Analyzing Hockey: Through the Big Data and Analytics lens

ANALYZING HOCKEY THROUGH THE BIG DATA AND ANALYTICS LENS https://datasportsgroup.com/

Professional sports have been taking advantage of analytics ever since Moneyball revolutionized the entire sports industry with sabermetrics. The statistical tracking truly hit the mainstream with Oakland A’s performance, which was made possible with manual tracking, and the database is generated.

Baseball might have been the first sport to use data analytics but soccer and basketball and others were not far off and used data tracking tech for decision making and even evolved their process through the years from manual tracking to automated data tracking to have a seamless system in place.

The applicability of data analytics in other sports like hockey may have seemed limited at first but it has blown up as well. When we discuss hockey, less popular sport compared to cricket or soccer, but the sport has its own fanatics. In the world of hockey for the ones who are unfamiliar with it, players are known to skate at a speed up to 35 MPH and the puck even flies up to 100 MPH. To the unenlightened, the game can have all the earmarks of being too turbulent.

In any case, while groups started applying new norms of cutting-edge advanced statistics in the previous ten years, the combination of innovation and technology is going to make a huge impact on the NHL.

For as long as a decade, the NHL has utilized a group of analysts called the Hockey Information Tracking System to log things like a player's experience on ice, go head-to-head wins, and other details. The watchword here is a group — stats were followed physically on a proprietary data entry app by various individuals throughout the period. NHL has even deployed an automated data tracking tech which was being developed for quite a long time and was first openly given a chance during the 2019 NHL All-Star Game in San Jose.

Extraordinarily manufactured pucks containing tracking chips, and such devices were also put into players’ shoulder braces.

Joined with a number of sensors put around the arena, unexpectedly the world's quickest sport has enormous information being gathered during each snapshot of the game: position, speed, bearing, distance, and other key measurements. Which was a true challenge in the sports.

The big data was thus generated with numerous data points generated at about 200 times per second, even more, data points were collected for five skaters and the goalie of each team participating in the league, and the match lasted for about 60 minutes. Now that is a lot of data! If we look at the numbers in the onehour match roughly 9,360,000 logged events for a category were created in an NHL game.

NHL’s ability to create such raw data is a big deal in itself but with the technological development and emergence of artificial intelligence the data was analyzed and valuable insights were drawn as well. The process of data collection was further streamlined with the use of AI models that helped reduce the human error and bias which was prominent with manual tracking and build a more robust model.

Hockey Analytics is a whole new ball game With analytics player tracking is made a real possibility as well as with such a massive amount of data, the team’s statisticians and data scientists can come up with innovative ways to develop strategICE hockey stats apiies. Data Analytics could be used to bag free agent gems and improve the roster performance it all boils down to how the data is being utilized to get results. The same has been possible with field hockey XML data.

Data might primarily be used to improve performance but it's one other use that has created a new revenue stream for the clubs from licensing the data and offering that to broadcasts. Gambling sites are also improving their bottom line by using the same data.

The scope of the big data revolution in the sports industry is still not entirely realized presently. There is a lot of potential and an endless amount of innovation and revenue stream data could unfold. And companies like Data Sports Group as a sports data provider are taking an active role in revolutionizing the sports industry and facilitating many companies to do the same. Even in sports like Hockey, Big Data and Analytics have played a significant role in the advancement of sports.

Data Sports Group offers a comprehensive set of databases from pre-match stats about the teams and players’ performance, to a live sports feed that engages the fans and post-match analysis with team standings. hockey stats API, ice hockey XML data could be used to pull specific data into your platform and with widgets, fan engagement could be achieved. What are you waiting for get in touch with the team today!

CONTACT US Emai -sales@datasportsgroup.com Phone - +1 (704) 964-6859 Address - 2600 Kinmere Dr City – Gastonia State - North Carolina PIN – 28056 Country - USA