Blackhawks confident they’re leaders in NHL’s analytics movement, but puck-tracking revolution looms

Al MacIsaac first heard of analytics approximately 4,500 miles away from his spacious United Center office.

Shortly before the Blackhawks’ 2009-10 season opener in Finland, MacIsaac sat down alongside Stan and Scotty Bowman to meet a stranger in Helsinki’s grand Hotel Kamp for a brief presentation.

The ensuing 30 minutes have since proven monumental to the course of the Blackhawks’ franchise. Today, analytics dominate MacIsaac’s day-to-day work as the Hawks’ hockey operations president.

“It started as a project that we were going to build on,” MacIsaac told the Sun-Times this week. “Now we have analytics for everything. ... It’s evolved from that first chance meeting in 2009 to something that we feel proud of and that our staff have come to embrace.”

Big commitment to shadowed world

The term ‘analytics’ itself is mentioned nowhere in MacIsaac’s job description, and it takes quite a bit of scrolling down the Hawks’ front office directory to find Andrew Contis, the lone listed member with it in his title.

But MacIsaac will disclose there’s a whole team of employees — “young people,” he calls them — who compose the Hawks’ analytics department, collecting and analyzing data and looking for new areas to explore.

“Our ideas can’t be cascading down from the senior guys like me and Stan,” MacIsaac said. “We want ideas cascading upwards, and that comes from guys like Andrew Contis and a number of others.”

So-called “advanced” statistics like Corsi (a fancy word for shot attempts) and zone start ratios have been in the public realm for years now, popularized by sites like Extra Skater, War on Ice and Corsica.

The analytics created and used behind most teams’ closed doors have advanced significantly beyond basic Corsi. Where each team stands in relation to each other, however, is a topic of much mystery and debate.

“Everybody is at a certain place right now,” MacIsaac said, “but they don’t know if they’re in front or they’re way behind.”

Impending revolution

Hockey analytics nonetheless remain in relative infancy compared to other North American sports, particularly baseball and basketball. (The Hawks are fully aware of that, and have actually met with MLB teams to plot a model for their path forward.)

No one is more familiar with that reality than Andrew Thomas, the founder of War on Ice and a former data analyst for both the Wild and various MLB teams. He’s convinced that the cause of the NHL’s late and still sluggish integration with analytics is logistical rather than cultural.

“What it comes down to is the puck is tiny and fast. No other sport has the constraints that hockey does,” Thomas said. “[Data is] just way more expensive to gather in hockey than it is in other sports.”

For years, the NHL has been exploring puck- and player-tracking software that would transform its analytics universe.

Such software’s implementation has been continuously delayed, though. An NHL spokesman confirmed Wednesday that tracking would not be in place at the start of the upcoming season, contrary to an announcement at the 2019 All-Star Game. Tellingly, MacIsaac admitted tracking is “not something that is on our minds right now.”

That’s frustrating for Thomas, who saw firsthand how drastically basketball analytics changed when the NBA instituted tracking in 2013.

“It’s going to open a lot of people’s eyes to what data can do,” he said. “It will tell us more about defense, because a lot of that is context — what situation did a defender have to defend against? The current stuff we have right now does not tell us a lot of context, other than who they were playing with.”

It will also accelerate the rate of analytics’ integration into hockey, especially in-game coaching, which remains a fairly untouched frontier.

Right now, most raw data is tabulated manually by scorers, who can’t match the exactness of a computer. Certain statistics like hits vary significantly from arena to arena, based on how each scorer defines what a hit is. Naturally, that undermines reliability and credibility, giving ammunition to the conservative hockey minds who decry the analytics revolution.

“It’s going to make people feel more comfortable with the data, because you can go and see where that data came from,” Thomas said. “It’s going to help people in the front office appreciate what’s happening with data more, without being able to pooh-pooh it.”

The aforementioned expensiveness of puck tracking continues to be a holdup, but the NHL has turned toward another concurrent sports revolution — gambling legalization — to foot the bill.

The league has already signed licensing deals with MGM Grand and other sportsbooks to help fund the software development. That growing financial backing is a promising indicator that tracking will, finally, arrive soon.

‘Create our own path’

Just a year after that 2009 Helsinki meeting — the stranger who gave the presentation, by the way, still works with the Hawks — the same group of Hawks executives met with an analytics company in Toronto.

“They gave their presentation, and we said, ‘Boy, that’s great. But you guys are so far behind where we already are,’” MacIsaac said. “In about 12 months, once we bought into that direction, we had made pretty good leaps and bounds. And it was because of the right people.”

The nine years since have followed the same overall upward trajectory, but with some bumps.

In 2015, ESPN The Magazine ranked the Hawks as the most analytics-friendly NHL franchise. But then in 2016, the Hawks gave the eight-year, $55 million contract to Brent Seabrook — who was already trending negatively, according to advanced statistics — that’s now considered unanimously the worst in the NHL. That decision brought some consternation upon Chicago from the analytics community.

“Any new technology is going to hurt the people that are in a system already, just by nature, because it’s the current one that got them where they are,” Thomas said. “But I will say...the Seabrook deal in particular made me wonder how much the Hawks are listening to [their analytics staff].”

Perhaps the reasoning can be traced to one particular maxim that MacIsaac tells his analysts, which comes across equally inspiring and concerning: “Don’t tell me what they’re bad at. Tell me what they’re good at, and we’ll build on the good.”

Or perhaps it was a mere misstep, one that retroactively emphasizes the importance of valuing data over emotion. MacIsaac and the Hawks sagely know that their analytics — as confident as they are in them — aren’t perfect, and that the crux of the industry is constant innovation.

“We don’t want to duplicate what others are doing,” he said. “We’re looking to create our own path. To do that, we still have to see what they’re doing, and say, ‘You know what, we can improve on that’ or ‘We can do better in these areas.’”

“If you’re currently in a situation where your analytics are where they are and you’re comfortable with that, you’re falling behind.”