from Amazon
Monday, June 08, 2009
Mike Smith
I was the sole developer in what Mike Smith, former NHL GM, is talking about here. Through 2007, anyway. I’m not sure who is involved today.
In the fall of 2005 I helped a business consultant, Richard Coleman, put together a company, Coleman Analytics, which provides hockey analytics to NHL GMs and coaches. It’s pretty much hush-hush. We limit the number of franchises because we believe the information is too valuable to let every team have it.
The clients that use it keep that fact confidential and we do as well. This is easier than you would assume since most GMs have little interest in our data. Every coach who has seen it has wanted it, but unfortunately some of their GMs weren’t so keen on the idea. It’s called teamwork – or is it the lack thereof?
It is my work here that made me realize that acting in a “part-time” capacity (consultant) for many teams made more sense than working full-time for one team. Simply put, you can leverage your work across multiple teams. You get to price yourself lower, per team, and make up for it by getting more teams.
It was a great experience. I created as good a database system as I ever wrote, in hockey or baseball. I wrote tons of scripts to download and parse data. The NHL data itself was not always clean, and I spent alot of time cleaning up all the files. Lots of good stuff came out of that work.
I was reading something in your archives the other day about your work in hockey and saw that you mentioned you were part of a three person operation, with one guy at the front end who had great access to NHL teams and kind of wondered if you were part of that group. As you may be aware, there were discussions about that post from Smith at my site and at Lowetide’s - are you able to talk about it at all?