from Matt Porter of the Boston Globe,

The Bruins are involved in the latest development, which originates from the ninth floor of the 10 Post Office Square building in Boston’s Financial District. Sports science company Catapult is working on what could be a significant step to assist those who wield pads and paddles for paychecks.

The company this month will release a new goalie analytics solution, as they call it, for the Bruins and two other NHL teams (Flyers and Kings, along with Hockey Canada) that participated in beta testing last month.

Fourteen of 32 NHL teams use Catapult’s existing data-capture technology. Players at practices wear Catapult monitors, which measure speed, force, and muscle output. Cameras capture their movement. Coaches and trainers will always listen to a player who says they’re tired or sore, but this extra data helps the Bruins and other teams build better practice plans, manage injuries, and deploy players.

Until now, time on ice, eye tests, and verbal communication have been the main factors in sussing out workloads for goalies. At Bruins, Kings, and Flyers practices and games over the last few months, Catapult CEO Will Lopes said, cameras took 360-degree footage of goalies, capturing about 900 data points per second, to measure how explosive they were over time, how often they dropped down, and how often they were in a “set” position. The goal: determine netminder-specific levels of stress and exertion.

“What we’ve heard from trainers and coaches is, it’s changing how they’re looking at load level, and how many games a goalie should play,” Lopes said. “There’s not a lot of prescriptive, predictive [data that says], we need to rest this goalie.”

The data could help teams better determine whether a goalie had a hard night at the office, or an easy one. Some nights, they’re stationary. Others, they’re scrambling.

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