On my list of things to do is to go to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference. It’s a shame it’s not a month or two later or I’d tie it into a Red Sox road trip without difficulty. Anyway, they’ve posted the videos of this year’s conference on their site. Brian Burke appeared on the Next Generation Sports Management and Ownership panel and offered this:
“Our talent evaluation system doesn’t lend itself to statistical analysis as much as it does in other sports. Film doesn’t have the same value in our sports as much as it does in other sports because the game is so much less predictable…Every year I get probably five papers from kids at MIT, Harvard and Duke and they say that they’ve come up with a new system for evaluating players. You go through it and you realize that it doesn’t lend itself to the analysis of what we need to do to pick a player, when we draft a player. We try to identify a lot of things that don’t lend themselves to statistical analysis and they’re very team related. So someone’ll say ‘Well this guy has the best +/- in the league’; well, if you’re on a good team, you’re going to have a positive +/-. It’s a meaningless statistic, unless you’re on a horseshit team and you have a decent +/-, then it might mean something. We don’t do as much statistical analysis as they do in baseball, for example.”
Daryl Morey, GM of the Houston Rockets, chimed in with: “I detect opportunity. The first person to convince Brian Burke will be the next big thing in hockey on the analytics side.”