Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 537: Sean McIndoe on the NHL’s Analytics Awakening

Episode Date: September 18, 2014

Ben and Michael Baumann talk to Grantland lead hockey writer Sean McIndoe about the rise of sabermetric-style analysis in the NHL.

🎵 She thinks it's tasting me Good morning and welcome to episode 537 of Effectively Wild, a daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com. It's actually an all-Grantland episode today. Filling in for Sam Miller, who'll be back tomorrow, is Michael Baumann of Grantland, who writes about baseball and has been on the show before. Hello, Michael.

Hey, how's it going? Good. And today we're going to do something a little bit different. Longtime listeners know that I am not exactly a connoisseur of other sports, but there is one sport that I really regret not knowing better, which is hockey. And maybe it's just my half Canadian side asserting itself, but every year I see some snippets of hockey that convince me that it is clearly the most exciting sport and that I am an idiot for not watching it. But the idea of trying to get up to speed is too daunting for me to dive in. I can probably name more 1994 Rangers than I can active players in the NHL, although I know that Yarmir Yager is still playing. Beyond that,

it gets a little bit hazy. However, I do try to keep up a little bit with the analytics work that's being done, which is fascinating in other sports as it is in baseball. So today we're going to try a little cross-sport sabermetrics exchange program to find out about the state of hockey analysis and the parallels between sabermetrics in hockey and in baseball. To help us out with that, we have Sean McIndoe, the founder of a great hockey blog, Down Goes Brown, and also the lead hockey writer for Grantland. Hey, Sean. Hey. So you wrote an article yesterday or Wednesday at Grantland about the NHL's analytics awakening, and this is something I've been reading about for the past few months because we're a few

days away from fall, so it is still the summer of analytics in hockey. And all of a sudden, seemingly, everyone on the internet who does hockey analysis has been plucked up by teams. And this is really interesting because in baseball, obviously, the poaching of internet analysts has been going on for a while, but I don't know that it ever has happened in such a concentrated way, so fast and furious. So why is it that this has happened all of a sudden? Yeah, it's been really strange. I mean, hockey analytics has been around for a long time. And certainly even over the last few years, there's been a lot of back and forth between kind of the guys who were getting into the analytics and then you had sort of the old school crowd.

And it was very reminiscent of what baseball went through 10 or 15 years ago. And, you know, the proponents of the numbers and the stats kept saying, you know, we know how this is going to end. We've already seen it in baseball. We've seen it in basketball and football. We know that these stats are going to become part of the game. And everybody who had knowledge of those other sports predicted that this is where we would wind up.

But nobody predicted it would happen this quickly. I mean, it just all sort of, over the last few months, analytics went from being this kind of thing off on the periphery that some people were talking about and other people were rolling their eyes at to the point where now it's everywhere. I mean, as you said, so many of the top bloggers and thinkers in the space have been hired by NHL teams. The ones that haven't been hired by NHL teams have been hired by major sports networks up here. One of the major networks up here just announced that they're creating basically a whole analytics team to go through the season with. Another one is doing some sort of special tonight where they're going to kind of go

through and break it all down. It's really been amazing. I was at a conference on the weekend, which was in Calgary with the Alberta Analytics Conference, and it was the second one that they had had. The first one had been in May, so we're talking four months between conferences. And everybody kept saying, everything has changed since the last time we were all together because half of them had been snapped up and hired and weren't there because they had these jobs now where they weren't allowed to talk publicly about what they were doing.

And in the first conference, it had all been about how do we get acceptance? How do we get this stuff out into the mainstream? And the second time, it was more like, OK, now that we already are mainstream, where do we go from here? Has it helped at all that this process has already unfolded in baseball? Because it's kind of curious, you know, having seen the whole stats versus scouts and analysts versus mainstream media members, fights play out over the past several years, over the past decade, and kind of come to a head and then sort of subside at this point in baseball, where you just have a few cranky columnists still holding out, but for the most part, most people are on board.

So has that helped ease the way in hockey at all? Or are people fighting exactly the same battles, even though those battles have already played out in baseball? Yeah, I mean, I really don't know that it did ease the way because we did see a lot of the same battles and really just the same playbook. I mean, you had the old school types who were just kind of naturally against it. And certainly hockey is a sport that really does embrace the old school. It embraces tradition. It embraces all of those sort of ideas of what old style sports are supposed to be. And then you had, like you said, you had the cranky columnists.

You had the columnists who didn't get it. And then you had the columnists who probably did get it, but they were doing shtick. They realized that this was a good way to get people riled up, and so they would play that. So, you know, I'm not sure that it really helped it along. What it did was it gave anyone who was paying attention a roadmap where they could look and say, we know how this is going to end up.

I mean, it was with baseball. I remember, you know, going through that because I'm a baseball fan, and I remember watching all of that play out and going, you know, I don't really know where this is going to end. I'm not really sure which side is going to prevail or what the future is going to look like. In hockey, you were looking at it going, we know what the finish line is. We know how this ends.

It's just a question of, you know, how many rotten tomatoes are we all going to throw at each other until it happens. And as it turned out, it all seemed to sort of come to a head really quickly this summer. Sean, the thing I find most interesting about the parallel between what's going on in hockey right now and what went on in baseball five to ten years ago is how similar that conversation is. And when the stats sort of took over the baseball conversation around the time of Moneyball,

it was happening at the same time as the sort of democratization of publishing where blogs become more accepted and prints or a lot of the work that was being done in print moves to online. So the stat war was in a way sort of a proxy war for new media versus old media. But in hockey, obviously that hasn't quite transpired the same way. Do you think that stats are being accepted more now because outside voices were already being heard? Yeah, I mean, that did play a role. I mean, there is still in hockey, certainly, this kind of turf protection that does go on

between some of the mainstream media guys, for lack of a better term, and some of the new wave of bloggers or people who are coming up through different channels. And a lot of the great work that was done in hockey and the analytics side was coming from blogs. It was coming from people who were doing stuff either on their own sites or on some of the other larger sites, the SB Nation sites and that kind of thing,

and then publicizing it on Twitter. But you're right. I mean, I do think there's a – I have found that even though there's this idea out there that when it comes to some of these stats discussions that the old school media are all these cranky guys who don't get it, for the most part, I haven't found that to be the case. There are certainly a few, and like I say, there's a few that legitimately have some objections to it, and there's a few that are just kind of doing it as shtick because that's how they get attention these days.

But the vast majority of the media voices in hockey and some of the most powerful voices have embraced this stuff, and even when they haven't understood it, they've been curious enough, sort of intellectually curious enough to get into it and figure out where it was going uh and they've been more than willing to uh uh to share the good work that was being done or to share interesting findings that people were coming up with and if that happened to be something that was discovered by some blogger nobody had ever heard of as long as it could stand up to scrutiny and it could be verified, then even the Bob McKenzie's of the world, who is basically kind of the Adam Schefter of hockey, would be more than willing to put that sort of information out

there. So without diving too far into the details, can you kind of bring us up to speed on the state of the actual stats? What are the major insights that have been made? What's the hockey equivalent of on-base percentage is better than batting average? Yeah, the main breakthrough, I guess you could call it, and like I said, this has been around for a few years, it really came down to the concept of possession. And this is not a new breakthrough.

It's always been understood that, you know, clearly in a game like hockey, you want to have the puck as much as possible. But we never really had a way to measure that, and we didn't really know how important it was. And so one of the things that happened was people started to figure out, okay, we don't have, there's no stat in the box score, there's no numbers we can pull from anywhere that tells us who had the puck the most. But what we can do is we can measure how many shots our team's taking. And they found out that those shots, when they actually did sit down with stopwatches

or to break down film, they found that shots actually was a really good proxy for how much possession a team had. And then somebody said, well, if the shots are good, can we make that sample size even a little bit bigger by counting even missed shots? Now, before all this came along, taking a shot on goal in hockey and missing the net was considered a bad play, a wasted play. But what they found is that if you actually mix that in, it gives you an even clearer idea of who's possessing the puck the most.

And you started to come up with numbers where you could look at a team and say, you know, a really good team like the Kings or the Blackhawks tends to have the puck about a 55-45 edge, whereas the really poor teams like the Sabres or the Maple Leafs last year, you know, they're down around 40 or 45 percent mark. And that doesn't seem like a big swing but it turns out to be to be really very important and really very predictive as well this is all this stuff has turned out to be excellent at predicting future results not necessarily all that great at predicting what happened in the past but as far as what's going to happen in the future if you've got a year of

the halfway mark of the season and you want to figure out which teams are going to fall, which teams are going to surge, which teams are going to end up where, the very best tool you can look at is to just look at their possession numbers and say that the teams that have had the puck the most probably will continue to and that's going to translate into wins. The flip side of that

has always been in hockey, okay, you've got the quantity, but then what about the quality? What about shot quality? What about maybe I don't get that many shots on net, but maybe the shots I am taking are much higher quality and they're going to go in much more often. And the discovery on that side was that that doesn't really seem to hold up. What we're finding is that the volume side tends to be repeatable. The volume side tends to be something that's predictive, whereas the percentages, the shooting percentages, the save percentages, those are the numbers that tend to fluctuate a lot.

Obviously, there's a skill component to it. Nobody's expecting that Sidney Crosby's going to shoot the same as a fourth liner like Colt Knorr, but what they're finding is that's the stuff that does kind of go in flux and introduce a lot of noise and that into the statistics. So, you know, that's kind of been the breakthrough, so to speak. And at the end of the day, one of the things that's interesting is that the term that gets used a lot when people are talking about this in hockey is they talk about advanced stats.

The stats actually aren't all that advanced. You know, from a math perspective, they're not complicated at all. And I think somebody who is really immersed in the baseball side, if they sat down and looked at what currently is being served up in hockey, they'd say, you know what, this stuff is pretty basic and shouldn't even really be all that controversial. But again, hockey is a sport that does tend to get kind of ingrained in the old way of thinking, and so it's been kind of a baby step

process. I wanted to ask you about the availability of the raw data, because there's not yet any equivalent of, say, the NBA's SportView system or MLB's StatCast system, which is coming, or even PitchFX, I suppose. And it seems like, from reading your work and other things that I've seen, It seems like from reading your work and other things that I've seen, a big element is just crowdsource data collection, like a real throwback to the project score sheet era of baseball, where just the raw foundational data that you need to make any kind of conclusions either wasn't available or wasn't publicly available. And people just kind of had to band together to collect it which is a difficult and time-consuming process so how much actual information is out there how granular does it get well there's I

mean there's sort of a few a few different pieces of that when you look back at traditional hockey box scores and there I'm talking about things where you'd be going back to the 60s and 70s and before that. You've got box scores. They really don't have an awful lot of information in there that's useful for this type of thing. It's not even like baseball where you can go back and run some calculations and figure out how does Babe Ruth's best season compare to Barry Bonds.

There's nothing like that for hockey. There's really not a lot of value that we can extract out of that stuff. Now, in the last decade or so, the NHL has started tracking a lot more useful information, and they put that in the game files, and the game files go up on the website. And then what people can do is they create tools, and they sort of pull that data in off of NHL.com, which the lead, so far, knock on wood, is still letting people do. And that certainly gives them better information.

That's where they can get the shot attempts, for example, that allows them to figure out some of these possession stats. I mean, you hear about a stat like Corsi, which is pretty much the basic building block for possession in the stuff that we're doing with hockey. We don't even have Corsi numbers going back to the Wayne Gretzky era, let alone Bobby Orr or Gordie Howe or whoever. So it's only the last 10 years or so that we kind of consider the advanced stats era that we've even got those numbers.

The problem is those numbers themselves aren't all that reliable. The NHL is notoriously bad at tracking these numbers. Maybe I shouldn't say bad because it's a very tough sport to track. It's a very difficult job to do, but mistakes get made. They showed at the conference, somebody put up a slide where it was scoring chance tracking for the exact same game, same period of the same game, came from two different sources. One was ESPN, one was CBS, and they were completely different. I mean, the shots were just literally all over the map.

There was no consensus between them. So the data there is questionable. And so then you're right. If you want the really accurate and the really useful stuff, then at this point you basically got to crowdsource it and you've got people sitting there breaking down film in their living room with a notepad and a stopwatch and whatever other tools they're using. So the hope is that all of that is going to go away relatively soon because we will enter this era where it will be either the sport viewer

or some sort of equivalent. There's talk about putting chips in uniforms, put a chip in the puck so that you can measure everything and know who had the puck for how long. That turns out to be complicated. It's even more complicated than it is in the NBA because it's something as simple as the fact that hockey players are using sticks and you've got this five-foot-long stick in somebody's hand

and they're using the puck. Well, how do you create a system that knows that which guy has possession of the puck, even though you might have one guy holding it on a stick, another guy poking at it with his stick? It does get a little bit complicated. There are challenges there, technological. There's challenges as far as what you do with all the data.

But that will be a nice problem to have once we get there, and the thinking is that probably not this year. Maybe as soon as next year we're going to start seeing that technology in place. So one challenge that strikes me as being particularly special to hockey is that there doesn't seem to me to be a great tradition of fans and media using even what baseball people would consider basic stats. Baseball and basketball are extremely numbers-based. Every baseball fan, even before the statistical revolution, knew batting average on base percentage slugging percentage they at least knew they existed but in hockey there's goals assists you know plus minus and and penalty

minutes that's pretty much all the the casual fan would would really know has that been a challenge in acclimating uh acclimating fans to some of these more advanced numbers? Yeah, it has been to an extent. I mean, you're right. You look at the stats that we use in hockey, you're basically goals, assists, and points, which are goals is a great stat, but too much random noise to be great on its own. Assists is a little bit questionable

because one of the things we're starting to learn is that there's two assists given out on every goal. It turns out you can learn a lot more from who gets the first assist than who gets the secondary assist. And then you get into plus minus, which we found is pretty much useless as a stat. And then penalty minutes, which is actually measuring a negative, and yet it gets held up as a positive, which sort of gives you an idea of how strange hockey fans can be with this stuff sometimes. So there is that. And, you know, overall there's this sense and this pushback that you get from a lot of fans that says that hockey is not a game that lends itself to numbers. Hockey is not a game that lends itself to measurement.

There's an awful lot of fans who might look at a sport like baseball and say, okay, here's a perfect sport for measurement because every play only has a certain number of outcomes. It's individual, it's one versus one, and the play happens, and then there's this nice long pause and everybody can write down exactly what happened and run their calculations and make sure everything's just right before the next play. Whereas in hockey, it can be chaos out there. It's so free-flowing. There's so much going on.

Whereas in hockey, it can be chaos out there. It's so free-flowing. There's so much going on. One guy at the conference that I was at, he's a software developer. He develops software for tracking hockey. And he says the challenge that they run into is you train somebody on how to track this stuff. They see something happen on the ice that they're supposed to track. They look down on their iPad or whatever it is. They press a button.

They look up half a second later, and they've missed something. And that's something that you don't really have to deal with as much in other sports. And, you know, there's a lot of people who look at hockey and they look at that situation and they kind of throw their hands up and say, we shouldn't even be trying to measure this stuff. And then you've got the other side that says, you know what, there's some challenges here, maybe some challenges that are even unique to hockey, but let's do our best and let's see what we can find out. And they've actually been able to find out quite a bit.

So another side effect of this is being able to test some of the truisms and old adages that you have about your sport that have never everybody sort of accepts but have never been sort of empirically tested before and one of them is that we sort of know now on an aggregate level that that fighting doesn't really impact it's it's a non-factor essentially as a driver of of game outcomes and as someone who's been a lifelong hockey fan and a lifelong fan of fighting in hockey, that sort of change brought me over to the other side in terms of the fighting debate. Do you think this is something that's going to maybe hasten

the departure of fighting from the NHL game? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of factors that are sort of pushing fighting out the door, and this certainly could be one of them. I mean, there has been a lot of effort put into trying to determine what impact fighting might have to try to figure out, you know, does it shift momentum? Does it make the team play better. That's always been a concept that was very appealing at a fan level, but always seemed a little bit shaky.

Because you look at it, a fight by definition has got one guy from each team involved. So how do you possibly swing momentum when both teams have just gotten into a fight? And so far, any efforts to come up with some sort of impact, possibly swing momentum when both teams have just gotten into a fight. And so far, any efforts to come up with some sort of impact, some sort of measurement have come up empty. It just seems as if these fights really don't have much in a way of impact at all, at least in anything we can measure. I suspect that there tends to be a big overlap between those who still really embrace fighting as an important part of the game and those that push back on a lot of these stats and analytics.

I'm not completely sure why that is, but my guess is that will be the very last crowd to embrace this stuff. That is kind of the decidedly old-school approach. this stuff that that is kind of the decidedly old school approach and uh you know i'm i'm i'm not sure that you're ever going to be able to convince somebody um that fighting doesn't have value by showing them numbers um but what you might be able to do is uh you know convince some of the influencers and some of the people who are stepping back and looking at it from a little more neutral position and uh uh and that that might color the way that that they cover it going forward and um along with a whole bunch of other stuff that's happening in the background i think at the end of the day we're going to see a day where i'm not sure that you'll

see fighting out of the nhl what i think you'll see is this enforcer tough guy goon role uh be gone and i think it's going to be gone probably within the next decade. You mentioned in your piece that there isn't really a one-stop stat for hockey yet, that there have been some attempts at producing one, but that there's no real equivalent to war in baseball. Is that purely a result of just the kind of infancy of the movement and the state of the stats available? Is it sort of like in baseball, how you had to gradually build up to war by, you know, having Vorp, which was just offense before you build in all this other stuff? Is there a stat out there

that, you know, would do a decent job of approximating a player's value and it just hasn't sold itself well? or is that stat just not out there yet it's i mean there have been attempts there've uh there have been probably uh about a dozen stats that have been offered up uh in an attempt to do that sort of thing and uh some of them have had quite a bit of work put into them, and we may be getting close. The challenge with hockey, again, it does come back to that kind of free-flowing aspect of the game and how do you actually sit down and determine what are the players doing and how can we assign value to that. And there are certain areas where you can sit there and say,

okay, we can put a value on an offensive zone face-off win or loss for example so if somebody's taking the face-off and we know that you know maybe it's worth 1 20th of a goal to win a face-off in the offensive zone we can give credit for that um you know what is it worth to to execute a clean zone entry well you know now you're getting into areas where you don't really have that information available to you. You've got to track it separately, but hopefully soon we will. But then there's all this other stuff that goes into playing hockey and to being an effective player that not only does it not show up in a box score, it's very difficult to track in any way. And so the problem that we've run into is that, as I say, there have been some fairly detailed attempts at this. And

certainly when you look at what happened in baseball, that roadmap is there. I mean, we don't have to solve the problem of how do you even do this in the first place, because we've got a pretty good model in front of us with what baseball did. The problem with hockey is that the efforts that have been made so far, when you ran the numbers and when you looked at the results a lot of times the results that you got uh really didn't match up with uh with what you might think was uh what you might expect to see you can run the numbers and you say okay here's my list of the 10 best players uh based on my stat and if five of those players are third liners who aren't even really considered

especially good good players even if whether you're on to something or not that's just going to be rejected out of hand by by most of the people who look at it and then that's happened a couple of times so um they're they're still working at it they're still trying to refine it trying to get it uh um and uh you know try to get something they can use and then the the other unfortunate thing is that even when they have that stat it won't be like baseball where you can go back and say, okay, now let's run this number on everyone who's ever played and start having some really fun debates and seeing some really fun results about who's the all-time leader among pitchers, how does Babe Ruth measure up to Willie Mays and Williams.

You won't be able to do that in hockey. It's going to be something that we're just going to have going forward or going back the last few years, but at least it'll be something. It's just a question of who gets there first. So one thing that has sort of struck me as interesting is that in this rash this summer to hire stack guys for their front offices, a couple of teams have demanded that, or demanded, but, but required that those writers like Tyler Dello and, and Daryl Metcalf take down their, their stat sites. So we don't even have the archives anymore. Now, like when somebody gets hired from baseball perspectives to,

to go work for the Astros or whatever, his work is still up. Is there a worry that that'll damage the institutional memory of the stat movement, maybe make it slower for other people to pick up the torch? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was a big loss, especially when you look at, like you mentioned, the Tyler Delos, the Cam Chirons, those guys who had done work on their own sites. Now, in some cases, they had also done work for other sites where those sites would own that content, and that content is still available. But somebody like Tyler had just this treasure trove of awesome stuff on his site that had gone back years,

and one of the conditions when they were hired was you've got to take all that down because we want the team that's hiring you, we want to be the only ones who have access to that. It was tough. The situation with Darrell Metcalf was even more interesting. He was the guy who created this website called Extra Skater, which wasn't really a site that had broken new ground as far as what information it was offering. He didn't invent a bunch of new stats.

What he did was he was the first one to take everything and put it in a nice, easy-to-use package where even regular fans or your typical media member could go in and find this stuff very easily, and it was presented in this very nice visual way. And the Maple Leafs, when they hired him, they shut that site down. They didn't want anyone else in other front offices, anywhere else around the league being able to use it,

even though there was nothing on there necessarily that you couldn't find somewhere else. They didn't want that one-stop shop to be up there. So I don't know what that looks like going forward. I don't know if you'll start seeing. It wouldn't surprise me if you've got people who are kind of secretly maybe scraping some of these sites in the background to make sure that that information is still there and still lives somewhere. But I do think it'll be less of an issue going forward because like I say, the guys

who aren't getting hired by teams these days are getting hired by major media properties. So when you've got entities like TSN or SportsNest who are hiring these guys, they're going to make sure that they own that content going forward and that it's not going to be something where they're going to have to shut it down. A year from now, if some NHL team comes calling and makes somebody an offer they can't refuse. That's interesting because that seems like something that's actually been sort of slow to come to baseball, at least on broadcast. You see some of that stuff, but that's been a slower movement than teams embracing these things. But I wanted to ask you, what's the understanding of how far teams are ahead of the community, if at all? Because you look back at, say, the beginning

of Baseball Prospectus, and there was this snarky tone, everyone writing with the assumption that they knew better than the teams and were looking at things that the teams weren't looking at. And to an extent, there was truth to that. And now that teams have sort of swallowed a large portion of the community, including the Maple Leafs, right? The team that you root for, you were just talking about Daryl Metcalf, and he went to them, and they had been kind of the butt of jokes of the sabermetric community, right? They were, I mean, Michael's a- They were the Phillies of the NHL. Exactly, right. Michael's a Phillies fan, so it would be like if the Phillies suddenly hired every publicly available sabermetrician.

So is there a sense that teams are ahead of the public research? And if so, by how much? You know, I don't know that there's a great sense either way, because what's happened is over the last couple of years, as this stuff has started to get attention and, you know, you talked about that kind of snarky aspect of we know better. That certainly was present in hockey as well, but then there have been voices saying, you know what, teams are doing stuff. But it's always been very secretive.

So you always hear these references to, well, you know, some teams are doing it, some teams are not. But the teams that are doing it won't talk about what they're doing. They don't want anybody to know what numbers they're looking at. There are certainly teams that have, to some extent, indicated that they were looking at similar stuff. There are certainly teams that, anytime you hear anyone from the LA Kings just talk generally about strategy and how they approach the game,

it's very clear that they're on a very similar wavelength to a lot of the stuff that's been going on and probably have been for a little while. Then there are other teams, like you say, like the Maple Leafs, who not only were they not doing this stuff, but they were proudly not doing it. I mean, the Maple Leafs have always been a very, or I shouldn't say have always been,

but over the last six or seven years have been a very old school organization in terms of their thinking. They hired Brian Burke as a GM, and Brian Burke is absolutely one of those, you know, if you can't beat him in the alleys, you can't beat him in the ice sort of guys. And he's gone now, but a lot of the legacy he's left behind, a lot of the people he hired are still there. And the Maple Leafs, they would just infuriate people whenever they talked about this stuff

because it wasn't just a case of saying, we're not doing it. They almost seemed proud to not be doing it. At one point, their current general manager, Dave Nonis, basically said, look, we've had this great big chunk of money set aside as our analytics budget for years, and we don't spend it because we don't see any value in it. You had other people who would go on and say, these stats are nonsense. We don't look at them. Well, that all changed this summer.

They hired Brendan Shanahan as the new president of the team, and he came in, didn't really clean house, but certainly removed a few people, hired a few, didn't just hire an analytics group, mind you, hired a new assistant general manager, 28-year-old kid out of the OHL who had a lot of background in this sort of thing, basically, to put it in baseball terms, almost kind of like hiring the Theo Epstein sort of guy, or at least somebody who had the potential to be that. And he sort of changed the course. And, of course, now the Toronto Maple Leafs are saying that they were looking at this stuff all along.

They're saying, you know, oh, yeah, we had our own analytics. Nobody believes them. You know, they're clearly just kind of seeing which way the wind is blowing and covering their tracks. But, you know, there are still some teams that, you know, when you talk to people who aren't doing very much. But I think just about every team now is at least looking at this stuff and aware of it.

And, you know, I think it's at the point where if you're a GM and you're not interested in this stuff at all, at some point your owner is going to ask you why we're not looking at the same information everyone else is. From there, what are people doing with it? It's hard to say because, like I said, nobody wants to actually go on the record and talk about what they're actually doing. Okay. Well, I feel much more informed. My Canadian side is satisfied.

Thank you very much, Sean. Thanks for having me. All right. So you can find Sean's work at Grantland. I will link to the post that we were discussing on the blog post at BP and in the Facebook group. You can also find him on Twitter at Down Goes Brown. You can find his other writing at downgoesbrown.com. And a lot of the best writing from that site is collected in The Best of Down Goes Brown, a book that I think would be of interest to even some non-hockey fans. I

looked at some of it and there's an excellent piece called A Transcript of Every Hockey Game Ever Broadcast, which you will definitely, it will sound familiar to baseball fans because it's not that different from every baseball game ever broadcast. So check that out. Please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference, by going to baseballreference.com, subscribing to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discount price of $30 on a one-year subscription. And we will be back with another show tomorrow.