Hockey’s advanced stats geeks finally getting the credit they deserve

That looks weird. Bob McKenzie routinely breaks NHL trades and hirings and firings, but breaking the hiring of a basement blogger by an NHL club? This is new territory.

But with his hiring and some other moves by NHL teams this summer, it seems like the tide has turned in the NHL at a completely unexpected pace.

The New Jersey Devils also hired Sunny Mehta, a former stats blogger and professional poker player, as their Director of Hockey Analytics this summer.

For years the greater hockey community’s opinion on analytics has been an echo chamber of dismissiveness, creating a false dichotomy between stats people and “hockey” people:

As the theory went, you were either a person who watched the game and loved intangibles or you watched spreadsheets and counted numbers. Either you believed in scouting, or you believed in dispassionate, math-driven analysis.

The reality is that it’s difficult to find people who watch more hockey than the ones coming up with these new ways of analyzing the game, because watching the game is how you get the numbers. The best analysts have for years been melding what they see with their eyes with what the numbers prove:

Dellow’s work that had gained attention this summer -- it can now no longer be accessed because his site has been taken down -- focused on the marriage of analytics with video analysis, which may be what sold the Oilers on hiring him.

The long-standing war of words on social media over this subject is essentially over, or at least should be. There are always going to be those who are against statistics, but it’s very clear that NHL management teams are now scrambling to avoid being left behind, and the bloggers who were told repeatedly that no hockey people believed in what they were doing are now working for hockey people. The nerds were right.

The best thing about this entire evolution is how inspiring it is for fans of the game who want to have real say in what their teams do on the ice. For those with passion for hockey (or any sport), the drive to learn more about the game, and the ability to communicate ideas effectively, the potential impact of those ideas cannot be underestimated.

Dellow was a lawyer who loved hockey, and began to work with statistics to better understand the game. He wrote for years about how to improve the team he loved, and now gets to actually help improve his team.

Tulsky began writing comments and FanPosts on SB Nation’s Broad Street Hockey, eventually joined that site as a contributor, went on to write elsewhere including here at SBNation.com, presented research at MIT’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and now works for an NHL team. And it’s only the beginning.