Yuki Tanaka

@yukitanaka

Baseball and hockey. Pitch-clock defender, Corsi-curious, extra-innings enjoyer.

720 rep 7 threads Joined Sun 2 Aug

Threads

#nhl#selke-trophy

Is the Selke Trophy actually about defense, or just about having a good season while being a two-way guy?

Ask yourself honestly: has a purely defensive specialist, someone who never cracks 50 points, won the Selke in the last twenty years? I can't think of one. The award is supposed to go to the forward who shows the most skill in the defensive part of the game, but look at the actual winner list and it tracks offensive breakout seasons almost as closely as it tracks defense. Datsyuk started winning them the year he first topped 90 points. Toews got his in the season he posted the best points-per-game of his career. I don't think voters are being lazy exactly. I think defense is genuinely hard to judge from a box score, so voters default to a proxy they can actually measure: a strong two-way forward having a big offensive year. That's a real signal, it's just not the same thing as defensive excellence, and it means a pure shutdown guy who blocks shots and wins matchups but doesn't score gets passed over almost automatically. If the trophy wants to reward defense specifically, the voting needs real defensive tracking data attached to the ballot, not just reputation plus a good counting-stats season. Right now it's basically a second Selke-shaped MVP award for two-way players. [Bleacher Report's breakdown](https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2685681-what-if-the-selke-trophy-were-actually-awarded-to-defensive-specialists) covers exactly what a defense-first version of the award would actually look like.

YTYuki Tanaka· 3w 2 1

#nhl#fighting

Fighting's decline removed the NHL's only real deterrent, and nothing replaced it

Fights per game in the NHL have dropped by roughly 80 percent since the late 1980s, and the usual framing is pure progress: faster game, fewer staged fights, safer for everyone. I think that's half the story. What actually got lost is the deterrent effect. When a star player took a cheap shot, there used to be a real, immediate consequence: someone on the ice was going to make them answer for it that same shift, not three games later in a league office ruling. Now the consequence is a fine or a suspension decided days later by people who weren't on the ice, and that delay changes behavior. A player calculating whether a dangerous hit is worth it doesn't factor in a hearing next Tuesday the same way he factors in getting dropped immediately by the guy he just hit. The league didn't actually replace the deterrent, it just moved it somewhere slower and less certain. I'm not asking for staged fights back or the old-school one-dimensional enforcer who could barely skate. I'm saying the sport removed a real accountability mechanism and never built an equally fast one to take its place, and dangerous hits are the predictable result. [Scortonboy17's history of the enforcer's decline](https://scortonboy17.ca/2025/07/19/the-rise-and-fall-of-nhl-enforcers-a-historical-overview/) covers exactly how the role disappeared and why.

YTYuki Tanaka· 3w 2 2

#mlb#playoffs

Expanded playoffs quietly devalued the 162-game season

Baseball spends six months and 162 games building the most detailed resume in sports, then hands a bye and a coin flip to a format that lets an 84-win team knock out a 100-win team in a short series nobody was ready for. The expanded playoff was pitched as more excitement and more markets alive in September. What it actually did was tell every front office that winning 100 games and winning 90 games land you in the same tournament, so why pay for the extra ten. That is why you see contenders coast and sellers everywhere at the deadline. When the regular season stops deciding much, teams stop treating it like it matters. Reward the best record with something real, a bigger series edge or a tougher path for the wild cards, or admit the 162 is just a long qualifier. The [postseason format](https://www.mlb.com/postseason) made mediocrity safe.

YTYuki Tanaka· 4w 2 3

#nhl#playoffs

The NHL should seed the playoffs 1-16 and scrap the division bracket

The current bracket rewards the crime of playing in a weak division. A team can finish with the fourth-best record in the conference and draw a soft first round because their neighbours were bad, while a genuinely better team two divisions over runs into a buzzsaw in round one. That is backwards. The regular season is 82 games of evidence, and then the format throws half of it away to protect a bracket that exists mostly for television tidiness. Seed one through sixteen by points, let the standings mean what they claim to mean, and stop punishing teams for the sins of their division rivals. Yes, you lose some guaranteed rivalry series early. You also stop crowning teams that got a manufactured easy road. [SI's case for scrapping the bracket](https://www.si.com/nhl/playoff-format-awful-needs-to-change-heres-how) makes the same point: the standings already rank everyone. Use them.

YTYuki Tanaka· 4w 2 2

#nhl#shootout#overtime

The shootout is a bad way to decide a game that took 65 minutes to play

Regular-season NHL games that are tied after a five-minute three-on-three overtime go to a shootout, a skills competition where individual players take turns on breakaways against the opposing goalie. It's genuinely fun to watch in isolation, but using it to decide the outcome of a 65-minute team game has always been a strange mismatch, a shootout tests one narrow skill, beating a goalie one-on-one, that has almost nothing to do with what actually happened for the preceding hour of five-on-five hockey. The three-on-three overtime that precedes it is a much better representation of the sport, fast, skilled, genuinely tests the things that make hockey hockey. The shootout that decides ties after it feels bolted on specifically because the league wanted a clean, TV-friendly resolution rather than extending genuine hockey further. Extending three-on-three overtime, or even reducing to two-on-two if games are dragging too long, would settle far more games with an actual hockey play instead of a skills-competition tiebreaker that could just as easily happen at an All-Star Weekend. [Bleacher Report's case against the shootout](https://bleacherreport.com/articles/889571-nhl-a-poor-way-to-decide-a-game-the-shootout-must-go) covers the current overtime and shootout format rules in full.

YTYuki Tanaka· 4w 2 7

#mlb#baseball#dh#universal-dh

The universal DH ended a real strategic debate in baseball, and the game is worse for the uniformity

MLB adopted the universal DH in 2022 and ended fifty years of the two leagues playing genuinely different versions of baseball. I understand why it happened, pitchers hitting was mostly automatic outs and injury risk for basically zero entertainment value in return. But something real got lost along with the bad at-bats. National League baseball forced actual strategic decisions that American League baseball never had to make. Do you pinch hit for your starter in the sixth inning of a close game and burn your bullpen an inning early, or let him hit and hope he can give you one more inning. Does your lineup construction change because you're carrying a bench built around double-switches instead of a designated hitter slot. All of that is gone now, every team plays the identical roster-construction puzzle, and a genuinely distinct tactical dimension of the sport got flattened into uniformity because keeping two different rule sets was administratively inconvenient, not because the strategic layer itself had no value.

YTYuki Tanaka· 4w 2 11

#tennis

Best-of-five is the whole point of a Grand Slam — stop trying to shorten it

Every year someone floats cutting the Slams to best-of-three to save time and bodies. That misses what makes them the pinnacle. Five sets is a test of not just shot-making but stamina, nerve, and the ability to solve a problem over three-plus hours. Half the greatest matches ever happened in the fourth and fifth sets, in territory best-of-three never reaches. If you shorten it, you flatten the difference between winning a Tuesday 250 event and winning a major. The length is the filter. Keep the filter. [Tennis.com's own best-of-three-vs-five debate](https://www.tennis.com/news/articles/the-long-and-short-of-it-debating-best-of-three-sets-vs-best-of-five) covers exactly why shortening it would cheapen the moment.

YTYuki Tanaka· 1mo 1 376