The Matthew Effect: Part 2
Understanding the Success of Tage Thompson of the Buffalo Sabres
We had some great feedback and comments on our article concerning the Matthew Effect.
In that article, we wrote about what the Matthew Effect is, its origin, and how athletes can use it to gain a substantial competitive advantage.
In Part 2, we would like to focus on some key attributes or features of the Matthew Effect and how athletes can use these features to amplify certain physical capacities that permit high performance.
The Case of Tage Thompson
To demonstrate how features of the Matthew Effect can be used by athletes, we will use Tage Thompson of the Buffalo Sabres as an example. Thompson is currently having a fantastic season where he is on pace for a level of point production, specifically goals that far exceeds his previous career high of 38 set last season. This was considered his “breakout” season, for which he was rewarded with a 7-year, 50 million dollar contract.
Thompson has always been talented, his observable skills and large size (he’s 6’6”) having landed him on the US U18 development team and subsequently to Hockey East at UCONN. He was a first-round pick (26th overall) of the St. Louis Blues in the 2016 NHL entry draft, however, spent most of his time there in the American Hockey League before being traded to the Sabres in 2018.
Very early during the 2019/20 season, after being recalled from the AHL, Thompson dislocated his right shoulder on a collision along the boards. For a player that has an accurate and hard shot, this is significant. As a right-handed shooter, the right arm is the power arm as it pushes down on the stick to create flex. After spending a couple of months trying to rehabilitate the injury with little success, it was decided that he would have season-ending surgery to reconstruct the shoulder. The total expected time was six months.
Although unfortunate, the injury served as a blessing in disguise as Thompson took advantage of the time off as well as the subsequent COVID delay to the following season which didn’t begin until early 2021 to fully rehabilitate the shoulder as well as undergo significant changes to his physical capacities.
Having no detailed information regarding his rehabilitation or subsequent training, it has been documented that Thompson undertook a strength training program that added significant strength and size to his stature.
From the perspective of Absolute, this allowed Thompson to be close to an optimal Point B going into the 2021/2022 season. This season he is even better, making it evident that he has become much closer to optimal.
Matthew Effects Result from Feedbacks
“Where did this guy come from?”
Most casual NHL observers would express surprise as to the success that Tage Thompson is having. Others knew the skill set was there; he just needed to add physical dimensions to his game that allowed for success. Ecologically Thompson needed to acquire a range of fundamental physical capacities at the Level of Adaptation that allowed him to meet and exceed demands at the Level of Competition. Tage Thompson is still the same player he has always been, now with a level of physicality that allows him to dominate.
Any change in behaviour results from feedback loops. Understanding which way the feedback goes is important to understanding how the behaviour change occurs. Simply, Matthew Effects result from feedbacks. Feedbacks create loops that dictate a future behaviour or new state of the system, or they moderate the current behaviour around a desired steady state.
In Tage Thompson’s case, many positive feedbacks occurred to change his ability to compete physically and achieve success. This is the goal when moving to Point B at an optimal level, as the desire is to push for a repeatable behaviour of the system that it currently does not possess. Continually driving this type of feedback creates a signal that the system processes and internalizes to generate behaviours that were not present previously.
Matthew effects specifically result from positive feedbacks that causes a deviation of a current behaviour of the system, therefore, generating a new behaviour that is different than its predecessor, which produces an amplifying effect creating a larger gap between what was and currently what is.
*There is a caveat with positive feedback loops: they must be balanced with negative feedback loops otherwise, they will continually run uncontrolled and could eventually lead to the system crashing (herein lies a great case for overuse injury)
Anytime a behaviour is moderated around a current set point, it constitutes a negative feedback loop. In Thompson’s case, those negative feedbacks centred around his skill work. This, in effect, balances the system. Thompson was already a highly skilled player, so the desired behaviours were already intertwined within the system and could be produced. It is easy to see now, that as his physical portfolio increases as a result of positive feedbacks creating adaptation, the negative feedbacks allow for his new physical capacities to be expressed within behaviours the system already knows.
The Parable of the Monopoly Game1 and Positive Feedback
Daniel Rigney has a great piece in his book, illustrating positive feedback and its relationship to the Matthew Effect.
In the board game of Monopoly, all players begin with equal resources. Yet equal opportunity at the start soon gives way to extreme inequalities in the distribution of resources as the game progresses. Though there may be ups and downs along the way, the richer players tend to get richer, and the poorer players poorer, until eventually the richest player has monopolized all resources and the poor are left with nothing at all. As successful players accumulate income-producing property through a combination of skill and luck, their cumulative advantages allow them to reinvest new income in accumulating still more property, producing still more new income. This snowballing pattern of self-amplifying accumulation results in a Matthew effect that ultimately allows the most advantaged player to crush all opponents.
It should be the goal of strength practitioners, by creating Matthew effects with intent through training for physical currencies to magnify the capacity for high performance of the athletes they manage. This must be done through positive feedbacks that for a period of time cause system destabilization that leads to the acquisition of what is needed. As long as this is controlled on the backend with training that creates negative feedbacks to moderate and maintain certain behaviours that are already apparent (this includes skill work)
Absolute vs. Relative Matthew Effects
The parable above although harsh represents society to a large degree, and for us, The Level of Competition. Those that have will undoubtedly be provided the ability to have more. This clearly illustrates what can be termed an Absolute Matthew Effect.
An Absolute Matthew Effect occurs when there develops a larger gap between two groups. Although important, in the realm of sport performance most of what occurs are what are termed Relative Matthew Effects. Relative effects are those whereby the gap between the haves and the have nots occurs incrementally over time, until such time that it is concretely measurable that the gap has dramatically. increased. Relative effects are easily demonstrated using compounding. If there are two bank accounts that offer a 10 percent annual return (obviously not real-world!) on any currency deposited, yet one account starts at $1000 and the other at $100, over time when the interest is re-invested, the first account will accumulate a higher return than the second even though the annual rate of return is identical. Over time, the gap between the two accounts would gradually widen further, while at the same time the rate of annualized growth in the first account would accelerate.
How does this relate to sport performance and specifically Tage Thompson?
Bringing in aspects of game theory, hockey is in effect a zero sum game. Zero sum games are those where there is a winner and a loser of equal proportions, meaning the amount that one competitor gains is equal to the same amount that the other competitor loses creating a net zero sum.
Without diving into too many specifics, the game of hockey when observed at the highest levels is made up of many instances of zero sum games that offer one competitor an advantage while simultaneously taking that exact advantage away from the competition. The Level of Competition in the sport of hockey is made up of repetitive battles that if won can confer significant advantage to the player (and team) who wins the battle, while taking away from the player who loses the battle. These occur both for the puck to gain possession or off-the puck, where time, space and opportunity are the advantage.
Tage Thompson is having significant success in the many zero sum games that make up a game of hockey. Winning the puck, an area of space or shortening time for defenders has created advantages, or Relative Matthew Effects for him and his teammates and has allowed him opportunities to score. Tage Thompson currently at an optimal Point B is a bigger, stronger and faster version of previous seasons, which allows him the advantage of winning more battles and putting himself in positions that allow him to win the zero sum games with the game at the Level of Competition.
It is evident that over the course of his very short career so far that Tage Thompson has created multiple advantages for himself by creating Matthew Effects. The expectation is that the Absolute Effect will become greater as his career progresses, and he will continue to produce at a high level.
The Matthew Effect: How Advantage Begets Further Advantage.