When will hockey-analytics arrive in the Swiss League

Switzerland was long enough a complete desert of reliable hockey-stats. However, the arrival of SAP will help to drop this 3rd-world-image, at least I do hope so.

But not only according to NHL-writer Arik Parnass the real milestone of professional hockey-analyses is not professional stats, it’s the analytics. Hockey-analytics did arrive in the NHL just a couple of years ago. Now more and more franchises are jumping on to this bandwagon and add analytical brains to their staff. A revolution is underway. But let’s put it into context: Relatively speaking, we are still talking about baby steps and in Switzerland I’m not even sure whether hockey-analytics and our pro-hockey-teams even had already just “sex” together, not to talk about already producing a baby…;-). Means: A similar scenario is not yet on the Swiss horizon although I would warmly welcome it because it’s definitely time to challenge some still very popular but completely wrong bar-room-hockey-rhetoric.

In the NHL several teams already hired analytical specialists, highlighted maybe by the appointing of Kyle Dubas as assistant GM to the Toronto Maple Leafs. One of the most popular pioneers in the world of sport-analytics is legendary Oakland A’s GM Billy Bean, known from the famous book/movie “Moneyball”. Baseball is much more static than hockey. That’s why there were and there are still more doubters in terms of adapting such analytics to hockey. But I’m convinced that also in hockey, analytics will lead to the art of winning an unfair game. The unfair game of low budget teams vs rich teams. Hockey-people in average are quite conservative and coupled this with the traditional conservative mentality in Switzerland I would bet that hockey-analytics will arrive in the home of Heidi, chocolate and banking very late. I would be more than happy if the reality will proof me wrong.

The first step to welcome analytics is to understand them but don’t worry, hockey analytics is not rocket-science: First of all there is a crucial difference between stats and analytics. A statistic is simply a piece of data but real analysts look for reproducible patterns in large examples what will teach us important lessons about the game. Hockey-analytics will explain why certain stats are important for predicting the outcome of a season and what stats are more or less meaningless. E.g. if a team has more hits than the opponent this doesn’t mean something positive but rather negative because you can throw hits just if you don’t have the puck, means you just can win in the hits-category if the other team is dominating the puck-possession-game. Maybe the most difficult part in understanding analytics is to recognize the aspect of variance, to recognize that outcomes are not evenly distributed. Even the best goal-scorers have droughts but we have the tendency to explain every scoring-drought with this or that. Our mind is programmed to read patterns even when none exist. According to Nobel Prize-winning Daniel Kahneman, we understand sentences by trying to make them true. By the way: Kahneman’s book “Thinking, fast and slow” is one of my real personal favorites, I highly recommend it to everyone who has to take important decisions in whatever business! Hockey is a fast game of very small margins. Even across samples as large as two seasons, bounces can go one team’s way more than another’s. Variance is difficult to catch with the naked eye. Hockey-purists will always tell that watching the game live with your own eyes tells much more than just brain-forcing about spreadsheets and numbers. They completely forget that huge amounts of hockey-analyses have been recorded by watching game film repeatedly.

Even as an experienced scout I tell you it’s naive to trust your own eyes more than advanced stats. Our eyes are not sufficient enough for analyzing a fast-moving game like hockey. In addition analytical approach did “find” most important stats as “Corsi” and the importance of “controlled-zone entries”. Hockey-analytics will  help to convince the old school bench bosses that carrying the puck into the zone is significantly more successful than dump-and-chase. But please also be aware of the fact that judging analytics on the short-term results of recent converts is a slap in the face to the analytic process itself. However, a team can win without analytics, but the additional information will definitely provide a greater chance at success. So, when will hockey-analytics arrive in our Swiss League?

Last but not least: Maybe I’m completely out and professional hockey-analytics is already common in the Swiss pro hockey board rooms. In this case I would still wonder why nobody is talking about, wonder why nobody is spreading the knowledge, the findings. I think the mentality of hiding things should be gone in Switzerland. Let’s change to open up our minds and hearts, let’s exchange our knowledge to the good of our sport we love, the game of hockey! I remember the quote of a smart Swedish hockey-person: „We do exchange our findings, our analyses, our knowledge from team to team because in Sweden we did realise that in the big picture not the other teams are our competitors, our competitors are other sports like soccer, e.g.“ So let’s come together to further improve the best sport in the world: let’s improve our ice-hockey, let’s welcome some high-end analytical brains to our hockey-family, to the Swiss hockey-family!

Thomas Roost, 14^th July 2015                                           Hockey-analyticsSUIJuly15.docx