New NHL = Money Puck

Peace from Russia.

It's been a while. It has taken many months of therapy and vodka to get over the Senators devastatingly inept performance last spring. My nightmares focus on Alfie playing the point and Chara crushing Sens into the boards of Scotiabank Place rather than stylized B's. Luckily, Phoff sobered my up and begged long enough for me to write again.

First, an interesting article over at Yahoo! caught my eye recently. As an avid sports "pooler" I've been obsessed by baseball statistics for some time. Phoff, Beeg and I have discussed several times how the cap era of the NHL might eventually lead to some new developments in statistical evaluations of players. Afterall, using "new stats" in baseball developed first in its arbitration system. I think there are challenges to developing more refined statistical analysis for hockey, the primary one (as identified in the article) is the fluid nature of hockey. Where baseball can easily and effectively be broken into a series of discreet units hockey can't, except for time, but I'm skeptical that time on the ice provides provides a good measure of production. The other part that interests me about the article is that it sounds as though these new developments are happening within the organizations primarily. I haven't checked the public resources listed in the article, but in baseball's case, many of these developments first occurred outside of the infrastructure of Major League Baseball. This is significant, because part of the reason it happened that way in MLB was the institutional culture of the game - old baseball men who "knew" what made a good player. That hockey organizations seem to be adopting this without the groundswell of grassroots activity may be positive or could mean it takes longer to root itself due to being subordinated to "traditional" means of evaluation and "the old stats." I digress. It remains an interesting piece. (PS- I wonder if Huck shares my sense that having Craig Button as the spokesperson in this article is disheartening.)