Moneyballhockey

Hockey puck, picture taken by Janothird, February 12, 2006

I was just recently watching a Toronto Maple Leafs game on TV at a restaurant and I was going to myself, “if they were to implement the same concepts of Moneyball in hockey, what would they use as a metric?”

So I was going through a few ideas

• Points, obvious but not sustainable
• Assists, blocks and all other single point metrics not really sustainable in the game.
• Average play time, well at least you’d avoid the penalty boxes.

Then I though about:

• Time spent with the puck correlating with  amount of moving forward distance over time.

Ideally, the concept is we want the puck to be kept away as much as possible from the goal so we want people who can relatively sustain that amount of time as well as moving away from the teams’ goal.  That will allow them to keep the puck in play longer but still move towards a positive result (which is why I added moving forward).

In theory I am guessing the same concept can be applied to other ball to goal games such as lacrosse, basketball, football, American football.

Well I’m not a hockey player nor have any real interest in any sport, but I am pretty sure they would’ve thought about it by now.