Here's a story about the company Chayka started, Stathletes:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/sports/...043/story.html
Quote:
As Stathletes was taking off, Laine became aware that many teams were using the Neilson model on scoring chances and tracking other things as well. “They’re not necessarily putting it in a data base and organizing it, but they’re all collecting or analyzing the game in their own way.
“(NHL) people that were sort of against the analytics movement when we were talking to them, they still looked at the game analytically. They looked at the game in a way that we could measure, they just never thought about it that way, so there was a big training or educational period with what we were doing. Why do you call that player gritty? What is he doing that is gritty? And they would tell us all their definition of why they think he’s gritty and we would say, ‘Well, we can measure that very black and white through this, this, this and this.’ ”
In recent years, many of the analytics people hired by NHL teams have come from the data mining school, doing work based on NHL data on shots-at-net plus-minus metrics such as Corsi and Fenwick numbers, which are popular metrics with many fans.
“I think they have their place,” Lane says of the Corsi and Fenwick metrics. “The fact of the matter is there’s only so much data available to the general public and people are trying to do the best they can with what they have. That’s why we built this business, to bring more data and do better.”
But, again, one problem with mining the NHL’s data is its unreliability, Lane says. “We looked at the data that was out there and we didn’t think it was reliable enough. We had a philosophy of ‘Garbage in, garbage out,’ no matter how good you are at manipulating it. So that was one of the big reasons for us collecting our own data. We also looked at the mathematical analysis and whether it was the regression outputs to prove stuff. From our mathematical background we just didn’t feel they were strong enough, and we felt that in a market where players are getting paid the salaries they are, to make decisions off those types of numbers is not something I would be comfortable doing, and that’s why we felt the needed to be more and why we built this.”
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They started with two NHL clients: The Canucks and an unnamed Eastern Conference team. The Eastern team has an exclusive contract for the entire Eastern Conference, but multiple Western teams are now using their service.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Flames are one of them. This sounds a lot like what the Flames have been having Chris Snow do for a number of years.