MONTREAL— Mike Kelly’s voice was the first thing that popped out at me while delving into NHL.com’s new Edge section, which launched on Monday and finally provides player and puck tracking data to the public for the very first time in hockey’s history.
If you were to choose one person in the hockey world to explain the different metrics now available, you could do no better than to have it be someone who’s been at the forefront of the analytical shift we’ve seen in the sport over the past decade. Kelly started in business development at Sportlogiq eight years ago, he translated—and continues to translate—the data to the public through media like Sportsnet and NHL Network, and he serves as the company’s director of analytics and insights. So having him voice the league’s video explanations about speed bursts, shot speeds, shot locations, possession, zone time and distances traveled by a player made perfect sense.
Calling him up to talk about all of it did, too, because what Kelly has really mastered over all this time is putting all the data available to us into proper context.
As I discussed with him on Monday, this new stuff, while unique and illuminating, requires a great deal of context.
To start with, it’s important to note this is only Phase 1 of the NHL’s unveiling. In this one, you can’t yet isolate a specific game or go game by game to factor in the work-to-rest ratios that would affect performance in all categories over a bigger sample. You can compare players and teams, but only one-to-one in each category. And while you can go back to the 2021-22 season, you can’t yet get a cumulative snapshot of a player or team from then to now.
The tool is still cutting-edge and enticing, and it’s only going to evolve.
But even as it does, Kelly cautions you should only take from it what it’s giving you.
“I would caution the same I would caution with any data set: Don’t draw stark conclusions based on one stat,” he says. “It’s interesting information, and it’s a great entry point, but don’t make a black-and-white statement based on one stat. That would be my comment about any stat.
“Just because someone has the hardest shot, doesn’t mean someone has the best shot. I think Radko Gudas had the hardest shot last season, and he only scored two goals. You might see now that Connor McDavid isn’t actually the fastest player in the league, he’s one of them. But what he can do at top speed is what separates him from everybody else.”
Still there’s no question how interesting it is to be able to see just how hard someone shoots, or how fast McDavid goes at his top end and how frequently he gets to that top speed throughout a season.
Just as it’s interesting to peruse the data and find players who can actually move quicker.
Seeing that undoes perception, and having our own perceptions tested against the data is huge part of the fun of it.
As I was looking through some of the stats of the Montreal Canadiens, one of my assumptions was quickly debunked. I’ve watched Josh Anderson and Alex Newhook practise and play since the start of training camp and, before consulting these new metrics, I’d have bet anything Newhook was faster than Anderson.
It’s black and white that Anderson is faster—and by nearly a mile-and-a-half per hour, which is a lot.
But that doesn’t mean he plays faster.
Again, you have to be careful what conclusions you draw.
And you have to be able to put what you see into proper context.
“A guy could have 14 successful zone entries in possession of the puck, which would be outstanding,” says Kelly, “but if he button hooks on 13 of them and throws it in the corner, it doesn’t really mean anything. As I said, it’s always an entry point into looking into something further.”
The distance a player covers on average, or the most miles he’s skated in a game, is probably the easiest thing to misinterpret, in my opinion. It’s not a metric you can look at in isolation and view as something positive or negative.
Is it interesting to know that Ottawa’s Thomas Chabot skates roughly a mile more per game than everyone else in the league does on average? Sure.
But I don’t know what that says about Chabot, other than he does more skating than most players do on average. It says he has endurance, but we already knew that just by checking his average ice time per game.
And while it’s interesting that Chabot might skate the most miles in a given game, you do have to wonder if he’s skating more than he needs to. If I could compare him to Buffalo’s Rasmus Dahlin in a game where both players have played the same amount of minutes, I’d want to measure distances skated against all the other stats that indicate high performance to know if the higher number is actually a good thing.
Even still, that would be hard to figure out considering all the other variables, like quality of competition or ice-time allotment at different strengths.
But at least we have these new metrics at our disposal to run deeper statistical analysis.
Think of the possibilities.
“Think about things like speed burst,” says Kelly. “If I wanted to get granular, I’d want to know if the shift after a goal your team scored produced greater speed bursts. Do guys have more jump in that instance? Does the opposition have less of it? Breaking it down that way could be quite interesting.
“But we’re only in Phase 1. It’s not what it’ll end up being yet.”
It’s already pretty cool.
And, as Kelly notes, even in its primary form, it’s serving its intended purpose.
“I think the most important thing about this type of work is—and I really believe this and have experienced doing this and hearing this from people—that in the same way, you would try to tell a human-interest story about a player to bring fans closer to the game, its teams and players, and drive that fan interest, you can do the same with performance data,” he says. “The more the viewer knows what a player is doing, knows strengths and weaknesses, and knows about a team’s strengths and weaknesses and what they’re doing, the more connected to the game they are. They’re the same thing to me as a human-interest story. So the more information is available to people—if it’s able to be articulated to the people in a way that’s very clear to them—the more it’s going to bring them closer to the game and drive fan interest. I think there’s an opportunity to do that with this type of information.”