As many of you know, I love reading about baseball and soccer analytics. I think that in baseball’s case, having the “first mover” element means that later-adapting sports like hockey can look to copy many of their concepts and ideas, even if the sports are quite different. Soccer, meanwhile, is quite a similar game to hockey – just a slower version – and therefore many of the more specific practices translate quite well.
Soccer is at an interesting point though because they, unlike baseball, are uncovering new statistics (courtesy of companies like Opta) while also just now figuring out which of those statistics are meaningful. You can get an idea of how far behind analytics in soccer is by the fact that its main predictive statistic: Total Shots Ratio – which is essentially the soccer version of corsi – is actually based on corsi.
Jack Han, formerly of the Montreal Canadiens, now of Habs EOTP, wrote an 
There’s a scene in Moneyball where Red Sox owner John Henry offers his vacant GM position to Billy Beane. “Anybody who’s not tearing their team down right now and rebuilding it using your model,” he says. “They’re dinosaurs.” The Oakland A’s were the first movers of modern sports analytics. They took a risk, and while there were stumbles along the way, they benefitted as a result. In hockey, it took a decade longer for any kind of true analytic implementation, and we’re still not quite in “tear down and rebuild using your model” territory. So why has it taken so long? I think the answer lies in the hockey world’s view of baseball. NHL executives are drawn to the differences between the two sports rather than their similarities. Yes, baseball is a stop-start game whereas hockey is fluid. And yes, baseball involves more one-on-one matchups and less team play. But beyond that, the games – and the strategies that result in building the best possible teams – are actually quite similar.
In June of 2010 I joined Twitter, and I had no idea at that point what an impact it would have on my ability to analyze and process the game of hockey. In the four years since, I’ve read thousands of articles, and was fortunate to be welcomed into Habs Eyes On The Prize, able to share my writing, research, and analysis with its loyal and diverse readership. Don’t worry, I’m not stepping down from anything, and I hope to continue to contribute analytical Habs-related content to EOTP, but I decided near the end of last season that I wanted to start my own blog, giving myself ultimate editorial freedom and the ability to jump from team-to-team, sport-to-sport, topic-to-topic and serve what I hope will become a readership of my own. Now that we are nearing the beginning of another NHL season, I thought it was the right time to act on that decision.
AP Hockey 