On its home page, nhl.com is best known for its belaboured puns.
A strong game from Vladimir Tarasenko is “Vlad to the Bone”.
A Radim Vrbata highlight spawns “Hey Bata Bata”.
And then there was “Baby Got Quack”, which I still have no idea what that meant.
But last week the league set aside the shave-and-a-haircut routine and did something smart: it added advanced stats to its website.
Suddenly, possession indicators like Corsi and Fenwick are part of the league’s vocabulary. And so are even finer stats such as the percentage of shots that are taken by a given team when the game is close (the leader: Los Angeles, at 54.3 per cent). Regarding that last stat, the league said leads in shot percentage in close games was a “significant indicator of which teams make the Stanley Cup play-offs”.
That is significant: it is the old guard admitting that the new guard has a point. It has the feel of a tipping point.
And about time.
The hockey world has lagged far behind baseball in the use of statistics. But it was fans – smart fans – who shook the NHL awake. Arik Parnass, in an outstanding essay on the league's website, specifies a surprising spawning ground: "the comments section of blogs like Irreverent Oiler Fans".
Those conversations led to websites like war-on-ice.com and extraskater.com, and now any self-respecting Canadian sports website has a hockey analytics writer. Teams, including even dimwitted Toronto, have begun to hire analytics experts, sometimes plucking them from the pool of analytics bloggers.
As nhl.com might say, “Stat’s all, folks!”
rmckenzie@thenational.ae
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