There is an idea- or perhaps nothing so fully formed as an idea, but a sense or an impression- that advanced statistics are a new thing in hockey. The debate between quantitative and qualitative methodologies is often framed, in a narrative that goes back at least to Moneyball, as one of the new vs. the old, a bright revolution of young radicals setting fire to the staid customs of their fathers’ age.
This is both true and untrue. True, in that before recent years there existed neither the data nor the technology necessary to do the kind of work currently being done. No matter what one’s values or interests, it simply wasn’t possible in the 1970s to count all shots directed at net for every team in the NHL, then to aggregate and distribute that data widely among many different thinkers, all with extensive computing resources at their disposal. The kind of large-scale, league-wide, multi-year analyses that constitute the meat and muscle of contemporary fancystats are a product of the internet as much as of a new ideology.
But despite their limitations, there were plenty of premodern hockey men who experimented with using quantitative methods to get beneath the skin of the game. Conn Smythe, who was so traditional that his views virtually define tradition in Canadian hockey, who believed hard in good bloodlines and beating people in alleys, recorded all Leafs games on film and rewatched the footage, noting who was on the ice for which types of events in pursuit of objective data about quality of competition. Roger Neilson, dissatisfied with shots on net as a measure of team offense, kept his own count of on-ice scoring chances. And, of course, the metric for shots directed at net is named Corsi for a reason. While technological limitations made it nearly impossible for early innovators to do work on the advanced statistics of the NHL as a whole, it is clear that within franchises, some GMs and coaches have been pursuing fancystats for several decades.
