from Jack Todd at the Montreal Gazette,
Hockey, I’m afraid, is in for the Year of the Number. We got an early indication when Brendan Shanahan’s Toronto Maple Leafs turfed a couple of veteran hockey people in the front office to bring in Kyle Dubas, a young hotshot whose ticket to the big-time was his supposed grasp of the relatively new discipline of hockey analytics — breaking down everything that happens on the ice and attempting to quantify it through various systems. (Pittsburgh, Chicago and Los Angeles are said to have had secret analytics departments for some time. If that’s the case, maybe it’s time everyone got on board.)
Whether you think it’s a fad or the future probably depends on whether you’re a poet or an accountant. But may I remind you — accountants run the world.
Inevitably, the stats movement has spread to the media. Newspapers and TV network websites are hiring journalists who are numerate rather than literate. That sometimes results in turgid prose, written in indigestible 500-word blocks that are enough to leave any reader yearning for the glory days of this profession, when sportswriters who could barely count wrote like angels.
When I reacted to TSN’s new analytics hire last week by saying I hoped it was a fad that would die before I do, I was bombarded with angry missives calling me a useless old curmudgeon and worse.
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