Upon seeing their promotional video on youtube, however, I am now cautiously optimistic. As a fan of sabermetrics and the changes it brought to the game of baseball in the early 2000’s, I am constantly looking for similar advanced statistical analysis to be applied to hockey. The question of why it hasn’t has a number of answers.
First, hockey is an infinitely complex and contextual game due to the abundance of constantly moving parts. It is that entropy that makes it hard to reduce the game to meaningful statistics.
The simplest example I can give to demonstrate this is to suggest that the next time you watch a game, try and track the zone entries (as I am currently trying to do for an upcoming post).