DENVER — Here in the Mile High City, the Flames are preparing for a stiff test against the NHL’s best.
But when the puck drops Monday evening between Calgary and Colorado, some of the NHL’s brightest minds will be on hand, too.
That’s because the Avalanche and NHL are hosting the first-ever Hockey Analytics League Operations conference this week. The two-day event marks the NHL analytics community’s first-ever league meetings, including cutting-edge analytics presentations utilizing proprietary data not available to the public, and informative panels about the future of the sport.
And that’s why, on a sunny March Monday, Flames Director of Analytics and Data Hendrix Hanes, Director of Engineering, Hockey Analytics Alex Robson and Data Analyst Etienne Rouleau are here in Colorado. To idea-share with their peers, as well as bring home best practices from around the League.
“In the past, there have been third-party vendor events where they would have an event at some location, and half the teams would come,” Hanes explained Monday morning. “But this is the first one that Colorado's hosting, which is awesome. We're going to have representatives from the League here as well.
“This is the first set of actual League meetings, it's pretty exciting that the League and Colorado spent time investing in this opportunity.”
Robson and Hanes both arrived in Calgary from Ontario, where Robson previously plied his trade with the Toronto Blue Jays. But they met while working together with the OHL’s Kitchener Rangers and were reunited out West in 2023.
“After I graduated, I was pretty lucky I got a job with the Toronto Blue Jays and did a lot of very code-heavy work for them,” said Robson. ‘Long story short, my partner came out here (to Calgary) for med school, and it just worked out really well with Hendrix coming out here, too, and I was very lucky to get a job working on the analytics team.”
Three seasons in, they’ve fit in seamlessly with the club’s hockey operations.
“We kind of pride ourselves on touching a lot of our different hockey operations departments,” said Hanes. “Our primary focus on game day, is helping our NHL coaching staff, trying to prepare to win the next game. So we do a lot of work to assist on pre-scouts, post-game reports, ad hoc analysis with that.
“In total, we touch player development, we touch amateur scouting, we touch pro scouting, NHL coaching staff, AHL coaching staff, work that the management team requests, all of that together, we try to support all those different parts of our organization and provide information for them to continue to make good decisions.”
The trio will take in tonight’s game at Ball Arena before the conference continues Tuesday.
For Robson, the two-day session offers an opportunity to network, both with peers from around the League but also companies who help with data tracking, software and more.
“A lot of it is hearing from different vendors, and obviously, you try to do the most that you can with the data that you have available,” he said. “Just to hear from them, just to get their presentations and their demos on what their products are and what they have available.
“It's super-useful for us to figure out, maybe things that we can be doing differently, or things that we can add to our existing products, because at the end of the day, we want to get the most out of what we have, and this is a great avenue to do that.”
And for the group, analytics is an area of the game that is only growing. More data means more opportunities to extract trends.
More opportunities to gain a competitive advantage by using data the right way.
Even if, for Robson, the transition back to hockey from baseball meant looking at different types of data to get the job done.
“It’s very different environment, right? Like, if you think about baseball teams, there's 30-40 people, and hockey, it's obviously a lot smaller,” Robson explained. “You're really in baseball digging into some very specific skeletal tracking data and trying to draw a lot of insights from that.
“But I'd say there's a mindset that you get, an analytical mindset looking at data and figuring out what advantages we can draw from that data. And that applies back to hockey where, yes, the data's maybe not quite where baseball data is, but when you're able to apply that mindset, you can still pull a lot of insights that are valuable and hopefully give you an advantage over other teams when you're looking at your decisions as a group.”
