 games as a freshman at Harvard and won the ECAC’s Rookie of the Year award as college hockey’s third-highest-scoring player. Two years after that, the Crimson named him team captain, he played for Team USA at the Olympics, and the Leafs signed him.

* * *

After his promotion to Marlies assistant coach in the summer of 2019, Han spent one last season within the Leafs organization until he decided in May 2020, at the age of 31, to step away from the team, return to work in the public sphere (which included authoring a series of books on hockey tactics), and pursue other opportunities.

The decision to leave was one he didn’t take lightly, but he felt was necessary as one chapter of the Marlies closed and another opened following the promotions of Dubas, Keefe, and others.

“Imagine you’re driving on a two-lane highway where there’s only one lane going in each direction, and then you come up on a car that you want to pass. What do you do?” Han said. “Well, if you want to pass that car, either you’ve got to change lanes and make the pass and take some risk while you’re doing that, or you wait behind that car until that car turns off. Those are the only two ways that you’re going to get past that car that’s blocking you. And whichever choice you make is fine, but you’ve got to make a choice and commit to that.”

Today, though, he looks back on his three years with the Leafs organization with pride for what he contributed at the crossroads between several departments, and gratitude for the opportunity Dubas gave him to help a team toward that Calder Cup in 2018. When he talks about what he saw in Keane, or the role he played with Engvall, or that combine interview process with Abruzzese, he speaks assuredly about the impact he had in both scouting and helping to develop not only the kids but the organizational processes and data that helped to study and support them.

“There’s a mix of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis that goes into it for the kids. I think the three years that I was there, we were able to build on that. And that was kind of the lens through which I did everything. Certainly, there’s the numbers way of doing it and saying, ‘Does this player’s past production project well to this league?’ So that’s the quantitative way. The qualitative way is looking at the players’ technical and tactical and physical skill sets and saying, ‘Does this translate?’ So does the player use a lot of outside speed to beat defenders, because that’s less projectible than a player who plays between checks, who uses deception, who turns defenders’ feet,” Han said. “And once you get familiar with a player’s profile on both sides of the fence, then you can start having a much better idea of, first of all, ‘How does this guy project?’ and second of all, ‘How can we influence his game on a day-to-day or month-to-month basis so that he has the best chance to either hit his projection or outperform his projection?’”

He often wonders how things might have turned out differently for him, and for the Leafs for that matter, had Dubas left the Leafs in 2017 for a job with the Avalanche (which the Leafs had allowed him to pursue while he was assistant general manager). He knows, surely, that he never would have interviewed for his job with the Leafs, and he never would have answered that question from Lamoriello.

But the very best thing that happened to him from 2017 to 2020, as the Leafs tried to go about building their team differently than they had in the past, was the same thing he tells all the people who reach out looking for advice.

“I didn’t go into that job expecting to learn a lot about scouting or even to learn that much about player development to be honest. I expected it to be more of a stats-driven job. But ultimately what I was really happy about was that I became a pretty good scout because I became a much better player development coach,” Han finished. “I already had a pretty decent understanding of the stats side of things, and projecting, and league equivalencies, and microstats going in. But once I got there, I got to learn about what to look for in the skater, or what to do to make a player skate better, or stickhandle better, or protect the puck better, or pass the puck better. And that really gave me a whole appreciation of what kind of players, even in the same points-per-game range or the same age-adjusted production range, are more projectible than others.”