From the kids playing on the pond arguing over which of their heroes are superior, to executives at the highest level of the NHL making difficult decisions, analyzing hockey players has always been an incredibly subjective exercise. This is probably most evident when it comes to voting for the NHL awards, where a goaltender adjudged to be the best at his position or the forward with the best defensive ability have only a modicum of stats for voters to consider, so “intangibles” get brought into the equation.
But it seems, with the potential integration of tracking technology, all that is about to change.
Why Tracking Technology Will Forever Change the NHL
To recap: At the All-Star game in Columbus last month, the NHL experimented with placing tracking chips in player’s jerseys. It was, by all accounts, a complete success, allowing television viewers to see players’ speed and movements tracked in real time, right on their screen.
Based on that initial success the NHL, in a surprising and belated embracing of technology, is looking to have complete tracking integration in every game sometime in the near future, a move which will, in the words of Commissioner Gary Bettman, “enable us to create and then maintain a digital record of everything in our game and compile a complete digital history.”
It’s hard not to get excited hearing those words. The thought of knowing the movement of every player, the speed and location of every shot, the positioning of every goaltender, all in real time, is so enticing that many fans around the league are hollering for its integration as soon as possible. While the implementation of the technology is still a ways away, there are kinks to work out, and an agreement between the league and the NHLPA will have to be reached at some point down the road as well, it seems only a matter of time before those fans get their wish.
All this is very exciting, but the impact it might have on the subjectivity, the biases, and the plain old fun of debating the sport doesn’t seem to be something many people are thinking of, particularly when it comes to the NHL’s year-end awards.
Take for example the Vezina trophy. Montreal Canadiens netminder Carey Price is having a stellar season, with a league-leading 1.91 goals against average and .935 save percentage as of Tuesday morning. However, Nashville’s Pekka Rinne is right there behind him with a 2.01 goals against average and a .931 save percentage. The race is tight, and with Rinne holding a higher winning percentage and Price having more shutouts, determining a Vezina winner is like splitting hairs at this point.
However, these are the traditional metrics voters have used to determine a Vezina winner. Now imagine how tracking technology will completely change everyone’s perspective.
Let’s assume tracking technology will allow us to see with complete accuracy every single shot taken against a goaltender over the course of a season. That is a massive amount of data, and it will take some working, but with enough sorting and calculation, we can determine in exact detail who is actually the better goaltender.
Here’s an example of how exact this data could ultimately be. We could potentially know, with complete accuracy, what percentage of saves Price makes in the top left quadrant of the net (AKA high glove) on shots that are going 70 miles per hour from 35 feet away at a 45 degree angle relative to the net that were tipped from 10 feet away, which changed the puck’s angle of approach and velocity, while Montreal is on a 5-on-3 penalty kill featuring nine other players on the ice with their own data sets (of which things like shooting percentage don’t even come close to touching), in the 18th minute of the third period during the second game in three nights, etc, etc… That exact.
Five-on-five save percentage? That’s nothing. While advanced stats have come a long way, just this season becoming mainstream, and we can use them to analyze players and teams better than ever before, tracking technology is poised to leave many of those new statistics in the dust.
Now, of course that’s a ton of data and it may take years before we’re able to track it with any semblance of consistency. Additionally, delving into the minutiae would result in smaller and smaller sample sizes, but if the data exists, all it would take is someone with the time, inclination and ability to accurately rank every single NHL goaltender by finding their median in each metric and comparing it to their peers across the league.
Even those who don’t portend to be stats gurus would now have irrefutable evidence to fall back on in every debate about “who’s better.” Price or Rinne? The numbers are right there. The Vezina could become as easily determinable as the Art Ross once the season comes to an end. The same could be said for other awards, such as the Selke or the Norris, assuming there is an consensus about which metrics best reflect the best defensive forward, or the best blueliner.
Whether this new development is viewed as positive or negative really depends on personal perspective. Modern, progressive NHL fans are likely to embrace the new technology and all the statistics that come along with it, while the idea could represent a death knell for hockey as they know it for “old-school” fans. It can be either turning a new page, or opening Pandora’s Box. One thing is certain though, good or bad, it will forever change how we view the game, and how we judge the league’s greatest players.
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