LeBrun: NHL exec surprised advanced stats less impactful than first thought

Pierre LeBrun was on Vancouver’s TSN 1040 on Tuesday afternoon.

As part of a larger discussion on the coming inclusion of more advanced stats by the NHL:

"I’m trying to convince this guy to go on the record. I suspect that he doesn’t want to for awhile.

“But I’ll tell you, I talked to one team executive a couple of months ago whose team has, for a long time, been involved in advanced stats. They embraced this way before a lot of other teams.

“And he’s now come to the conclusion after all of these years they’re not nearly as impactful as they first thought they were.

“And I tell you, if I could ever convince this guy to go on the record, it would be a headline.”

Sometimes that’s where math and science leads you right? Not necessarily to what you were hoping was a eureka new method, but as a way of disproving...

“And I think what they’re doing is they’re trying to play with the numbers now to at least give them some information they can at least use, but I think over the course of time they ended up being surprised that it didn’t end up being everything they thought it would be, I guess would be the way to put it.”

Source: TSN 1040/ Transcript: Nichols on Hockey