[Jay Random]

In a sense, sports can be thoroughly quantified: that is, it's possible, with enough sensors and enough data-collecting power, to come up with metrics describing everything that goes on in a particular sporting activity. But this in itself accomplishes nothing, except to give wanking material to stats nerds.

Consider chess. The world's best chess players are now computers, merely because they operate very, very fast and can churn through millions of possible move combinations without running out the chess clock, while human players, though much more efficient, work much more slowly. But there is still no system that can compute the optimum strategy for chess; the number of possible games is far too large. The problem isn't computable.

In a sense, hockey is like a game of chess in which all the pieces move at once, each piece makes its own decisions, and every piece can make hundreds of moves in the course of the match – as opposed to the 30 or 40 total moves each player makes in a typical chess game. On top of that, no two pieces in hockey are exactly alike, because every player's reaction times, intelligence, and athletic skills are slightly different. Even if, by some miracle of processing power, someone could calculate an optimum strategy for hockey, human players would never be able to carry it out perfectly, and the essential element of athletic competition would remain.