The latest instalment of “the hockey establishment versus analytics” exploded yesterday, but with a twist. Instead of mainstream media types taking shots at bloggers or vice versa, a league stepped in—albeit briefly—to stoke the fire.
And so it began.
A tweet from @QMJHL directed at the ExtraSkater of Canadian Hockey League statistics, @CHLStats, set the junior hockey crowd off on social media Wednesday afternoon.
Twitter went nuts.
While there was a more-measured discussion on Reddit.
The owner of CHLstats.com has received a Cease and Desist letter from the QMJHL * /r/hockey
And a few minutes of engagement by @QMJHL ended with the deleting of tweets.
But that didn’t keep them from being disseminated.
And dissected.
But that’s not the whole story. Because @CHLStats and the man behind the site, Josh Weissbock, had been poking the bear prior to the C&D tweet. Some of those tweets have also been deleted, but live on, as all things do on the Internet.
The pokes continued after as well.
So no one is innocent here.
However, there is no doubt that what CHLStats.com is doing is dragging junior hockey into the analytics movement—even if its public personas are doing so with some smarm—and that’s only good for junior hockey in general.
While the debate over whether analytics is useful in hockey is now over, leagues are still trying to figure out how to protect what they consider their property. Last season the NHL added a rider to its fine print that essentially prohibited third-party sites from scraping data from the league’s play-by-play sheets. That is exactly what the person writing @QMJHL’s tweets yesterday would like as well.
And of course, NHL.com com now offers its own “enhanced” stats in addition to the traditional ones analytics sites have been mining for years. But the CHL doesn’t have anything of the sort, which is largely what led to the uproar—that and the error in judgement in responding to what whoever was at the @QMJHL keyboard considered attacks on the QMJHL site’s credibility and theft of its property.
Not surprisingly, analytics folks are hoping for the best.
And so should everyone in the industry. The CHL’s websites are not exactly known for doing a great job presenting stats, so any site that can help fans and media dig into things more is only a good thing.
Let’s just keep it professional.