I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to attend the last three years of the RIT Sports Analytics Conference. The first year I went, I was nervous to meet people whose work I admired. I was afraid that nobody would want to talk to this new person that few people knew and who was just starting to learn about the field.
I could not have been more wrong.
First of all, congratulations if you got accepted. Kudos to you if you got accepted to a conference like RITSAC, a very well run and well curated conference. This is a wonderful accomplishment, and you should be proud. Tell your friends and family. Celebrate. Bask in the adoration.
Well, maybe not that last part. But you get my point. Your work clearly has some perceived value and is based on solid reasoning and data analysis.
So now what?
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Hockey-Graphs is excited to be co-hosting the Seattle Hockey Analytics Conference as VanHAC moves south of the border for the year! We will be working with the University of Washington and NHLtoSeattle.com.
On Saturday, November 4th, we hosted the first ever Hockey Graphs Analytics Data Sprint. The idea was teams had 6 hours to take raw data and do something interesting with it as a trial for the Vancouver Hockey Analytics Conference. Local teams met up at La Casita here in Vancouver, but we also had online participants as well.
Thanks to all of the people who helped put it together, and thank you to all those who participated, especially those who travelled from as far away as New York.
In this post we link to the finished results and you can see the winners. Their work is in a github repo which you can use for your own data analysis!
Hockey-Graphs is once again excited to be co-hosting the Vancouver Hockey Analytics Conference for its third year! We will be working with the Vancouver Canucks, Simon Fraser University and the great team at CanucksArmy.com.
This year we’ll have a 3 day conference, with 2 days of talks, tutorials, keynotes and great discussions. There will also be plenty of social events throughout the weekend.
All knowledge levels are welcome. If you are interested, you are more than welcome! Nobody will be turned away, everyone is encouraged to attend.
Date: March 2nd to 4th, 2018
Location: Downtown Vancouver, Canada
Website: https://hockey-graphs.com/events/vanhac18/
The Call for Presentations is currently open with a deadline of January 8th, 2018. See the website for more details or go here to submit your talk.
Registration has yet to open as we tabulate the final costs to host the venue, among other factors. Check back here or on Twitter, or add yourself to our mailing list, for more information on when it will open. (Note: Expect participants to be capped at around ~175 people.)
Watch the VanHAC page for updates as they are released!
Hello all,
Josh and I want to off the top thank everyone for making VanHAC17 such a wonderful success. The Vancouver Canucks for hosting, catering, and supplying so much support and resources. Our financial sponsors Canucks Army and HockeyData. Our helpful registration desk volunteers. Our panelists Dan Murphy and Dimitri Filipovic. Our presenters (more on them below). And a huge applause and thank you to our wonderful keynote speaker: Meghan Chayka.
Let me break down how this conference and the weekend surrounding it went from my perspective.
In the salary cap world, hockey is a game of resource allocation. Each team is given a set amount of money to acquire players. Consequently, hockey inevitably becomes about tradeoffs. When building a team, every dollar spent on one player is a dollar that can’t be used for another. There are certainly times when you can get a bargain, but you will always have to make decisions about spending priorities.
One frequent prioritization question is high-end quality vs. depth. How much should a team focus on the very top of its lineup vs. ensuring it has adequate depth? Should a team maximize its strengths or minimize its weaknesses?
This question is relevant to many front office decisions. The Bruins traded Tyler Seguin for several assets, and some argued that the Penguins should do the same with Evgeni Malkin to improve their depth. As Steven Stamkos approached free agency, many teams were deciding just how much they would be willing to pay him while knowing that signing him would inevitably come at a cost lower down the roster.
We can think through these tradeoffs by studying talent distribution within a team. If you hold total talent constant, is it better to have a team where everyone is equally talented, or one where a few elite players are trying to shelter a few terrible ones? We know from current Florida Panthers consultant Moneypuck that contending teams have at least one elite player, but to my knowledge, very little work has been done on the broader question of total team structure. This article mirrors my presentation at the Vancouver Hockey Analytics Conference 2017, at which I dug into talent inequality within teams to demonstrate:
It’s been a little while, as we’ve been sorting out venue costs and sponsorship, but today we can officially give you information on how and when to get tickets for VanHAC.
Hockey Graphs is excited to announce that we will be co-hosting the Vancouver Hockey Analytics Conference (#VanHAC) with the Vancouver Canucks along with HockeyData and Canucks Army.
Date: Saturday, March 11th, 2017
Location: Rogers Arena, Vancouver, Canada
Website: HockeyGraphs.com/VanHAC
The call for speakers is currently open with a deadline of January 10th, 2017. See the website for more details or go here to submit your submission.
Registration has yet to open as we tabulate the final costs to host the venue, among other factors. Check back here or on Twitter for more information when it will open. (Note: Expect participants to be capped at around 100 people.)
Watch the VanHAC page for updates as they are released!
Image courtesy of picswallpaper.com
Two of Hockey Graphs contributors, Josh Weissbock and MoneyPuck, along with two Simon Fraser University professors, Tim Schwartz and Oliver Schulte, are organizing the first ever Vancouver Hockey Analytics Conference (#VanHAC).
This is not the first hockey analytics conference, as there have been a few popping up in recent years, including those in Alberta, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Washington DC and Rochester.
Hockey Graphs 