BOSTON -- It was July 1, 2006, and it was the first day of work for Chris Snow as director of hockey operations with the Minnesota Wild. By the end of the day, the Wild would hand out tens of millions of dollars to free agents.
Snow, who went from writing about the Wild for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and the Boston Red Sox for the Boston Globe to the Wild front office, watched, marveling at what he saw.
"They spent, I think, like $70 million collectively on those player contracts and there wasn't a single number, aside from what the player was going to be paid, that was discussed," Snow, director of hockey analysis for the Calgary Flames, said during the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston on Friday. "Not even basic numbers."
Twelve years later, things are different. Numbers abound in hockey as the game attempts to catch up to baseball and basketball, the leaders in analytics in the sports world. Still, it's a delicate balance for those tasked with bringing data into a sport that always has seemed not quite built for it, a balance to find that data, to analyze that data and to disseminate that data.
That last one might be the most important part.
Because once that data is uncovered, it's the job of Snow, 36, to deliver it to the general manager and assistant general managers, the coaching staff and the players, in words they can understand and process. It's a task that relies on building relationships and on being able to read people.
And it relies on the right linguistic touch.
"I don't even use the word analytics that often at work because it sounds too fancy," Snow said.
Instead, his job is convincing hockey executives that his data, his concepts, will improve the team, whether that's in decision-making on the ice, in player acquisition or drafting. To do that, Snow determines the best language to get his concepts across, frames those concepts in a way that makes the data accessible, and gets others to understand what analytics are, and what they aren't.
"A lot of this information can be really confusing, and I very rarely talk in numbers," Snow said. "I almost never talk in formulas or byproducts of numbers. I talk in the language of the scouts. I talk in the language of the coaches. I try and take the numbers and turn them into hockey-playing attributes that we're talking about anyhow."
That's something former Pittsburgh Penguins and Buffalo Sabres coach Dan Bylsma said he appreciated, while participating with Snow on the "Hockey Analytics on the Fly" panel at Sloan, along with Arizona Coyotes general manager John Chayka, and Chris Boucher, the director of hockey analytics for SPORTLOGIQ.
"That's the challenge for me, in my position, is what is appropriate information and how can I disseminate what that is, and then how can I use it toward evaluation of the team and/or players and individuals," Bylsma said during the panel. "Certainly been involved with a lot of data, and have a hard time disseminating what's the important piece of information and how can I use that to evaluate the team and the players."
Snow works to eliminate that confusion, to make sure that a coach, a general manager or a scout will be able to understand necessary information and use it. In doing that, he works to blur the line between analytics and scouting, between the data and the conventional ways that teams are run.
To do that, Snow approaches other people in hockey operations and makes the numbers actionable.
"I think there's still this perception, and I deal with this perception with people I work with, including the players, that analytics is Corsi," Snow said. "I don't know if I've used the word Corsi in my seven years working in Calgary because that's not what it is. Analytics is all the ways in which a player can interact with the game."
It's separating opponents from the puck with a stick or a body. It's sustaining play. It's possession.
It's the sets of events that create possession and sustain possession, and determining which players thrive at those events, whether it's some or all or none.
It's still a battle in hockey, a sport where the discrete events are so much more limited than they are in, say, baseball, and where the best data has been available for maybe three or four years. It remains a battle inside organizations, even ones that are taking the lead on this topic, and outside, with a public that's privy to a fraction of the data that Snow and the Flames are.
"We're not really there as a sport, but just sitting there today and kind of looking around and thinking back on my very first day, it's like we're traveling that path," Snow said.
They're getting closer. They're seeing progress.
It's there in this panel at Sloan, in Snow's daily work for the Flames. It's something they can see happening on other teams, in other sports, from the Boston Red Sox of 2004 to the Houston Astros of 2017.
And it's in those Astros that Snow sees a model to emulate.
"The Astros won the World Series and a month later they posted a job for yet another analyst," he said. "The second or third component of the job description [was] what are you going to do in this job to enhance the organization's understanding of the game of baseball?
"How great is that? They just won the World Series and they're basically saying, 'We need to understand the game better than we do right now.' So that's what we're after."
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