i applaud the move by the leafs, not because i'm a hard believer of advanced stats and their impact on hockey decisions as of today.
i like it. as the team with very deep pockets has to be creative when looking for an edge when they can't simply buy up all the talent in a cap league. This seems to be throwing money at an area that could really impact the on ice product in the short term (if the coaches use this to determine how they are executing game plans and line decisions) and/or long term (when GM using the data as a tool to determine player decisions in drafting , trade, or free agency.
i don't think any proffessional organization suffers from having too much data on hand. Investing in the group that is mining the data and creating cross reference views of the data that could lead to meaningful conclusions (working in conjunction with existing/traditional means used today), seems like a reasonable investment that i'm pretty sure all 30 teams will have done if not already then within a year or so.
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