NHL player tracking tech faces cost obstacles, NHLPA suspicion

TORONTO – Not all NHL arenas are built the same, and that’s a lesson Hank Adams and his player-tracking technology learned at the World Cup of Hockey in Air Canada Centre.

“We had an issue early on with shift times,” said Adams, CEO of Sportvision. “When players were going off to the penalty box, [the cameras] weren’t seeing their infrared tags. It was still counting their ice time as they sat there.”

The solution: Adjusting the infrared cameras and compensating, as they would in any other NHL arena. It’s trial and error for the technology, and it’s all about proving to the NHL’s suspicious minds that the player tracking revolution is worth their money and effort to implement soon.

“The tech is ready. It’s working, it’s enhancing the game,” said Adams, who said the technology could be in every arena by “next season” if the NHL gave the green light,

Player tracking technology was introduced at the 2015 NHL All-Star Game in Columbus, and showed enormous promise. A series of cameras placed around the arena tracked not only the players, who wore special tags on their sweaters that emitted a signal, but the puck itself, which had infrared sensors built into it.

The result? The opportunity to track everything from a player’s speed to the trajectory of the puck on goals to running stats like ice time. Eventually, it could help create a full digital record of a game that could be recreated in a 3-D digital environment.

The NHL has used the tech again at the All-Star Game, but the World Cup of Hockey is its biggest stress test.

“This was a really important test. To show that we could withstand the rigors of a full-on hockey game, and not just an All-Star Game. We’re past the proof of concept, but this was an important threshold,” said Adams.

But beyond showing they can do it, there are NHL team owners and others in the League that want to be sure that they should do it.

Like the issue of cost, as this technology would need to be put into all 31 arenas (when Las Vegas joins in 2017). But Adams says that’s overstated.

“It’s not a question of cost at this point,” said Adams. “Some of the stuff they came up with in cost … there was a $200 puck that they talked about. Yeah, it was $200, because there was a hundred of them. If we do 35,000 pucks you can scale it with proper manufacturing. So the costs will come down dramatically.

“I’m not under-estimating [the cost],” he said. “To put all of this equipment in stadiums is expensive. So it comes down to how we’re using the data, what the effects are going to be and what is the benefit to the fans. Is it worth it?”

Which brings us to the data. What will it be used for, and is it worth the investment?

Adams said the stats that come from player tracking will be revolutionary, as it expands the scope of the data the NHL collects, teams review and the media uses to tell a story.

What it won’t do is completely eliminate the need for game sheets or in-arena observation, which are both used to tabulate things like puck possession metrics now.

“It’ll never replace observation. We can track players and the puck, but that doesn’t tell you possession. The puck may be closer to another player, but I have possession of it. There’s always going to be an element of human intervention,” said Adams. “And we don’t classify things as a shot or a pass. That takes a human being to make that determination. It’s a subjective decision. So I don’t thing it’ll supplant that, it’ll just give them a hell of a lot more tools to come up with the insights. And it’ll bias to the math guys, ultimately.”

There’s also a sell job needed to get the NHLPA on board. The primary pitch, Adams said, is to show that player tracking can be used to benefit the healthy of the players.

“There’s this concept of player load. When they’re working out, they reach a maximum load that can exercise. As with everything, you have to build you body back up. What they’ve found out is that the traditional view on how long a player needs to rest is wrong. Actually, we should be exercising less and getting more rest,” he said.

Player tracking can, he said, help track that player load, and in theory prevent injuries from over-practicing.

But Sportvision and the NHL also have to sell the players on how the data will be used; i.e. that the playing field will be level between the players and the men who pay them.

“How is it going to be used? Is it accurate? They want to understand that this data isn’t going to be used in ways … look, if you’re a player or a player’s agent, you’d be at a MASSIVE disadvantage if the other side had access to something you didn’t have access to,” he said.

The obstacles are still there for player tracking. Adams said the next step is to get the technology into several arenas for a full season, to see how it handles that rigor and to see what accurate data can be acquired from 82 games of tracking. It’s not proof of concept, but it’s proof of execution.

The potential is undeniable. At the World Cup, we’ve seen the tech used for everything from measuring the space between penalty killers on the ice to measuring the speed of the dynamic Team North America players, which is something Rogers Sportsnet president Scott Moore wanted his broadcasters to focus on.

“I asked them, ‘Can you figure out a way to do average speed on Team North America, because they’re way faster?” he said.

The player-tracking numbers were crunched and helped tell the story of their offensive dominance.

“When you have that data and you have great storytelling commentators, you can use that,” he said.

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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

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