The Name Of The Game

An age old discussion about the name of the sport of floorball was restarted by the highest of the parties, IFF. This time the issue seems to be twofold: make the name of the sport itself be floorball in every language and make sure everyone uses the hashtag #floorball in discussions related to the sport in any language. The discussion about the proposal has been going on in Twitter for a while now and after the Swedes started talking about it the leading executive of the Finnish Floorball Federation Jari Kinnunen's tweet started the discussion in Finland as well.

Namechange to Floorball? Kansainvälinen Salibandyliitto IFF suosittelee kansallisiinkin twiitteihin käytettäväksi hashtagia #floorball 1/3
— Jari Kinnunen (@kinnuin) January 10, 2014

The discussion sparked this blog post as I felt I could not express my feelings properly in Twitter's 140 characters. Here is how I see the proposal and my views on it as well as some questions that are still left unanswered.

Let's All Use #floorball

The only reason for this I can see is that it would (artificially) inflate the usage of the hashtag and increase the possibility of it trending some day. I can see that as a valid argument only if you have no clue how hashtags are supposed to work, namely as ways to categorize tweets. If everyone who is tweeting about floorball in Finnish or Swedish would use the hashtag its usage would increase tenfold or more but at the same time its usefulness would be killed completely. An American using #floorball to find more tweets about floorball would be presented with a few readable tweets in the midst of tons of tweets he had simply no idea what they mean. He would stop using the hashtag right then and there and he would be left with no way to find relevant content in Twitter.

On the point of getting #floorball to trend in the global Twitter, do you understand how many people are actually tweeting about the trending topics? Justin Bieber has almost 50 million followers (three times as many as there are people in Finland and Sweden combined) and if he posts anything even a little interesting he gets 200000+ retweets and who knows how many favorites. If there's a hashtag in his tweet it will get such a massive amount of visibility there is nothing the people in the tiny nordic countries can do to top it. What needs to happen to get floorball to trend? We need to get the masses in US interested in floorball. But they will use the hashtag naturally because it's in their language!

Let's Change The Name To Floorball In Every Language

 The argument for this has been branding. The secretary general of IFF, John Liljelund, said in his op-ed that there have been problems when trying to talk to people of Central European countries about floorball because they haven't known the word floorball. A loose translation of the relevant paragraph:
One of floorball's problems is the international name of the sport, or more precisely the multiplicity of the names. When we talk about floorball people shake their heads and say they've never heard of the sport. But as soon as someone mentions unihockey or innebandy they go yeah, we used to play that in school.
My question here is this. If you go talk to a Swiss in German do you assume they know English language name of the sport? Why not learn and use the name of the sport in the language used in the area? This has never been seen as an issue in any other sport.

The biggest issue, and the one that hits closest to home, is that floorball as a word simply does not fit into the Finnish language context. It is not a word that can be bent as a word in Finnish has to be. Even if the official name would be changed it would never feel natural and most likely a bastardized version of the word would become de-facto in Finland thus nullifying the efforts to standardize the name.

My View

Both of these proposals seem strange to me. The hashtag proposal is just plain stupid and probably reflects ignorance more than anything else but the name change also sounds weird. I cannot see what the concrete benefits of changing the name would be. There would need to be translations of any materials anyway so translating the name of the sport itself would not be a big deal. Likewise if someone doesn't know of the sport already the name will not make any difference whatsoever.

The only reason for all this I can see is the goal IFF set to itself: get to the olympics sooner rather than later. Now they are running out of real stuff to do and in panic coming up with all kinds of weird suggestions that might help without doing the due diligence and actually first studying the effect of said changes.

Both of these issues would be moot if there was more genuine English language discussion and content about floorball. In my view IFF should, instead of suggesting these weird gimmicks, throw resources at producing such content and sparking such discussions. There's a saying in Finland that goes something like this: the water carried into the well will not stay there.

I am not an IFF insider so I don't know anything more than what has been publicly stated so I might be well off with my conclusion. If you know more, please let me know in the comments below. And most importantly, if you can explain to me how these changes are supposed to help promote the sport concretically I'd be more than happy to change my opinion. What I've heard so far is just wishful thinking with no connection to reality.

Team Selection

The team selection is quite often a controversial thing. Higher profile teams, like national teams, might even spark public debate (or in the case of Montreal Canadiens commentary from the mayor of Montreal) but in every case there will be players and other individuals near the team who are surprised or disappointed in the selection. The old truth is that you can't please everyone and in the end the selection does come down to the subjective opinion of the coaching staff but most often the people who disagree with the team selection just don't have the facts right. In this post I try to explain the process how I see it and in the next post I will talk about how I see an individual player should react to the selection.

There are two major criteria to consider when considering a player for the team and forming the lineups.

1) The expected influence on result
2) The player development

Both of these should always play a part but the weight of each differs depending on the age group as well as the part of the season the team is in. It is a lot different for young kids compared to adult elite but also between the early parts of the regular season and the decisive game in the final series of play-offs. Obviously each coach chooses the weighing individually based on their own experience and viewpoints. Let's look at the criteria more closely.

Influence On Result

The obvious property here is the individual skills of the player in consideration but also how well the player fits into the team and the line. A line is not really good if it does not have a balanced mix of skills and personalities. What the balanced mix is depends on the team and its style of play. The goal of picking players and forming lineups is obviously to create a team that will most likely score more goals than it allows. From a coach's perspective having a line that is able to score two goals and allow only one is a lot better than a line that scores four but allows four as well.

One great tool for evaluating each player's contribution to this scoring balance is the +/- statistic. A player with relatively high value in this statistic is most likely a choice. In floorball only one assistant gets a point but it's quite often what happens before the final pass that makes the play and thus the points league might not be representative of who actually sets up the scoring opportunities. On the other hand how the lines are played might distort the statistics: a player who always plays against the top players of the opponents will obviously have more minuses than a player who plays less minutes and against weaker players.

Of course the coach should have her own opinion on the contribution of each of the available players with or without the statistics but they are nevertheless a good tool.

Player Development

To improve you need to play. Playing with a lot of responsibility and with good players in a high level game accelerates improvement. Sitting at the end of the bench or in the stands is both demotivating and useless in most cases. A regular season game early in the season does very little for a seasoned veteran but it might be very useful for a rookie. On the other hand one player might be better at a certain role but another one's individual skill development might benefit from taking that role in that game. Similarly someone might need to be benched for disciplinary reasons even though being the best choice to a line or a role.

Selecting any team is a complicated process as I was hopefully able to show in this simplified narrative. The coach considers a ton of variables and tries to build the best team for that occasion from the pool of available players and there is a lot of subjective opinion in the selection as everything cannot be objectively measured. Finally, because we are all human even the personal relationship has influence in the selection. All other things being equal it's quite easy to pick a player who is easy to work with over a player who is considered more difficult.