95% of cap nerds and people who spend too much time online thinking about stats and cap space quit right before striking it big in a front office position šÆšÆ
I have a friend who used to be like that, but for soccer. Back in the day we knew near everything about the teams and players in Europe. He would always say watch out for player x, or y, or z. And sure enough, they would go on to blow up a few years later. Up to this day, he still knows relatively much more than I do with players. Other friends that donāt know him think heās dumb as rocks when you meet him, which to be fair, he sometimes can be. But with this itās insane.
I really think that it would do well if they marketed it correctly. Plus so much of it was just borrowed from the FM code, it really wouldn't take them all that much time to get it back up and running lol
It was decently popular at one time. As I understood it though it was mainly one guy working on it as a passion project and the rest of the company kind of has it's hands full with FM.
Half ironically - how can I spin my entry level data skills into the Rangers GM role? I have a spreadsheet with the rangers cap sheet, rangers are SOL without Capfriendly. HIRE ME!!!
went to check on this and it turns out JFresh did an entire writeup about [Chayka's attempts to Moneyball the Coyotes](https://jfresh.substack.com/p/john-chaykas-reverse-moneyball). basically it looks like he tried, but his only real successes were Chychrun, Hjalmarsson, and goaltending
To be in higher level manager positions only a tiny part of your job is knowing what to do.
To be successful you need a whole network of qualified people that you trust and trust you that help you make the right decisions and handle the operations.
He was too young and had a shitty network that knew nothing about hockey. Then the hockey people who would work with him were outcasts for one reason or another that became sycophant yes-men.
There is a reason the same coaches and GM's get passed around, it's because they have built a good hockey, operations and analytics network.
Sir, this is a [\(John Chayka franchised\) Wendy's.](https://jkcrestaurants.com/about/)
I'm just glad he found his level as a Frosty merchant instead of an NHL GM.
I mean it was pretty plain, he needed double hip surgery... for the second time... by age 25
He was producing initially when he got back with the Oilers but after he went on LTIR and came back he just couldn't, and then his analytics were getting worse by the end because he was putting himself out of position to try to score because he wasn't scoring.
He was PPG for like 50 games after coming back to the Oilers, but then his hips caught up with him.
The Oilers lost 2 major Scandinavian talents on cost-controlled contracts (one of which would've also prevented the monster Nurse contract) to arthritis within McDavid's time here. The core would also be younger too so the window would last longer. It's just bad luck
Bruh what the hell i built a model for my econometrics class last year to predict new contract value, whereās my front office NHL job?
For those curious the linear regression formula was
AAV = averageTimeOnIce(in milliseconds)*$4.43 + SigningAge*-$94505 + Goals*$53742 + Assists*$58959 + GamesPlayed*-$52892 + $4426929.
Granted this value was skewed by only using publicly available data, and we only measured the top 250 contracts signed since 2016, and were pretty sure games played got skewed by shortened seasons, and our RSquared was only 0.5366, so our model was for sure incomplete, but damnit whereās my front office NHL job?
Regardless it predicted Pastrnak would sign at $10,619,326 a week before he signed at $11.25.
Using the top 250 really messed this up since it would predict a guy with 0 of everything would get around $4.4M.
But for a real life dataset the R-Squared is decent. You should use adjusted R-squared though.
Ah yes, only consider offensive stats in contract negotiations. Hits, blocked shots, faceoffs, giveaways, takeaways... to hell with all those useless stats
I haven't run the numbers, but it seems unlikely that you'd be able to get close with players like Carlo, Slavin, or perennially injured Stone, where they're pretty statistically mediocre by those measures but bring a lot of value on the defensive side
Super good. The story of an unconventional inner city math teacher (John Moneyball) teaching kids how to stay out of gangs and have a better life as professional baseball players through the magic of statistics.
It works well in baseball because itās much more predictable. Hockey is more random and you canāt just apply a formula to automatically give you success.
It works the same in both tbh. Just get superstar players. Every year hockey analysts show you need stars, baseball is the same.
https://x.com/ByronMBader/status/1668808945656537089?s=19
The Moneyball A's had Tejada, Chavez, Hudson, Mulder, Zito, and Koch.
Good players = good team. But this guys numbers are a bit questionable. Doesnāt define what a ātrue starā is. Also uses 11 years as a break point. Why 11? Why not 10 or 15 or since the lockout? Because his numbers start to tell a different story after 11. Also how many teams have tons of star power and donāt make it to the SCF.
I'm sure he defines it somewhere, but it's just a quick tweet to show. The athletic does something similar in the form of a checklist. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5303204/2024/02/28/stanley-cup-contender-checklist-western-conference?source=user-shared-article
I had to explain this while watching with my wife (one of our favorite shared movies). I'm like "see that black dude with the Latin name? Yeah he was the MVP that year. Oh and those guys? They were all in contention for the best pitcher in the league."
There is a lot money, though. Or at least a lot of talking about how there isn't money.
And in fairness, there isn't a lot of baseball gameplay, but they often have Jonah Hill playing with _a_ baseball on screen so you don't forget what the movie you're watching is about.Ā
I haven't seen the movie but the book it's based on is fascinating. I do not care one single iota about baseball in general but the math and science that the book goes into is a really interesting read if you're into that sort of thing.
Thereās a scene in margin call where the main character is talking to the directors about the financial model which says theyāre fucked. They ask his background and he says something like āgot my undergrad in physics from MIT and then got my PHD and wrote my thesis on rocket propulsion systems. Investment banking just pays better than nasa.ā
Part of the point of Moneyball is that it worked because nobody else was doing it. A scrappy no-budget team using data science to find undervalued players and run with the big dogs is a great story. But unsurprisingly, a decade later, the big dogs had all hired their own (more expensive) analytics departments and gotten just as good if not better at evaluating player value.
Of course a team can still benefit from some novel insight into how to evaluate players or what to prioritize. It's not a totally solved problem. But it's also not 2002 anymore, so the benefits are going to be way more marginal.
But one of the excellent initial messages that gets lost in the details is that if you continue to play/scout/coach/etc like the big dogs without their resources you will lose. When you're an underdog you need to innovate
The biggest challenge for moneyballing the NHL is that ice hockey does not operate on discrete events like baseball does, no matter how hard you try to quantify what is happening on the ice you're still only capturing a fraction of what's actually happening. This is almost the polar opposite in baseball, with every event being almost entirely quantifiable.
Any attempts to take hockey data and model it, results in wildly different outcomes based on the weight of the factors of the model.
Weāve seen the other part of Moneyball in the league already. Look at each teamās cap guy. Who gets the best value out of their cap management? Remember, the Aās were doing analytics tricks to find undervalued players they could get on the cheap.
My favorite Fantastic line is if you help the legion take Helios 1 you find him in fucking centurion armor and the first thing he says to you, after somehow tricking not just the NCR but the legion that he is vital to this station, is āwhen in Romeā
Ya I made a video about how to make FNV fuggin work and not crash... It had a significant bump in views post show lol
I usually always have the games active on my drive, but sadly that recent FO4 update bricked my save file (modded)... So I've started a vanilla run but the irony is vanilla ain't too stable either lol
Trevor Georgie, who is the president of the Saint John Sea dogs, and often seen as a potential NHL GM, used to be in charge of customer experience for Cadillac Fairview (a company that runs shopping malls) I used to sell him software lol.
Tulsky started off as a Flyers blogger.
For people who werenāt around for online hockey discourse in the late 00s-early 10s, itās hard to understate how much derision was directed towards the supposedly basement-dwelling analytics bloggers by prominent members of the hockey media, old school management types, and even lots of fans. The jist was āyou nerds donāt understand hockey and will never be more than bloggers seething in your parentsā basementā.
Tulsky was one of those bloggers. Now heās the GM of an NHL team (where heās worked for a decade already). I imagine if he wanted to, he could have kept a laundry list of receipts from prominent hockey personalities who were dead wrong about the career trajectory of him and other early analytics bloggers supposedly posting from their parentsā basements.
> I imagine if he wanted to, he could have kept a laundry list of receipts from prominent hockey personalities who were dead wrong about the career trajectory of him and other early analytics bloggers supposedly posting from their parentsā basements.
You're absolutely correct, but I think between his [26 patents](https://www.thescore.com/nhl/news/2848474) and [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=jsP1ZS8AAAAJ&hl=en) page, he's out of room for lists.
The key is trying to figure out who are real data analysts and who uses analytics to support their biases.
I worked in data analytics before taking a different role to stay closer to home. The amount of upper management that would be like, "well here's what's happening, can you make the data show that". No. I will analyze the data and the trends of the data, and the data will tell you if your hypothesis is right. If the data didn't support their initial idea they would dismiss it. If the data supported their biases then they would say, "look, I was right the whole time". I see the same with data analytics in Hockey (and other sports).
Iāve just accepted that if I want to keep making stupid money because I can model some numbers, then I need to accept that rigor will be tossed out the window if some VP decides the number we landed on is too big or too small.
>āThis rigorous and statistically accurate model says that the value of your new customers over the next 12M is $5ā
>āThat seems low, it seems more like $20ā
And look at that, 1 month later Iām presenting a slide deck saying how our hybrid modelling approach came up with about $15, but there are limitations blah blah blah.
Next year Iāll make over $200k š¤·š»āāļø
[āIām always making lists. In fact, thatās probably why Stephen Spielberg cast me as Oskar Schindler in Schindlerās List. I said, āStephen, I make lists all the timeā. And he said, āThatās exactly what Iām looking for.āā](https://youtu.be/yvVFvqd3lqA?si=hz4lYEOlpTwkmblP)
In my personal interactions with him through synagogue connections, he's been the nicest guy ever, helping out an aspiring data scientist (I was weighing getting an analytics masters with the goal of working on the Canes) who was basically a complete stranger. He definitely deserves all the success he's having now.
But also, sign Jarvis
Good for Eric T of Broadstreet hockey dot com.
I especially like the taunt of "watch the games, nerd" being thrown at people who were hand-tracking passing stats or similar. They probably watched more NHL games than anyone who wasn't paid full-time to watch the games.
I remember him from the comment section of BSH back in the day and always looked forward to reading his posts. Cannot believe the trajectory his career has had.
Some of those bloggers are actually working real jobs now. Another good example is Lowetide who used to post on the Oilers HF boards for years and is now a professional hockey writer. It seems silly but nowadays the career path from fan to professional in the sports business world is a real one.
Reminds me of how mainstream baseball folks went wild on Moneyball book.
The pitchforks came out for Billy Beane. Many even thinking he wrote the book.
If itās true that other GMs around the league gave Dubas a hard time when he first showed up because heās a āyoung nerd with glassesā, I canāt wait to see how they react to Mr. Scientist
Heās already been with them a long time and chances are heās already had a lot of interactions with them. Heās going to be good!
There were rumors about Philly trying to get him before Briere since heās from the area but I donāt think that was ever going to happen. And Briere has been a breath of fresh air.
The ironic thing is that Dubas is a lot closer to the "hockey man" archetype than he is to the "analytics nerd" archetype.
He may be young and embrace data and analytics more so than your average GM, but he grew up as a rink rat with SSM in the OHL, starting as a scout with them when he was a teenager.
The Detroit Lions hired Matt Patricia as head coach a few years back, and he has a degree in aeronautical engineering. He struggled, got fired, and has struggled since, which makes me wary of the "smart guy" trope.
That said, I think a cerebral person would fit better as a GM than coach, and Dr. Manager does have a nice ring to it.
I still remember the summer of 2014 when Eric Tulsky and others started to get snapped up by NHL teams.
It was a bittersweet victory for the public hockey analytics movement. Great that they were being recognized and going to get paid for their tremendous work and a tacit admission by the NHL that analytics had merit.
But sad because some of those guys and gals were really helping average fans to understand the game within the game and exploding myths about how certain traditional stats (+/-) didn't tell us that much while things like High danger scoring chances or goals saved above expected did tell us a lot. But all those free sites would slowly become dark and proprietary data.
Also the chip tracking data wasn't released to the public in a useful format. NHL Edge is more of a toy than anything to build a model on. I don't think it's available in the API either.
The Hurricanes posted an analytics job last year that had a lot of knowledge prereqs, but not much to do with hockey itself. Theyāre looking for skillsets.
Thatās funny, because that posting came up in conversation with a friend in a doctoral program adjacent to that field, when he was lamenting being able to find a job. āWell, the Canes are hiringā¦.ā
that's not super surprising. You're not looking for a subject matter expert, you are the subject matter expert. You're looking for a someone to harvest, organize, and analyze the data you care about.
from wikipedia: he holds 26 patents! and a phD from Berkeley.
Tulsky has a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry and physics from Harvard University. After completing his PhD in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, he worked for two years in postdoctoral study at the Naval Research Laboratory. He then worked in nanotechnology for ten years, including at Silicon Valley companies Life Technologies and QuantumScape. He holds 26 US patents as of 2024.
For anyone interested, [this podcast episode from last year](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/expected-by-whom-an-analytics-eye-test-hockey-podcast/id1682402391?i=1000615400481) is a great interview with Tulsky where he talks about his career, how he views analytics, etc.
Makes me think of Jerry Buss. He had a science PhD (chemistry IIRC) before taking over the Lakers. Not sure if he ever held the GM title but definitely was involved in roster building, although they were pretty stacked when he bought them.
It really is the case, in many areas of society, that wordy, narrative driven men with suits are doing jobs that should be done by dudes with glasses who dont like talking to other human beings
Every other GMās Bio:
## John "Knuckles" McCallister
### General Manager, Toronto Maple Leafs
**Summary**
A true warrior of the ice, John "Knuckles" McCallister is a seasoned hockey executive with over 25 years of experience in the NHL trenches. A former enforcer known for dropping the mitts and playing the game with sandpaper, he's a respected leader with a keen eye for talent and a deep understanding of the game's nuances. Committed to building cup-contending teams and fostering a positive, hard-hat mentality.
**Experience**
**Toronto Maple Leafs** - General Manager (2019 - Present)
- Fostered a winning culture, emphasizing hard work, accountability, and a team-first, lunch pail mentality.
**Boston Bruins** - Assistant General Manager (2014 - 2019)
- Contributed to roster management decisions, helping shape the team's identity and direction, building a hard-nosed, blue-collar squad.
**NHL Career** (1992 - 2010)
- Played 18 seasons as a rugged enforcer, accumulating over 2,500 penalty minutes, a true heavyweight in the pugilistic arts.
- Known for his physical presence, leadership, and unwavering commitment to his teammates, always having their backs.
- Respected throughout the league for playing the game the right way, with honor and integrity, a true student of the game's code
(Written by AI, naturally)
Itās like that scene at the beginning of Moneyball with all the old-timer scouts saying āProspect is good, big kid, nice face, strong arms, looks like a real ballplayerā
At higher levels isnāt inorganic just a ton of math?
Iāve long since blocked out my 200 level Chem courses from my memory and my life is better for it lol
This reminds me of Alexandra Mandrycky, Assistant GM of the Kraken. I knew her at Georgia Tech and sheās crazy smart, even by Tech standards. She worked at Goldman Sachs out of college and wrote a hockey blog, war-on-ice, in her spare time. The blog got noticed and the Wild hired her to build their analytics. Just a few years later, sheās an assistant GM
Iāve been following Tulskyās career for over a decade now since he was very close with the analytics writers/guys from Philly (Charlie OāConnor and the likes). Couldnāt be happier for him, he was always revered in the analytics circles even before he got his first job with the Canes.
I mean, I get it.. I'm definitely using the skills I learned for analyzing virology data to play around the NHL API for fun so this path seems totally reasonable to me lol
Not sure if I'm remembering this correctly but wasn't he that guy who had an advanced stats website that everyone used and then the hurricanes picked him up and he had to shut it down and we were all bummed
He was mainly a blogger. You might be thinking of the war on ice people. Alex Mandrycky, Andrew Thomas, and Sam Ventura who all work in higher up positions at NHL or MLB teams now. There have been a lot of talented people poached out of the public analytics community though.
I like all this. Youāve got a guy whoās obviously extremely intelligent doing a job heās passionate about. If his people skills match his technical skills this could work out really well. Itāll be very interesting to follow.
Funny that despite not being a hockey lifer he'd still be the best gm in the league, but unfortunately just purely interim
We likely won't see a fully analytical hm until 2030ish
Looking forward to it greatly
95% of cap nerds and people who spend too much time online thinking about stats and cap space quit right before striking it big in a front office position šÆšÆ
I just need to submit my NHL GM Mode saves and they can see firsthand what I bring to the table
The next wunderkind GM is not found in the OHL or in sports management schools but in the dumbest HFboards and CF armchair GM proposal trenches.
I have a friend who used to be like that, but for soccer. Back in the day we knew near everything about the teams and players in Europe. He would always say watch out for player x, or y, or z. And sure enough, they would go on to blow up a few years later. Up to this day, he still knows relatively much more than I do with players. Other friends that donāt know him think heās dumb as rocks when you meet him, which to be fair, he sometimes can be. But with this itās insane.
Real data nerds are playing Eastside hockey manager, sorry man
God I wish that game would get an update.
I really think that it would do well if they marketed it correctly. Plus so much of it was just borrowed from the FM code, it really wouldn't take them all that much time to get it back up and running lol
It was decently popular at one time. As I understood it though it was mainly one guy working on it as a passion project and the rest of the company kind of has it's hands full with FM.
"What makes you qualified for this role?" "Check out this graph of my comment karma on /r/hockey"
Any upward trend would be a major red flag. Flat or downward, please.
Half ironically - how can I spin my entry level data skills into the Rangers GM role? I have a spreadsheet with the rangers cap sheet, rangers are SOL without Capfriendly. HIRE ME!!!
You miss 100% of the stats you don't crunch.
Bro is gonna be the NHL version of Moneyball Prepare for a top line of Puljujarvi Kotkaniemi Kakko to feed families
>NHL version of Moneyball Thought Chayka was supposed to be that
Chayka was such a scam.
He really was. he was pure dog shit
Did he even do anything that approached āMoneyballingā? My memory is that he was a dime a dozen so-so standard GM.
I think it was just hype because he was one of the first GMs to really embrace advanced analytics
And he was one of the youngest GMs ever, certainly the youngest at the time, right? Wasn't he like, 27? Very big underdog vibes.Ā
26 at the time he was hired, according to wikipedia
Did he ever USE them though? Sign cheap a āhiddenā gem or draft a player cause their analytics showed theyāre undervalued?
went to check on this and it turns out JFresh did an entire writeup about [Chayka's attempts to Moneyball the Coyotes](https://jfresh.substack.com/p/john-chaykas-reverse-moneyball). basically it looks like he tried, but his only real successes were Chychrun, Hjalmarsson, and goaltending
Thanks for the link.
I thought that was the Senators, or was Bruce Cassidy wrong?
To be in higher level manager positions only a tiny part of your job is knowing what to do. To be successful you need a whole network of qualified people that you trust and trust you that help you make the right decisions and handle the operations. He was too young and had a shitty network that knew nothing about hockey. Then the hockey people who would work with him were outcasts for one reason or another that became sycophant yes-men. There is a reason the same coaches and GM's get passed around, it's because they have built a good hockey, operations and analytics network.
Good point.
Which sibling
They legitimately hired the wrong one, Meghan is a genius
Sir, this is a [\(John Chayka franchised\) Wendy's.](https://jkcrestaurants.com/about/) I'm just glad he found his level as a Frosty merchant instead of an NHL GM.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I mean it was pretty plain, he needed double hip surgery... for the second time... by age 25 He was producing initially when he got back with the Oilers but after he went on LTIR and came back he just couldn't, and then his analytics were getting worse by the end because he was putting himself out of position to try to score because he wasn't scoring. He was PPG for like 50 games after coming back to the Oilers, but then his hips caught up with him. The Oilers lost 2 major Scandinavian talents on cost-controlled contracts (one of which would've also prevented the monster Nurse contract) to arthritis within McDavid's time here. The core would also be younger too so the window would last longer. It's just bad luck
Not enough pizza.
He needs a pool party
A pool party would at least let him be in the water and take all the pressure off his hips. The man should pursue a water polo career.
Bruh what the hell i built a model for my econometrics class last year to predict new contract value, whereās my front office NHL job? For those curious the linear regression formula was AAV = averageTimeOnIce(in milliseconds)*$4.43 + SigningAge*-$94505 + Goals*$53742 + Assists*$58959 + GamesPlayed*-$52892 + $4426929. Granted this value was skewed by only using publicly available data, and we only measured the top 250 contracts signed since 2016, and were pretty sure games played got skewed by shortened seasons, and our RSquared was only 0.5366, so our model was for sure incomplete, but damnit whereās my front office NHL job? Regardless it predicted Pastrnak would sign at $10,619,326 a week before he signed at $11.25.
R-squared of .53 is pretty good tho
Should use adjusted R-squared tho
Using the top 250 really messed this up since it would predict a guy with 0 of everything would get around $4.4M. But for a real life dataset the R-Squared is decent. You should use adjusted R-squared though.
For sure, it was a decent first attempt for a metrics 1 class. Iād do it differently knowing what I know now
Ah yes, only consider offensive stats in contract negotiations. Hits, blocked shots, faceoffs, giveaways, takeaways... to hell with all those useless stats
They werenāt statistically significant
I haven't run the numbers, but it seems unlikely that you'd be able to get close with players like Carlo, Slavin, or perennially injured Stone, where they're pretty statistically mediocre by those measures but bring a lot of value on the defensive side
Maybe I should watch Moneyball so I can understand all the references to it Iāve seen in online sports circles in the past year
Itās a great movie and worth a watch in general. Unfortunate that John Fisher ruined the team.
It's a wonderful story about the heart-and-hustle Minnesota Twins triumphing in the postseason over the cold, calculating logic of the Oakland A's
[Barney Stinson approves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gB7SEhWRgM)
Fuck John Fisher, all my homies hate John Fisher
Super good. The story of an unconventional inner city math teacher (John Moneyball) teaching kids how to stay out of gangs and have a better life as professional baseball players through the magic of statistics.
This got a legit belly laugh out of me and was the shot of energy I needed this morning.
Past year? These references have been constant since the movie came out in 2011
Tell em Wash
It works well in baseball because itās much more predictable. Hockey is more random and you canāt just apply a formula to automatically give you success.
It works the same in both tbh. Just get superstar players. Every year hockey analysts show you need stars, baseball is the same. https://x.com/ByronMBader/status/1668808945656537089?s=19 The Moneyball A's had Tejada, Chavez, Hudson, Mulder, Zito, and Koch.
Good players = good team. But this guys numbers are a bit questionable. Doesnāt define what a ātrue starā is. Also uses 11 years as a break point. Why 11? Why not 10 or 15 or since the lockout? Because his numbers start to tell a different story after 11. Also how many teams have tons of star power and donāt make it to the SCF.
He defines "star" as career ppg > 0.7 for forwards or > 0.45 for defensemen IIRC.
I'm sure he defines it somewhere, but it's just a quick tweet to show. The athletic does something similar in the form of a checklist. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5303204/2024/02/28/stanley-cup-contender-checklist-western-conference?source=user-shared-article
They barely mention one of these players during the movie and it drives me insane.
I had to explain this while watching with my wife (one of our favorite shared movies). I'm like "see that black dude with the Latin name? Yeah he was the MVP that year. Oh and those guys? They were all in contention for the best pitcher in the league."
Because it doesn't fit Lewis' narrative
It's a really good watch and I can't stand watching a game of baseball
There is almost no actual baseball in Moneyball. It's fantastic.
The engine feels good, much slower than before. Amazing.
There is a lot money, though. Or at least a lot of talking about how there isn't money. And in fairness, there isn't a lot of baseball gameplay, but they often have Jonah Hill playing with _a_ baseball on screen so you don't forget what the movie you're watching is about.Ā
I haven't seen the movie but the book it's based on is fascinating. I do not care one single iota about baseball in general but the math and science that the book goes into is a really interesting read if you're into that sort of thing.
Thereās a scene in margin call where the main character is talking to the directors about the financial model which says theyāre fucked. They ask his background and he says something like āgot my undergrad in physics from MIT and then got my PHD and wrote my thesis on rocket propulsion systems. Investment banking just pays better than nasa.ā
I graduated with a Ph.D in Physics, and 11/13 in my department went straight into finance, just because they would pay you double than everyone else.Ā
Knocking at Jack Campbellās door, āI donāt want you in net, I want you on the left wing.ā
Feel like we've been promised the NHL version of money ball for 10 years now
Part of the point of Moneyball is that it worked because nobody else was doing it. A scrappy no-budget team using data science to find undervalued players and run with the big dogs is a great story. But unsurprisingly, a decade later, the big dogs had all hired their own (more expensive) analytics departments and gotten just as good if not better at evaluating player value. Of course a team can still benefit from some novel insight into how to evaluate players or what to prioritize. It's not a totally solved problem. But it's also not 2002 anymore, so the benefits are going to be way more marginal.
But one of the excellent initial messages that gets lost in the details is that if you continue to play/scout/coach/etc like the big dogs without their resources you will lose. When you're an underdog you need to innovate
The biggest challenge for moneyballing the NHL is that ice hockey does not operate on discrete events like baseball does, no matter how hard you try to quantify what is happening on the ice you're still only capturing a fraction of what's actually happening. This is almost the polar opposite in baseball, with every event being almost entirely quantifiable. Any attempts to take hockey data and model it, results in wildly different outcomes based on the weight of the factors of the model.
Happening in the second league in french soccer, well they're in the first league now
TFC!
Weāve seen the other part of Moneyball in the league already. Look at each teamās cap guy. Who gets the best value out of their cap management? Remember, the Aās were doing analytics tricks to find undervalued players they could get on the cheap.
LMAOOO
Was scrolling through the comments looking for someone to say exactly this
> Prepare for a top line of PuljujƤrvi Kotkaniemi Kakko subscribe
Omg I'd love that line
Makes me think, what is the hockey equivalent of "he gets on base"?
KKās the antithesis of moneyball. Ā
Kotkaniemi isnāt getting anywhere near a top line in the NHL version of moneyball. Heās the opposite of that.
I donāt get it, is this shade or something? Canes moved on from Puljujarvi pretty quickly, KK might get traded, Kakko is a rangerā¦
He was already calling the shots. That's why the last gm bolted.
āThey asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I have a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard.ā
My favorite Fantastic line is if you help the legion take Helios 1 you find him in fucking centurion armor and the first thing he says to you, after somehow tricking not just the NCR but the legion that he is vital to this station, is āwhen in Romeā
I've not done a legion playthrough and that's just plain amazing. Fantastic is the man.
FNVxNHL crossover was not the internet meta I expected to come across today. Got the whole Canes organization suckli-... no
Tons of people are replaying the games or just finished replaying them thanks to the show. Iām playing FNV and Fallout 2 right now
Ya I made a video about how to make FNV fuggin work and not crash... It had a significant bump in views post show lol I usually always have the games active on my drive, but sadly that recent FO4 update bricked my save file (modded)... So I've started a vanilla run but the irony is vanilla ain't too stable either lol
Why am I reading this in Mitch Hedbergās voice
I used to love Mitch Hedberg. I still do, but I used to, too
My love for Mitch Hedberg does not come with a receipt.
I canāt stand this motherfucker I reverse pickpocket a grenade onto him and watch him explode every play through
There's a chance that Tulsky promotes a former Redditor to be one of his AGMs too š
Michael Buble?
Trevor Georgie, who is the president of the Saint John Sea dogs, and often seen as a potential NHL GM, used to be in charge of customer experience for Cadillac Fairview (a company that runs shopping malls) I used to sell him software lol.
Tulsky started off as a Flyers blogger. For people who werenāt around for online hockey discourse in the late 00s-early 10s, itās hard to understate how much derision was directed towards the supposedly basement-dwelling analytics bloggers by prominent members of the hockey media, old school management types, and even lots of fans. The jist was āyou nerds donāt understand hockey and will never be more than bloggers seething in your parentsā basementā. Tulsky was one of those bloggers. Now heās the GM of an NHL team (where heās worked for a decade already). I imagine if he wanted to, he could have kept a laundry list of receipts from prominent hockey personalities who were dead wrong about the career trajectory of him and other early analytics bloggers supposedly posting from their parentsā basements.
> I imagine if he wanted to, he could have kept a laundry list of receipts from prominent hockey personalities who were dead wrong about the career trajectory of him and other early analytics bloggers supposedly posting from their parentsā basements. You're absolutely correct, but I think between his [26 patents](https://www.thescore.com/nhl/news/2848474) and [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=jsP1ZS8AAAAJ&hl=en) page, he's out of room for lists.
The key is trying to figure out who are real data analysts and who uses analytics to support their biases. I worked in data analytics before taking a different role to stay closer to home. The amount of upper management that would be like, "well here's what's happening, can you make the data show that". No. I will analyze the data and the trends of the data, and the data will tell you if your hypothesis is right. If the data didn't support their initial idea they would dismiss it. If the data supported their biases then they would say, "look, I was right the whole time". I see the same with data analytics in Hockey (and other sports).
Iāve just accepted that if I want to keep making stupid money because I can model some numbers, then I need to accept that rigor will be tossed out the window if some VP decides the number we landed on is too big or too small. >āThis rigorous and statistically accurate model says that the value of your new customers over the next 12M is $5ā >āThat seems low, it seems more like $20ā And look at that, 1 month later Iām presenting a slide deck saying how our hybrid modelling approach came up with about $15, but there are limitations blah blah blah. Next year Iāll make over $200k š¤·š»āāļø
[āIām always making lists. In fact, thatās probably why Stephen Spielberg cast me as Oskar Schindler in Schindlerās List. I said, āStephen, I make lists all the timeā. And he said, āThatās exactly what Iām looking for.āā](https://youtu.be/yvVFvqd3lqA?si=hz4lYEOlpTwkmblP)
ouf this guys orcid score has gotta be crazy
In my personal interactions with him through synagogue connections, he's been the nicest guy ever, helping out an aspiring data scientist (I was weighing getting an analytics masters with the goal of working on the Canes) who was basically a complete stranger. He definitely deserves all the success he's having now. But also, sign Jarvis
I've also met him a few times and can confirm, he's extremely nice.
> as a Flyers blogger Is that what he meant when he said he trained in "Inorganic Chemistry"?
we don't do words or numbers good
Remember him from BSH back in 2009-2010ish simply as āEric Tā
Good for Eric T of Broadstreet hockey dot com. I especially like the taunt of "watch the games, nerd" being thrown at people who were hand-tracking passing stats or similar. They probably watched more NHL games than anyone who wasn't paid full-time to watch the games.
I remember him from the comment section of BSH back in the day and always looked forward to reading his posts. Cannot believe the trajectory his career has had.
Some of those bloggers are actually working real jobs now. Another good example is Lowetide who used to post on the Oilers HF boards for years and is now a professional hockey writer. It seems silly but nowadays the career path from fan to professional in the sports business world is a real one.
Reminds me of how mainstream baseball folks went wild on Moneyball book. The pitchforks came out for Billy Beane. Many even thinking he wrote the book.
āI am capfriendlyā- Eric big dick Tulsky
If itās true that other GMs around the league gave Dubas a hard time when he first showed up because heās a āyoung nerd with glassesā, I canāt wait to see how they react to Mr. Scientist
> Mr. Scientist Excuse you, it's Dr. Scientist.
Mr. Dr. Scientist.
Dr. Mrs. Vandertramp
TƩlƩfranƧais! TƩlƩfrancais! Bonjour! AllƓ! Salut!
Reverend Doctor Mister, to you!
Mr. Manager Dr Scientist
Exactly
It's Strange.
Heās already been with them a long time and chances are heās already had a lot of interactions with them. Heās going to be good! There were rumors about Philly trying to get him before Briere since heās from the area but I donāt think that was ever going to happen. And Briere has been a breath of fresh air.
Tulsky is what Dubas tries to present himself as. I think the issue people had with Dubas is that he's a phony with a big mouthĀ
The ironic thing is that Dubas is a lot closer to the "hockey man" archetype than he is to the "analytics nerd" archetype. He may be young and embrace data and analytics more so than your average GM, but he grew up as a rink rat with SSM in the OHL, starting as a scout with them when he was a teenager.
The Detroit Lions hired Matt Patricia as head coach a few years back, and he has a degree in aeronautical engineering. He struggled, got fired, and has struggled since, which makes me wary of the "smart guy" trope. That said, I think a cerebral person would fit better as a GM than coach, and Dr. Manager does have a nice ring to it.
Matt Patricia struggled because he was a giant douchebag.
I still remember the summer of 2014 when Eric Tulsky and others started to get snapped up by NHL teams. It was a bittersweet victory for the public hockey analytics movement. Great that they were being recognized and going to get paid for their tremendous work and a tacit admission by the NHL that analytics had merit. But sad because some of those guys and gals were really helping average fans to understand the game within the game and exploding myths about how certain traditional stats (+/-) didn't tell us that much while things like High danger scoring chances or goals saved above expected did tell us a lot. But all those free sites would slowly become dark and proprietary data.
Also the chip tracking data wasn't released to the public in a useful format. NHL Edge is more of a toy than anything to build a model on. I don't think it's available in the API either.
The Hurricanes posted an analytics job last year that had a lot of knowledge prereqs, but not much to do with hockey itself. Theyāre looking for skillsets.
To be fair, having a person whoās agnostic to the game, but a wiz with the analytics could be a great counterbalance
We are going to A/B test our Twitter shitposting so much
Margaret Cunniff is the main data scientist on their team and has a phd in neuroscience. They definitely embrace academia and skillsets over there.
Thatās funny, because that posting came up in conversation with a friend in a doctoral program adjacent to that field, when he was lamenting being able to find a job. āWell, the Canes are hiringā¦.ā
that's not super surprising. You're not looking for a subject matter expert, you are the subject matter expert. You're looking for a someone to harvest, organize, and analyze the data you care about.
I gotta figure out how to do this cause I'm a scientist but NHL GM sounds a lot more fun
Hurricanes version of Moneyball incoming.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Puckmoney rolls off the tongue better. Reminds me of something else, but I canāt remember whatā¦
We can call it Puck University Money, or PuckU for short.
Well if there's anything that could will the Hurricanes to a Cup win it'd be Moneypuck
from wikipedia: he holds 26 patents! and a phD from Berkeley. Tulsky has a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry and physics from Harvard University. After completing his PhD in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, he worked for two years in postdoctoral study at the Naval Research Laboratory. He then worked in nanotechnology for ten years, including at Silicon Valley companies Life Technologies and QuantumScape. He holds 26 US patents as of 2024.
For anyone interested, [this podcast episode from last year](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/expected-by-whom-an-analytics-eye-test-hockey-podcast/id1682402391?i=1000615400481) is a great interview with Tulsky where he talks about his career, how he views analytics, etc.
This was really entertaining and helped me to understand his career even more. Thanks for recommending!
Makes me think of Jerry Buss. He had a science PhD (chemistry IIRC) before taking over the Lakers. Not sure if he ever held the GM title but definitely was involved in roster building, although they were pretty stacked when he bought them.
It really is the case, in many areas of society, that wordy, narrative driven men with suits are doing jobs that should be done by dudes with glasses who dont like talking to other human beings
many of these well-spoken guys basically social-engineered their way to the top
Every other GMās Bio: ## John "Knuckles" McCallister ### General Manager, Toronto Maple Leafs **Summary** A true warrior of the ice, John "Knuckles" McCallister is a seasoned hockey executive with over 25 years of experience in the NHL trenches. A former enforcer known for dropping the mitts and playing the game with sandpaper, he's a respected leader with a keen eye for talent and a deep understanding of the game's nuances. Committed to building cup-contending teams and fostering a positive, hard-hat mentality. **Experience** **Toronto Maple Leafs** - General Manager (2019 - Present) - Fostered a winning culture, emphasizing hard work, accountability, and a team-first, lunch pail mentality. **Boston Bruins** - Assistant General Manager (2014 - 2019) - Contributed to roster management decisions, helping shape the team's identity and direction, building a hard-nosed, blue-collar squad. **NHL Career** (1992 - 2010) - Played 18 seasons as a rugged enforcer, accumulating over 2,500 penalty minutes, a true heavyweight in the pugilistic arts. - Known for his physical presence, leadership, and unwavering commitment to his teammates, always having their backs. - Respected throughout the league for playing the game the right way, with honor and integrity, a true student of the game's code (Written by AI, naturally)
Thereās also the marginal NHL player/minor leaguer who also has a BA in business. See Don Waddell and his predecessor in Columbus.
Yeah, definitely that guy too
Itās like that scene at the beginning of Moneyball with all the old-timer scouts saying āProspect is good, big kid, nice face, strong arms, looks like a real ballplayerā
Has an ugly girlfriend though
ewwww inorganic chem
At higher levels isnāt inorganic just a ton of math? Iāve long since blocked out my 200 level Chem courses from my memory and my life is better for it lol
From Don Waddell to this guy - massive IQ upgrade
https://youtu.be/lYQSOrvDtyQ?feature=shared
This reminds me of Alexandra Mandrycky, Assistant GM of the Kraken. I knew her at Georgia Tech and sheās crazy smart, even by Tech standards. She worked at Goldman Sachs out of college and wrote a hockey blog, war-on-ice, in her spare time. The blog got noticed and the Wild hired her to build their analytics. Just a few years later, sheās an assistant GM
This dude is either way smarter than everyone else, or just really good at convincing everyone he's way smarter than everyone else.
Given the lab he graduated from, I'd say this guy is likely the real deal. Jeff Long don't fuck around.
Crazy how bombastically above curve some people are.
Just get Burns a cup before itās too late
The thing that ties it all together is a strong background in mathematics. Mathy thinkers are natural problem solvers
Iāve been following Tulskyās career for over a decade now since he was very close with the analytics writers/guys from Philly (Charlie OāConnor and the likes). Couldnāt be happier for him, he was always revered in the analytics circles even before he got his first job with the Canes.
Dude went to Harvard and did a PhD at Cal. Probably one of the only GMs to have a LinkedIn lol. https://www.linkedin.com/in/etulsky
Can this dude even skate?
Does it matter?
Ken Holland did not understand a thing about this letter.
I mean, I get it.. I'm definitely using the skills I learned for analyzing virology data to play around the NHL API for fun so this path seems totally reasonable to me lol
Might be helpful if Marchand starts licking people again.
Switched from chemistry to data science, eh? I considered doing that for my bachelors.
Well if you try doing it after you finish your chem degree it looks like youāll be hired as an NHL GM.
I have the exact opposite career trajectory starting in an NHL front office and now in data science decades later.
Not sure if I'm remembering this correctly but wasn't he that guy who had an advanced stats website that everyone used and then the hurricanes picked him up and he had to shut it down and we were all bummed
He was mainly a blogger. You might be thinking of the war on ice people. Alex Mandrycky, Andrew Thomas, and Sam Ventura who all work in higher up positions at NHL or MLB teams now. There have been a lot of talented people poached out of the public analytics community though.
That sounds pretty familiar, yeah
Like myself, heās a former writer for Broad Street Hockey (which, yes, has become my new favourite fun fact)
Nerd
This is really inspiring as a data scientist
Going for the perfect chemistry
This dude is similar to Sig Mejdal, the assistant GM of the Orioles, whose rise to power is also buck wild
I like all this. Youāve got a guy whoās obviously extremely intelligent doing a job heās passionate about. If his people skills match his technical skills this could work out really well. Itāll be very interesting to follow.
This belongs on r/linkedinlunatics
Eric Tulsky is doing side quests to grind XP
Dude should have study organic chemistry. I bet he regrets that now! Look out locker room! /s
Funny that despite not being a hockey lifer he'd still be the best gm in the league, but unfortunately just purely interim We likely won't see a fully analytical hm until 2030ish Looking forward to it greatly
Awfully confident in that statement
The owner there is pretty much the GM I think.
It's been GM by committee since Dundon bought the team.
As a relatively new data scientist (3 years in), this guy has my dream job. Iām jealous, but big congrats to him.
Does the data show that Freddie Andersen sucks in big games?
It's all about who you know, not what you know.
Dude should probably run some statistical analysis on why the Canes fall flat on their face in the playoffs year after year.
Moneyball ass hire
I give it three years and the Carolina Hurricanes are going to be crashing down to the cellar of the NHL.