An interesting sub-plot of the recent public analytics buy-in by NHL teams has revolved around the following series of questions: what about the players? what do they gain from analytics? isn’t it more for GMs constructing their roster and trying to take advantage of market inefficiencies and coaches trying to develop and put to practice on-ice systems? won’t players get confused and/or take the wrong lesson from an education in analytics?
This line of thought, especially in Oilers’ circles, stems from a pair of player interviews.
Back in March, Ryan Rishaug of TSN sat down with Taylor Hall and had a chat about analytics [because tsn.ca is a hateful mess of an online resource, this video, which should be found here, is no longer available. Fortunately, this tumbler post transcribed the crucial bits]. Here’s what Hall had to say,
The thing for a hockey player, if you’re an advanced stat guy and you’re describing them to a hockey player, you have to have some kind of end point, what does he have to do better to get this stat better. That’s the thing that I’m lost on, with Corsi and Fenwick and all this stuff, how do you improve a player, what do you tell him?… I know we have an advanced stat guy on our team… I’ve asked him, ‘So why is my Corsi not as good [this season]?’, and he didn’t really have an answer for me.
We often hear analytics referred to as a “tool.” And, here I think you can see how players approach the matter. If they are listening and invested in the conversation (like Hall is here with his “advanced stat guy”), they want to get a clear idea of how to the tool works and how to use it to get better. It’s clear in Hall’s case here, he didn’t get much more than noise from his analytics guys.
As it happens, Hall’s buddy, Jordan Eberle, recently offered his thoughts on the same matter:
[Question] The Oilers hired Tyler Dellow, a very well-known blogger and analytics guy. Dallas Eakins seem very open to using this as a tool. I’m wondering how much of that filters down to the players in terms of things you are told and things that might come from that universe that might affect some of the details of your game. [Eberle] Well, even last year we were on top of it. We were getting chance sheets after games to see, you know, when you were on the ice how much was produced and how much was produced against you. So, obviously it’s a big part of the game now. If you look at the top teams that win every year, I believe their Corsi is over 52 or whatever it is. So, it’s starting to creep into the game. There’s obviously a lot of positivity and a lot of use for it. But, I think if you start thinking on the ice, you know, you’re shooting the puck and you’re thinking your Corsi is going up, I think that is where you have issues. But, there is definitely a lot of tools after the game you can use it for.
Here we get another wrinkle in the player’s perspective. Not only could analytics simply confuse a player with contextless noise, it might also do harm to a player’s game. If a player is told his Corsi is poor and that this is a problem, he may well interpret this message in the way Eberle suggests above:
I think if you start thinking on the ice, you know, you’re shooting the puck and you’re thinking your Corsi is going up, I think that is where you have issues.
There are a couple of issues here.
1) Players (and their agents) are savvy enough to recognize there is a direct correlation between their stats (traditional boxcars) and both their playing opportunities (linemates, assignments, power-play, etc) and their take home pay. If “advanced stats” continue to become mainstream (say, in contract negotiations and arbitration hearings), it does seem possible some players will mis-interpret the information and seek to run-up the score in shot differential.
2) Just as with traditional boxcars, in an ideal situation you don’t want a player thinking about abstractions on the ice, i.e., you don’t want them “thinking” at all, let alone about trying to mentally calculate shot metrics on the fly. Not only would such mental effort pull a player out of the “team game” (through a concern for one’s own stats sheets), but it would simply pull a player out of the immediacy of the game itself.
Ideally, a player will internalize the situation-dependent systems put in place by his coaching staff. And, ideally those systems will be informed by mutually reinforcing data points (shot metrics, zone entries/exits, match-ups, zone starts, etc.). However, the intricacies of how and why such-and-such a strategy (and the complex thought that subtends it) is put in place is largely inessential information for the practitioners in the immediacy of the game.
Let me clarify with an example ripped from Heidegger’s Being and Time (§§15-16). Heidegger makes a distinction between the “handiness” of practical behavior related to tools, like a hammer, and a “theoretical” understanding of those tools and associated behaviors. The up-shot is that a tool, like a hammer, loses its handiness when looked at theoretically. In the midst of hammering, one isn’t thinking about the hammer, the nail, the house you are building, the family you are trying to shelter, etc. In fact, thinking about all those things is likely to distract you from the work of hammering at hand. It is only when the tool becomes conspicuous, like when it is broken, that the broader world of the tool (its associations and ultimately its purpose in caring for the self) appear as something to think about.
In hockey, the idea is roughly the same. The moment a player steps out of the actual, immediate process of playing the game and views it theoretically, he is bound to perform poorly.
Clarifying the Arguments
1. The Learning Process
Recently, Jonathan Willis picked up on Eberle’s quote and added some insight he received on the matter from a hockey coach,
Talking informally to a high-level coach this summer, he mentioned that while he thought stats had an important place in the game, he didn’t think they were all that valuable to players and that it was up to the coaches to draw the right conclusions and distill them to their charges. Eberle’s comment about Corsi (“I think if you start thinking on the ice, you’re shooting the puck and you think your Corsi’s going up that’s where you have issues”) reinforces for me that raw numbers aren’t necessarily going to help a player with his game.
I think this is basically right. A post-game, contextless spreadsheet of numbers isn’t going to help a player much. At best, such a sheet would be a matter of passing interest on its way to padding the recycling bin. At worst, such a sheet would encourage bad habits (abandoning systems-play in order to rack up numbers) or over-thinking in on-ice situations.
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