BOSTON — As I detailed yesterday, I was down in Boston over the weekend at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. And as promised, here are some of the more interesting stories or things I learned when I was down in Beantown.
Excluding baseball, most of the major sports panels can be boiled down into a couple of major thoughts.
One of the first panels I attended featured Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke, Peter Chiarelli of the Boston Bruins, and Michael Shuckers, who is the Associate Professor of Statistics at St. Lawrence University.
As always, Burke was cantankerous (although part of that may have been due to the fact that he would fire his head coach later in the day). And while he may have been cantankerous, he was also enlightening at times.
At one point he said,
Burke: in hockey stats are like lampposts to a drunk. Useful for support but not really for illumination.
— Kevin Nielsen (@Kevin_H_Nielsen) March 2, 2012
I doubt that most analysts would argue with him there.
Later in the day, during the baseball session, Indians president Mark Shapiro said, “No machine ever spits out an answer. They do spit out a lot of great ideas.”
Back to the hockey panel.
At one point Shuckers told the panel that he believed faceoffs were overrated. Only one in 100 ever result in a scoring chance. The panel immediately direided him and dismissed him after that, and he seemed rattled from that point forth.
It’s not that what he was saying was necessarily wrong, but it was how he presented the idea to the rest of the panel that was wrong.
This was really a running theme throughout the conference.
How do the analysts get their ideas across without offending the higher-ups or confusing upper management, players or coaches? Analysts aren’t claiming to be superior, but that the languages the two sides speak are very different.
One way that the soccer analysts do so is by cutting out some of the numerical data in their reports, replacing some of the math with video.
“Making it relevant for the players is one of the real challenges for us,” said Steve Houston, head of technical scouting for Hamburg F.C.
Steve Brown, an analyst at Everton Football Club, took it a step further when he explained, “The data and numbers are one thing, but if you don’t have the video to go with it, it will be a tough sell to players.”
Houston said he is amazed at how far the use of stat analysis has jumped over the last year, but Scott McLachlan, the head of international scouts for Chelsea, said there was still a ways to go: “I still think there’s a glass ceiling as far as team’s seeing value in analytics.”
While there were many ideas and guests at the conference over the weekend, one of the major flaws of the invited speakers was that they were unwilling to share ideas.
It is understandable as many of the speakers had opponents luring nearby, but it was frustrating nonetheless.
Fanalytics: One of the more interesting panels over the weekend was entitled Fanalytics and it featured Tim Brosnan (Major League Baseball), Drew Carey (Seattle Sounders), Nathan Hubbard (Ticketmaster), Jonathan Kraft (Patriots), and John Walsh of ESPN.
They discussed three major subjects which should be of interest to readers.
The first was ticket pricing, leftover tickets and the secondary market.
Hubbard: The secondary ticket market is successful because we suck at pricing.
— Kevin Nielsen (@Kevin_H_Nielsen) March 3, 2012
He said that 25 per cent of tickets for sporting events go unsold and that teams should be using dynamic pricing. Dynamic pricing would be comparable to how airlines price tickets. The cost of the tickets should go up or down depending on demand.
Hubbard’s example was the Jeremy Lin effect. Teams need to be prepared to boost prices for games that suddenly attract special interest and high demand, which makes sense, but there are a couple of flaws with the idea.
Kraft believes that “dynamic pricing devalues the brand for baseball.”
Teams are also afraid of upsetting season ticketholders who will have paid a set rate for their tickets and might suddenly feel cheated if the person next to them had spent significantly less for their seats.
Clearly another danger for fans would be that teams occasionally push prices up to sell seats but never cut prices (think: the cost of gasoline for your automobile).
Brosnan said, “Proper pricing is going to take care of the secondary market.”
Maybe, but it hasn’t worked thus far.
Another issue that the panel looked at was the effect of social media at the games and for teams and leagues.
During last year’s home run derby, Major League Baseball had players tweet live during the games. And when certain players sent messages, the TV ratings spiked, according to Brosnan.
He was not worried about the effect of social media on ratings, explaining, “I think we are going to be able to use social space to drive people to television.”
Hubbard said:
in-game twitter activity up seven times year over year.
— Kevin Nielsen (@Kevin_H_Nielsen) March 3, 2012
He brought up another interesting point about Twitter’s value.
“On average, every time someone tweets their seats, it is worth $20 to Ticketmaster.”
When asked the value of tweets versus Facebook posts, he said the posts were only worth about $6.
The last issue that teams are facing with regard to social media is having enough bandwith to deal with the growing use of electronic devices at sporting events.
Kraft said the Patriots have beefed up the bandwith at Gillette Stadium but that it would cost tens of millions of dollars in order to effectively allow every customer to have total access to everything, like video on demand.
There is one silver lining to that note, however, as he said, “Analytics will allow teams to see what their fans are trying to do.”
The plus side to that is, teams will be able to better service the fans, but the minus side is that fans’ privacy will become an issue.
NOTES AND QUOTES: Houston: “About 99 per cent of scouting is who you don’t sign.”
Rockets general manager Darryl Morey on coaches being fired at a higher rate than GMs: “I think GMs should be fired more often.”
Saints owner/executive vice-president Rita Benson LeBlanc’s Super Bowl ring was almost the size of her hand. Even from the back of the room it looked massive.
More Morey. This time on the star player’s influence: “Power flows to the top 20 players in the (NBA). They have a bigger win impact than in other sports.”
More Houston: “There are 10,000 (soccer) players around the world. How do we effectively evaluate all of them with a staff of 10?”
Bruins general manager Peter Chiarelli: “A little more (cost) uncertainty this year, and that’s probably why there wasn’t as much movement at trade deadline.”
Chiarelli said when he was in Ottawa that the team did some research into drafting, and one of the conclusions was that “weight is much more important than height when scouting players.”
Former Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy on the Charlotte Bobcats : “They’re trying to be bad, and the league rewards it.”
Quit calling it a tv. Quit calling it a laptop. It’s just a screen. – John Skipper, ESPN president
— Kevin Nielsen (@Kevin_H_Nielsen) March 2, 2012