On Tuesday, analytics staffers representing nearly all 32 NHL teams traveled to Ball Arena for the first ever Hockey Analytics League Operations (HALO) Meetings & Conference. The event, hosted by the Colorado Avalanche, brought people from across the NHL to hear from panelists, including Avalanche General Manager Chris MacFarland and Head Coach Jared Bednar, about the use of analytics in hockey and its growth in the sport.
Arik Parnass, Avalanche Director of Analytics, is the one who spearheaded the conference with the idea of bringing analytics personnel from around the league together, since they don’t often travel. Parnass said that the decentralization of the NHL Draft—an event that would normally be a gathering place for analytics personnel—gave him the idea to create this conference.
“We should find a time and a place for us all to be together and be able to talk about issues that are relevant to all of us in our industry,” Parnass said. “Meet with data providers. Help foster the public and people who want to get involved and get jobs and help them out. So that was always on my mind.”
Parnass added that MacFarland gave him the go-ahead and encouraged the conference at the end of last summer.
With the Avalanche, Parnass said that analytics is one of the many lenses through which decisions are made, starting from the top.
“Chris and (Avalanche President of Hockey Operations) Joe (Sakic) are phenomenal at—they've been open-minded from the start and believing that [analytics are] an important part of decision-making,” Parnass said. “...They’re great about having this ability to blend all these opinions from different people in the organization together to come to the best possible decision.”
Parnass said the boom and exponential growth in analytics over the last decade or so has been unbelievable, adding that its growth in other sports has led to its acceptance in hockey.
“That type of acceptance also wouldn’t be possible without my phenomenal group,” Parnass said. “From Dawson [Sprigings] coming on board early on to the department we have today, they’ve each raised our ceiling and what we’ve been able to provide to different parts of the organization.”
One of the panelists at the conference was Mike Kelly, Director of Analytics & Insight at Sportlogiq and an analyst for NHL Network. Since entering the analytics space 10 years ago, Kelly said its grown immensely.
“There was still a lot to do with just simple shot metrics,” Kelly said. “Obviously, the private analytics companies that have come into the space have added a lot in terms of the granularity of data and micro stats. Tracking data that’s come in over the last number of years has grown it as well. So, just the sheer amount of information that the teams are able to access has grown hundredfold.”
Additionally, Kelly spoke about Bednar’s interview at the conference and had high praise for the way the Avs’ bench boss incorporates analytics and the team’s analytics department as a whole.
“I don’t know every coach in the league,” Kelly said. “I’ve certainly talked to many of them over the years [who] have a decent handle, to some degree, on incorporating this kind of stuff (analytics) and how some teams are doing it. There may be coaches who do it as well as Jared Bednar. I don’t know any that do it better than he does. And I think what he talked about messaging, and it’s not necessarily 28.3% of the time, x, y and z, it’s they’re third and this [stat] or we’re 27th at that. It’s very simple [and] data driven, but spoken in a language that the recipient, in this case the player, can understand. That’s the most effective way to do it at any level.
“And Arik Parnass is one of the brighter minds in the space. He’s been here for a long time. He’s got the trust of the coaching staff. He’s got the trust of the front office. And to see how seamlessly interwoven it all is is a credit to him and his group.”
Kelly said that the conference was incredible for the hockey analytics community and its the first of its kind at this scale.
“This is one of the most well-run conferences I’ve been to in a number of years,” Kelly said. “And I think it’s something that hopefully other cities around the league [and] other teams around the league will want to host. And hopefully the first of many to come.”
