The Number Crunching Game

Billy Beane has revolutionized the way baseball GM's put together teams based on his system of Moneyball which is refined analysis of players performance numbers. There are those who believe the same approach could be used in hockey.... Moneypucks.

Hockey, like most sports, has scads of numbers and statistics. But there is not yet a well-established system that tracks these numbers to tell you what kind of player brings you the best results in the course of a year.

The obvious point, one that many in baseball made in response to Moneyball, is that talent wins. If you do not have the horses in any sport, you won't cross the line first. Yet it is the refinement in interpreting just what "talent" means that gave Moneyball its validity.

... Perhaps it is time for the hockey geeks to put away the fighting tapes and work on a program that connects hockey's statistical dots to wins.

I think with the introduction of the salary cap to the NHL landscape you'll see some GM's start to explore the possibilities of applying Moneyball to hockey.

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Let's see, something else happened over the weekend, what was it? Ooooh yeah I remember now... it was revealed that the...

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.....Other than that I guess nothing much else happened.