How I'd Explain My Passion for Hockey Analytics to My Crush
Explaining my obsession for Hockey Analytics to non-hockey fans around me
I am way too shy to explain to people how much of my life revolves around hockey. There is so much to unpack, and I never know where to start. So if you are here for hockey insights to sound smarter during your next hockey debate with your friends or family, I am deeply sorry, this post will be no use to you.
Instead, this is for everyone who ever asked me, “So… what do you do exactly in hockey?” and saw me freeze, trying to find the right words to describe my passion coherently in a language that’s understandable. Trust me, it’s extremely easy for me to lose people in analytics jargon like expected goals, prospect models, transitions, puck battles, distributions, or false positives. If you are still reading this, this is for you: my brother, my sister, my mom, my dad, my friend, my crush, or dear reader, who might want to see that side of me I used to hide because I thought it wasn’t cool enough.
What’s Hockey?
Let’s start at the beginning. Hockey is a sport played on ice with sticks and a rubber puck. Two teams of six players, one goalie, two defensemen, and three forwards, try to score more goals than the other in sixty minutes of pure chaos and fun.
The top league is the NHL, the National Hockey League. It has 32 teams fighting to win the sacred Stanley Cup. The season runs for 82 games, followed by the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The league takes a lot of pride in its parity. Any team can win on any given night. The team with the best player in the world doesn’t always win. It requires teamwork and a little bit of luck.
Luck is one of the elements that makes hockey so unique and fun. In addition to unpredictability, the sport mixes speed, skill, and physicality. Put all those ingredients in a blender, and you get the greatest sport on the planet. Let’s argue later.
Hockey is also a sport defined by transactions: drafts, trades, free-agent signings, and waivers. The best players, though, usually sign long-term contracts with trade protections, so stars don’t move around like they do in other major sports leagues such as the NBA or NFL. Hockey fans still find plenty of fun debating team-building and player evaluations. And when you add math to those two concepts, there’s a lot of fun to be had, at least for me.
The Genesis: Mini-Hockey and Fantasy Guides
The odds that I’d become a big hockey fan were almost zero growing up. I didn’t come from a hockey household. My parents, from Europe and Africa, didn’t hate hockey, they just didn’t care about it. I used to do everything my older brother did, but my love for hockey came out of nowhere.
In primary school, I discovered mini-hockey: little plastic sticks, a plastic ball, and scraped knees on the snow. That was the first time I was exposed to hockey. I wanted to be a goalie. I loved the logos and the gear.
I identified with P.K. Subban because I felt he looked like me. He doesn’t, really, but he is a person of color like me. I also identified with Max Pacioretty because we shared a first name. There was also a player with the same first name as my brother, so the Montreal Canadiens were the perfect team for me. I fell in love with the Canadiens during their miracle playoff run led by Jaroslav Halak in 2009–10.
Then I discovered Fantasy Hockey, a game that involves selecting players and accumulating points based on how they perform in real games. I was obsessed. I used my birthday money to buy fantasy guides, memorized every player’s stats, salary, and jersey number. I just liked looking at the data.
After that came hockey cards, more stats and more obsession, and the NHL video games, especially GM mode, where I could make trades, sign players, and build rosters. I was optimizing lineups before I even knew what data science was. I could spend days on that game. I was also obsessed with building the best hockey roster with my cards, based purely on stats.
All of this happened while I was an awful hockey player who could barely skate. But that didn’t matter. I didn’t need to be on the ice to fall in love with the game. I knew my place was off the ice.
High School: Hockey Blogs and Curiosity
When I got internet access, my world exploded. I started reading every hockey article and rumor site I could find. Eventually, I joined hockey blogs, writing about trade rumors and the Montreal Canadiens. I even spoke on a youth radio station and visited RDS, Québec’s TV sports broadcaster, dreaming of becoming a sports journalist. I used to write my articles on sheets of paper. That’s how deep it ran.
But something felt missing. Everyone could write their opinions about hockey. I wanted to back mine with graphics and stats to make my thoughts more accurate.
That’s when I discovered hockey analytics. I didn’t understand everything, in retrospect probably nothing, but I was fascinated by graphs and charts from people like Sean Tierney, Domenic Galamini Jr., Emmanuel Perry, and Sam Ventura, pioneers in the field who later went on to work in pro sports.
I started using analytics in my writing even if I barely knew what I was doing. I also created a Montreal Canadiens fan group on Facebook that grew to thousands of members.
High school wasn’t easy for me. I wasn’t living the happiest years of my life. Hockey became my refuge. In a sense, when I felt like I did not belong, writing about hockey gave me purpose.
College: Memes, Graphic Design, and Coding
In college, I got strategic. I wanted to run my own hockey blog with a built-in audience, so I bought, using money from selling my Facebook group, a dormant page called Montreal Canadiens Memes. I immediately caused chaos by announcing it would become my blog platform.
Fans revolted and started unliking the page in large numbers. So I backtracked, downloaded Photoshop, and started actually making memes to save my investment.
Surprisingly, it worked. The Instagram account grew from 100 to over 15,000 followers. I learned social media growth strategies, brand partnerships, and graphic design. Eventually, I got bored of memes and started making hockey posters instead. It became an obsession: I wanted to become a graphic designer.
Later, I discovered I could generate graphics automatically using code, perfect for things like pre-game rosters and standings. I wanted to know how. So I downloaded the most popular programming language: Python.
And then everything changed. I realized I could analyze hockey data with code. That was it. I was hooked.
Even though I was studying accounting, not math, I spent my nights learning programming, scraping data, and building my first hockey models. My grades suffered, but I didn’t care. During the pandemic, creating hockey graphs became therapy, a way to stay grounded when everything else was uncertain.
What About Now?
Fast forward to today. I finally got to work in professional hockey for the first time. I’ve collaborated with incredibly smart people, built models I once only dreamed of, and learned more than I thought possible. I also discovered how much I still have to learn.
I’m still coding almost every day. Still writing when inspiration strikes. Still growing. Still that same kid who fell in love with the game through mini sticks, fantasy guides, a miracle playoff run, player cards, and a video game.
I’ve started mentoring university students who want to get into hockey analytics, helping them navigate the same messy, nonlinear path I took.
And even though I think about hockey all the time, I’ve tried to find balance, like learning Mandarin. I can say bǐsài 比赛 for “game” and bīngqiú 冰球 for “hockey.” One day I’ll talk about hockey analytics in Mandarin too. I promise.
Right now, I’m working on a few big solo projects. Not for a job in the NHL, just to answer my own questions about the game. Because at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about for me: curiosity, creativity, and love.
Final Thoughts
If I had to explain my passion for hockey analytics to my crush, I’d still tell her it’s a long story. I didn’t fall in love by playing hockey. I fell in love by drawing it, writing it, counting it, isolating it, projecting it, and living it. I followed my heart and let it guide me, and so far, it’s never failed.