Canada's game is on the cusp of a revolution. No, not the salary cap, or anything like that. Rather, the way hockey is analyzed and enjoyed by the viewer is about to radically change.
Your stock portfolio may bear witness to the emergent AI revolution. “The new industrial revolution has begun” appears to be AI's answer to the first shot at Fort Sumter. It had been bubbling under the surface but in 2024, the world has awoken to the profound importance that AI will play in shaping the 21st century. The hockey world is no exception.
The University of Waterloo has been doing important trendsetting work on the subject of using AI to streamline game footage analysis and data collection. Today, much of this analysis is manual and a hockey game is far too fast and dynamic for one person to capture all the key details. The tool they're using at Waterloo relies on a neural network that was trained to watch and analyze games through being fed game footage frame by frame as well as team and player data. Such a tool, once further refined, could revolutionize the ability of broadcast analysts to give accurate, meaningful analysis in real-time and also the ability of coaches and scouts to review and prepare for games. It would be the greatest leap forward in this area since Roger Neilson first started using video to prepare his teams for games.
Like in baseball, AI is also being leveraged as a powerful new ally in the field of injury prevention and rehabilitation. Hockey is one of the most physically grueling sports on earth. Therefore, sophisticated monitoring of a player's health is of paramount importance. We want to identify and proactively address early indicators of player injuries. This involves keeping tabs on movement patterns, heart rates and personalizing conditioning programs to create as optimal an athlete as possible.
Teams also need to make money, and a big part of this is ensuring the fan experience is a good one. AI powered chart bots are already being deployed by some sports teams to address fan questions about things like tickets and promo events. The next step is teams using AI to power the most sophisticated and efficient marketing campaigns to date and make it cheaper and faster to drive merchandise sales, ticket sales, social media clout, and so on. On the broadcast side of things, this means increasingly an immersive fan experience the likes of which has not yet been experienced from our TV sets, or even at the rink itself.
And lastly, there is the roster building side of things. Like in other sports, hockey GMs are adopting an increasingly data driven approach to roster management and player development. Advanced analytics are less advanced in hockey than in say, baseball, but hockey's answers to sabermetrics are emerging, with metrics like expected goals making their way into the wider discourse. As such, front offices need much data analysis work done and a lot of this is done through scripts, macros, and whatnot. But what if all of this could simply be done automatically without any need to have people code, test and debug scripts? What if a machine could give a GM in a neat dashboard everything he needs to know? What if AI could help create powerful new predictive analysis methodology to inform a GM what players he should and should not target? That is where baseball is going and hockey is not far behind.
The AI age will be one where computing power will become such that human progress and industrial capacity will advance at a pace never before seen in our history. Sports, including hockey, will not be immune to the coming AI revolution. Teams are already jockeying for position to stay ahead of the curve. The first computer and internet age changed the way teams are run in the last thirty years. The data and accelerated computing age promises to once again overhaul the way pro hockey is run in ways that we are only beginning to be able to imagine. We live in exciting times.
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