By Jeremy Rutherford/The Athletic
The NHL’s long-awaited puck and player tracking system, delayed by a change in partners last year, is finally ready for primetime.
When Edmonton’s Connor McDavid and the rest of NHL All-Stars took the ice at Enterprise Center Friday night, they were wearing an extra piece of equipment. It’s a tag sewn into the back of their sweaters that, along with a puck that has a built-in sensor, will tell how fast the players are skating, passing and shooting.
The technology was used in the skills competition, including the 3-on-3 women’s game, and will be shown on NBC and Rogers in the NHL All-Star Game Saturday.
“We have been working fast and furious on the infrastructure side of things, getting the cameras installed, calibrating the system, and conducting tests in every arena for the past several months and are now on the precipice of having a live utilization of that system during All-Star weekend,” said Dave Lehanski, the NHL’s executive vice president of business development and innovation. “Those moments are always a great marker, and even though you test them over and over and over again, it is great to see the utilization of the system on-air.”
The NHL was scheduled to unveil puck and player tracking at the start of the 2019-20 season, as The Athletic’s Jesse Granger wrote last January after testing in a game in Vegas. But later last year, the league left the company Jogmo over what commissioner Gary Bettman called “organizational and financial challenges” and moved forward with SportsMEDIA Technology (SMT).
The switch delayed league-wide implementation of the system from the start of the season to the start of the 2020 playoffs. But it will be fully functional for All-Star weekend, then ready to go in all 16 arenas in the postseason and the remaining 15 teams at the start of the 2020-21 regular season.
The unveiling of technology that will change the way the game is consumed and measured statistically – not to mention the opportunities that will open in the world of sports gambling – is later than the NHL had hoped. Lehanski, however, believes that it’s a blessing in disguise because SMT is a company the league has had a longstanding relationship with in statistical and analytical capacities, as well as the fact that tracking technology has been even further developed since the scheduled debut.
The foundation of the system created by the league’s partners will allow cameras strategically placed in arena catwalks to connect with the puck and the devices worn by the players to generate coordinates and data points that will feed raw material into a machine-learning algorithm and produce instantaneous statistical information and video replays.
There are two essential pieces of equipment involved: The puck, which has six lighting tubes around the All-Star logo; and a player tag, which in this case will be used by Blues captain Alex Pietrangelo this weekend.
While the puck has been re-manufactured to include the technology, it’s still made of solid vulcanized black rubber, remains three inches in diameter and weighs between 5.5 and 6 ounces.
“Same materials, size, weight, it just has those extra light tubes in it,” Horstman said. “The same company makes the rubber and does the logo, so nothing will be different. We’ve tested them with air guns, shooting it against boards, posts, glass … the rebounds are all the same as compared to a regular puck. So it performs just like the standard puck does today.”
The NHL and SMT have even worked out the kinks that occurred when freezing the pucks and trying to track.
“When we first started testing the frozen puck, we did learn from those mistakes,” Hortsman said. “But we’ve frozen them colder than we normally do – 17 degrees is what we do in the freezers, I believe – and no impact whatsoever.”
When the pucks were used during testing in Vegas last season, players said they felt “bouncier,” but the league has no such evidence.
“I think after any game, you can get a couple of players to say the puck was bouncy or complain about normal puck luck,” said Grant Nodine, a vice president of technology for the NHL, along with Keith Hortsman. “I view it as exactly the same thing as Gene Hackman at the end of ‘Hoosiers,’ getting the guy to get up on the guy’s shoulders and holding the tape measure to the basket in the giant gym that they had never played in and saying, ‘How tall is it? It’s 10 feet, just like our gym back home.’”
But that doesn’t mean he and Horstman won’t welcome criticism.
“You’re going to get feedback and you need to take feedback and make sure the product is getting better and better,” Horstman said. “It would be silly to not listen to it when it comes in. Let’s make the game better and if there is something wrong with the puck, or something we’re doing, we want to hear that and we want to make the system better.”
The pucks are battery-operated but not rechargeable because, generally speaking, the battery life will be longer than the puck will be used in a game.
“The pucks don’t survive more than four or five minutes of gameplay without getting significantly nicked up,” Horstman said. “I think if you were to look at most pucks that get taken out of play, you’d be surprised at how beat they get up. Every whistle, we change pucks.”
And while the pucks do cost a bit more, the difference isn’t that drastic, so you won’t be asked to return one if it comes into the crowd.
“Somebody once asked me, ‘How many pucks do we lose a game?’” Horstman said. “I said, ‘I don’t know, 10?’ No, it’s actually two to three, that’s it, because of the netting.”
There will be another minor difference with the pucks. They will be designated with specific numbers for tracking purposes, which will obviously make it easier to know who’s in possession of the right puck on goals like Patrick Kane’s Stanley Cup-clinching goal for Chicago in Game 6 of the 2010 Cup final against Philadelphia.
“Yeah, you could potentially validate pucks that were involved in great plays,” Nodine said.
The tags that players will wear All-Star weekend and beginning in the playoffs look similar and are about the same size as the theft-security devices that stores put on clothing.
“Every jersey has an Adidas logo (on the back shoulder area), and it’s a patch that’s sewn into the jersey,” Horstman said. “The shoulders are two-ply, so it actually made a perfect casing for it. We had Adidas sew in a pouch, so in that trapezoid (the tag) sits in the player’s jersey with the emitter facing out.”
One potential problem could be players using multiple sweaters during a game, but the NHL has prepared for that, having two to three tags available per player per game.
“I think a couple players use four jerseys per game, which implies he’s changing a jersey in-period, but we’ll be ready,” Horstman said. “The equipment manager will have a tag in the backup jersey, so if someone changes in-period, it’ll have another tag that’s assigned to his player ID and the recording will keep going.”
And what happens if one of those tags, which are rechargeable, gets thrown in the laundry basket and into the rinse cycle?
“Are we likely to wash some? Probably,” Nodine said. “It’s gonna happen.”
So how will the pucks and tags produce what the NHL believes will be an endless supply of previously impossible data?
Well, there will be about 14-18 cameras placed in the catwalk of each building, focused down on the rink. They are synced with the radio frequency that “talks” to the puck and the tags, telling them when to light up. The puck will light up 60 times per second, the tags of the players on the ice will flash 15 times and those on the bench once.
“The new thing from last year, we’re deriving data from these coordinates,” Horstman said. “So one of the things you’ll see on NBC is puck possession, which player has possession, all being derived using machine learning on who has the puck based on proximity.”
The plan for the playoffs is possession in all three zones, passes and shots. The system takes the information and, using time and distance, can measure a player’s average speed, burst speed, how fast they decelerate, change of direction, etc.
Passing, for example, is a stat that currently has no real measure, but soon will be quantified by pass-type and quality. And as the machine-learning algorithms process more and more data, and video is included, it will teach itself the difference.
“A great example, (New York Rangers defenseman) Tony DeAngelo one time threw a pass from his defensive faceoff circle off the far end boards to (teammate Chris) Kreider streaking for a goal,” Horstman said. “That was a pass, not a dump-in, and it assigns that to video, and the algorithms start learning, so the next time it happens it’s classified as a pass, not a dump-in. So it will (become) more accurate over time.”
For now, the system can only detect proximity of the puck, meaning a puck that is in between two players is assigned to one of them as far as possession. But ultimately, they will be able to recognize sticks and body limbs and know exactly who has the puck.
“In a 3D world, you’ll be able to recreate (a player) looking at the boards, and throwing the pass back through his legs,” Horstman said. “You’ll be able to pan a camera to his point of view.”
Imagine the vantage point of a goalie where we’ll be able to see how well he screens or whether the puck was deflected.
That’s down the road, though.
On Thursday, in preparation for All-Star weekend, the NHL tested the system out on a local youth team in St. Louis. They used a puck with sensors and wore tags in their sweaters, and on the Jumbotron at Enterprise Center, they were identified as “Hedman” and “Kopitar” and “Tkachuk.”
As the puck dropped inside the near-empty rink, Horstman pulled up a chair next to Nodine and watched the data pop up on his laptop
“They’re going to be in awe of seeing their name,” he said. “Well, an All-Star’s name.”
They went up and down the ice, and Horstman sounded like a broadcaster as the possession changed hands, with a dot on his laptop turning green for whoever had the puck.
“There was a pass from No. 9 to No. 2 … there’s a shot by No. 4,” he said. “We’re deriving this data in 300 milliseconds. It’s instant gratification, you know. Using the technology on the broadcast and being able to see it immediately, it’s chilling.”
That is the payday for the puck and player tracking, not only the ability to keep track of the data, but the capability to retrieve it right away and display it on the broadcasts, and in-arena. The video can be clipped, with graphics inserted on top of it, and pushed to the TV truck without any manual effort.
“The truck can say show me positioning on this particular goal and they can pull up a clip that’s going to have those graphics pre-rendered on them,” Nodine said. “So there’s a system that’s predictively saying, we want to go and pre-render these three or four views after a goal happens, so they’ll be ready for replay right after this. There may be goals where you want to highlight the speed of the pass, or how fast the player was skating on that particular goal. It gives rightsholders a lot more tools for telling stories, right?”
If you think about it, in sports such as baseball and football, there are quick bursts of actions followed by long breaks, in which the broadcasters can take their time telling stories about the teams and individuals. But in hockey, unless it’s a TV timeout, there may only be 10-15 seconds before play resumes.
“There’s very little downtime to pull fans in and educate fans on what’s happening and to give them backstories so that they can develop a greater sense of connection,” Lehanski said. “So we recognized that if we were going to do it, we needed to do it as an overlay to the live game. So how could we integrate data and stats and analytics and general insights? It would be through this type of system.
“So those will be available on All-Star weekend and I think those are really going to come to life during the playoffs when our broadcast partners are using it to analyze strategy and defensive positioning on a penalty kill. There’s some amazing illustrations and education that we can provide to fans, whether they be casual or avid fans. All-Star will be a precursor of what’s to come.”
Enterprise Center needed to be the first fully functional building because of the All-Star Game, but the NHL is making headway on having all 16 playoff venues equipped. They are currently up to 14 installations and hope to have 22 done by the second week of February.
“That way we know that we’ve got everybody covered,” Hortsman said. “You couldn’t anticipate the Blues’ run last year, so you don’t want to miss that. Winning the Cup would probably be a miss on our part.”
That would leave about nine buildings still needing installations and those will take place during the playoffs because ice must be in place for the league to be able to calibrate the system.
So why not just hold off the entire introduction until next season?
“We would never rush the implementation of something like this, that’s so important to our game, if we didn’t feel like it was ready,” Lehanski said. “We believe it can be ready and what better period of the season to introduce than the moment at which hockey excitement is at its peak, the playoffs.”
He reminded that in 2017, the league began allowing the usage of iPads at the start playoffs.
“You could say we made a much crazier and riskier move when we first deployed our coaching system,” Lehanski said. “You had teams and coaches at first blush that were like, ‘wait a second!’ Forget about the technology, just putting something in that environment that’s new, even from a superstition standpoint, they were like, ‘No, no, get out of here!’
“Lo and behold, the usage throughout the playoffs far exceeded our expectations. Some of the coaches who were the most ardent with regard to their reluctance ended up using it for critical plays and challenges. We had confidence in our team, confidence in our clubs, and in a way, the success we had opened the door for us to have more trust, allowing us to do things like this.”
Horstman, who spent 24 years as a sports technologist in the NBA before joining the NHL, said the players are ready for it.
“One of the things everybody always said in the NBA, ‘The players are never going to want a device,’” he said. “So we never even went down that path. We just went optical, using cameras to do everything off of video that’s not as good for precision. When I came here, we immediately talked to the players and it was it like, ‘When are we going to hear the (negative reaction from them)?’ I walked out of the meeting and I was shell-shocked. They were gung-ho.
“In our events last year, they actually went at each other, with ‘I’m going to skate faster than you, I’m going to shoot harder.’ So it’s the athlete that starts coming out and they want to be better than the guy next to him. They grew up with the data, playing NHL (video games). It was all about the data and which player you wanted on your team. It’s the same thing now, but in real life.”
(All photos: Jeremy Rutherford/The Athletic)