NHL not invested in the numbers when it comes to analytics

It was 15 years ago this summer that Moneyball, the groundbreaking book by Michael Lewis, began to make its mark on the curious minds of athletic power brokers around the world. And if the intervening time has taught us anything, it’s that the copycat tendencies of sports executives are strong.

Billy Beane, the forward-thinking Oakland A’s general manager who is Moneyball’s protagonist, probably never made a less visionary move than allowing Lewis to detail his methods. It wasn’t long after the book hit the mainstream that the market inefficiencies the Athletics had been stealthily exploiting disappeared. As for Beane’s influential way of thinking — a decade-and-a-half on, there isn’t a Major League Baseball franchise where the analytics department isn’t an accepted necessity. Ditto the NFL and the NBA.

But the NHL? Not so much.

“Most teams haven’t yet really become interested in hockey analytics,” Rob Vollman, the hockey analytics writer, was saying in a recent interview.

Vollman would know. The Calgary-based author of a shelf of books on the subject has consulted with various NHL teams and is also intimately tied into the small network of analytic gurus who have found work around the league. In his new book, the insightful and entertaining Stat Shot: A Fan’s Guide to Hockey Analytics, which comes out next month, Vollman points out that “most” NHL teams still have an analytics department consisting of precisely one statistician.

“Suffice it to say, I have had many, many discussions with many teams trying to persuade them to build an analytics department,” Vollman said. “It’s a tough battle.”

This is good news for fans of the Maple Leafs. Four years ago, in hockey’s so-called summer of analytics, the sport belatedly dragged its feet into the future with a slew of Moneyball-style hirings. (If NHL executives had clearly missed Lewis’s book, perhaps they caught the feature-film adaptation starring Brad Pitt, which was released in 2011). When Leafs president Brendan Shanahan took over the team in the spring of 2014, he acknowledged he had almost no knowledge of analytics, which is a big part of the reason he hired Kyle Dubas, the GM of the OHL’s Soo Greyhounds who had made his name as one of his sport’s rare Beane-inspired believers.

“He’s not tied to any old ideas,” Shanahan said of Dubas back in 2014.

Four years on, Dubas is the Leafs GM. And presiding as he does over what’s though to be one of the sport’s biggest analytics departments, he still stands out as a progressive in a game slow to embrace change. Amazingly, Vollman said analytics-related education remains an issue in more than a few NHL front offices.

“That’s often why they talk to me. It’s like, ‘We would love to get involved in hockey analytics, but what do we do? What do we need? Where do we get the data? What do we do with the data once we have it?’” he said.

Vollman still has to point out to hockey executives that analytics departments, if they’re being used correctly, aren’t simply in the business of crunching the so-called advanced stats with which they’ve become synonymous in some circles. It’s not about ranking players via Corsi. It’s about using intellect and research and industriousness to find edges in a salary-capped league.

“Analytics serve best as a sober second thought to challenge or confirm your traditional opinion, and/or find things you’ve missed. That’s what it’s for,” Vollman said. “If you’ve come to a traditional opinion about a trade or a free-agent contract or a draft pick or a coaching strategy, the numbers can actually tell you if you’re right, if your assumptions are correct. (Analytics) can test your beliefs. Most of the time it will confirm them. The numbers usually line up with what we think. If they don’t, that’s where it gets interesting.”

As Vollman pointed out, by way of example, if a research-based forecast from an analytics department could divert a team from investing in a single bad contract, it’d be worth millions.

“And if it can get you one good sixth-round pick — a pick that otherwise doesn’t usually give you an NHLer but turns out to be a useful third liner or something — that’s also worth millions,” Vollman said.

Such observations are givens in, say, baseball or basketball. And yet, the buy-in from hockey’s overseers has been relatively limited. Why? Maybe it’s because the NHL is the rare major North American league whose teams are still largely run by ex-players.

“I imagine the former hockey players say, ‘I didn’t need it. So why do today’s players need it?’ … This is the way it’s always been done. There’s never been a problem,’ ” Vollman said. “I’m speculating. But I’m guessing that’s the answer they would give you.”

Maybe, in a league ruled by a commissioner whose biggest against-the-grain innovation has been concussion denial, progress isn’t considered mandatory. Or maybe we’re witnessing collusion. NHL GMs: Mostly united in their aversion to offer sheets and math geeks.

“It’s hard for me to imagine having to persuade a business, any business, worth hundreds of millions of dollars that they need to invest in business analytics,” Vollman said. “I wouldn’t have to do that in banking or pharmaceuticals or energy or any other field … But in hockey, it’s a weird business. I have to convince many organizations that they should be investing in that. And not only that they should be, but how to do it.”

The Maple Leafs, Vollman noted, stand as wealthy outliers among the unenlightened. They’ve invested heavily in sports science, and in coaching, and in their minor-league system. And they’ve invested in analytics — or, as the Leafs have dubbed the operation, “research and development.”

“They’ve got a whole team of five or six people. Some of them are programmers, some of them are analysts, some of them are statisticians building models,” Vollman said. “Whereas other teams are hiring one grad student, or a blogger, and they’re giving them about half what the going rate is in other fields, in terms of salary. That’s not even putting your toe in the pool … I think the proper investment is much, much, much, much larger. I even think Toronto could invest more. I’m not sure exactly how much an analytics staff is worth. But it’s much larger than Toronto’s investment. I’d say it’s worth eight figures.”

Eight figures or not, 15 years after Moneyball’s release, you’d think more NHL franchises would be diving deeper into what’s become a standard practice elsewhere in the sports space. Vollman, in his book, strikes a hopeful note that change will come, eventually. Near the end of Stat Shot, he envisions a world where NHL teams scout universities for promising mathematical minds in the same way they scout the CHL for centremen.

“They’ll be armed with big contracts, looking for the best and brightest (math and statistics) graduates,” writes Vollman.

Not that recruiting better math-letes will make a Stanley Cup parade a certainty, but here’s a guarantee: Teams that don’t relentlessly look for an advantage in the numbers won’t find one. Competing in a league of Luddites, Dubas ought to take Vollman’s advice and double down in the search.