Puck and Player Tracking: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

The National Hockey League (NHL) is using a puck and player tracking (PPT) system that records the location of the puck and players during games. Data is recorded 12 times per second for each player on the ice and 60 times per second for the puck. There are tremendous opportunities for the use of this data, including the development of new metrics that can be used for a variety of purposes. However, there are also significant challenges that need to be overcome. In this talk I first describe several such challenges and opportunities. I then focus on one of the opportunities we have been exploring, which is to develop several passing metrics. I briefly describe some of these metrics, the intuition behind them and outline some possible uses for a few metrics. This is talk is based on joint work with David Radke, Daniel Radke and Alex Pawelczyk.