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St. Louis Blues Should Hire For Analytics Assistant

By Kate Cimini

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Over the past handful of years we’ve seen analytics gurus and fancy stats wizards not only invade the hockey community, much to our benefit, but begin to populate the upper echelons of front offices, such as in Toronto and, very recently, Arizona.

A few weeks ago Arizona made the announcement that they were hiring John Chayka as an assistant GM. Chayka is a co-founder of Stathletes, where he served as the Director of Hockey Operations. Stathletes is an analytics site based out of Ontario that offers an intensive look at an individual’s play through a particular video analysis. Among other things they offer baseline benchmarking, player comparisons, line matching, and team breakdowns.

Chayka’s work brought him to the attention of the Arizona front office. Per the official release on NHL.com,

"“John brings a unique skill set to our management team and is an important addition to our staff,” said [Coyotes GM Don] Maloney. “Chris continues to expand his role in our hockey operations department and will play a key role moving forward.”Chayka will be involved in all areas of hockey operations including NHL, minor league and amateur player evaluation as well as player development and coaching support."

This isn’t the first such hire even this year. Before that, the Toronto Maple Leafs brought the very young Kyle Dubas onboard. Dubas, who was considered shockingly young for an assistant GM at 28, has now been eclipsed by Chayka at 25. Likely the only reason Dubas received more attention for his employment by the Leafs was a) the Leafs are always big news and b) Chayka was hired during the postseason, when the only thing fans are truly interested in is who’s making it to the next round.

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The ‘Yotes and Leafs aren’t alone in turning to statistical metrics to boost their team play.

Other teams have been adding to their front office staff in a similar fashion: the Edmonton Oilers brought Tyler Dellow on to work his analytical magic and the New Jersey Devils asked the same of Sunny Mehta when they took him on in June of 2014. That four teams out of thirty have taken an interest in fancy stats seriously enough to hire those well-versed in them to front office staff in the past 12 months tells us that this isn’t a fad, and it isn’t going away. (Sorry to those fancy stats haters out there. Get on board, or get comfortable with being the cranky grandparent in the corner who grumbles about the good old days when kids were respectful and milk was five cents a gallon.

These are teams that are focused on the future of their clubs. Chayka’s work tells us that the Coyotes are serious about a years-long rebuild (in case you missed them snatching up as many future draft picks as possible during the 2015 trade deadline) and are committing at least one staff member to analyzing who to pick and who to bring up from the AHL.

St. Louis Blues Could Build For Future

While it is true that the teams who have picked up analytics experts as front office staff are in the bottom 10 of the league, wins-wise, the St. Louis Blues need a change of some sort. We’ve seen them bring back every one of their coaching staff after a pretty miserable postseason campaign — and that’s putting it mildly — and while everyone and their mother is speculating on who will show up on the Blues roster next season. Oshie, Backes, and other core names casual fans will recognize have been floated as potential trades.

But as we know, Armstrong, who can be brutally savvy when it comes to signing players, also has his blind spots. If he sees Hitchcock’s newfound love of speed as sufficient change to system that failed a team deep with talent, there may be no real roster movement either.

If so, adding an analytics guy or gal to assist the person who does the drafting makes the most sense in building for the future.

Next: In Light Of Coaching Hire, Blues Need To See Roster Changes

The Blues have already more or less committed to analytics by hiring Jim Corsi as their goalie coach in 2014. Corsi (the stat) was originally developed by Corsi (the person) as a way to measure how much work a goaltender does throughout a game. However he did not create what we now know as the Corsi statistic. Thanks to an engineer who applied it to players instead of goalies, it has morphed into a possession stat that is one of the most-used statistics in the hockey blogosphere.

And, perhaps more importantly, Hitchcock himself admitted in October of this season just how useful he found hockey analytics to Tom Timmermann of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Timmermann writes,

"Hitchcock may not seem like the type of guy to embrace advanced stats, and for a long time, he wasn’t. Now, like many in the hockey world, he has come to appreciate their benefits.“It took me a year and a half to get past being offended by somebody telling me to look past the visual,” he said. “I was (angry) about analytics coming in, but now it’s changed. I see how useful it is, but I had to get past, ‘You’re telling me …’“I take pride in being able to watch a game and understand exactly what happened, and this was information that was not making sense to me because my feel and what I wrote down on my paper wasn’t being projected. After I got my stubbornness out of the way, I looked at it and he was right, so I bought in.“We’ve won a lot of close matchups because he’s helped me make adjustments. Adjustments that I wouldn’t have made until I watched the tape and thought about it the next day. This has just sped up everything.”"

Armstrong was also an early adopter of analytics, using them regularly when he managed the Dallas Stars franchise. He continues to use the outside firm that he used with the Stars to give him insight on players and clubs, oftentimes to see how a player might fit in with the Blues.

But something clearly isn’t working for St. Louis. Their postseason failures are evident of that. At this point, finding someone to focus solely on minor league and amateur player evaluation would aid Armstrong in drafting for the future while allowing others to focus on the here-and-now.

The question isn’t “will the Blues do this,” but rather “when will the Blues do this.”

Next: Is Schmaltz The Change The Blues Need?

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