It’s been an exciting summer for analytics in hockey, as team after team has moved to hire analytics consultants. The most high-profile move was the Toronto Maple Leafs’ addition of Kyle Dubas as assistant general manager, but other teams have also made moves:
Obviously, teams are moving toward analytics because they believe it will help their decision-making process. But there is a theory out there that the competitive advantage afforded by analytics will disappear as more teams embrace them.
The thinking goes that while early adopters benefit because they know something nobody else knows, that benefit disappears once all these teams know roughly the same thing.
It’s a problematic theory.
“Analytics” is an all-encompassing word, one which in hockey generally refers to any effort to dig beyond conventional statistics (goals, points, etc.). It covers efforts to identify clutch performers by focusing specifically on high-pressure points in a game; it includes work done based on scraping data from the NHL’s official play-by-play charts; it incorporates the efforts o ...
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Article written by Jonathan Willis
Competitive Advantage in Analytics Here to Stay Despite NHL Stats Revolution
August 10th, 2014 by Jonathan Willis Leave a reply »
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