The Calgary Flames added six new members to their organization at the NHL Entry Draft in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Top pick Sven Baertschi hails from tiny Switzerland. John Gaudreau would be the smallest player in the NHL at his current height of 5-foot-6. Chris Snow has no intentions of ever playing a single game for the Flames. The brother of Markus Granlund is a YouTube legend.
And General Manager Jay Feaster told his scouts the 2011 draft class should be the group that leads the Flames to long-term success?
Baertschi and Gaudreau will need to overcome age-old NHL stereotypes, but Feaster didn’t grab Snow for his smooth skating or rocket of a slapshot. In fact, Feaster probably doesn’t want him anywhere near the ice surface.
Chris Snow, 29, is Calgary’s Director of Statistical and Video Analysis, the first in franchise history. Snow spent four seasons as Director of Hockey Operations for the Minnesota Wild before being let go in 2010, but still maintains a residence just a mile from the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul. He joined up with the Flames at the draft and in his new position will be responsible for the planning and implementation of the club’s video and statistical data mining programs.
Snow’s job title wouldn’t raise eyebrows in the average Major League Baseball front office, an environment overrun by stat gurus, Wall Street bankers and ‘sabermetricians’. Books such as The Extra 2% and the Michael Lewis classic Moneyball document the radical shift that’s taken place in baseball in recent years, turning America’s pastime into a complex web of acronyms and statistics.
But most fans still see hockey as a game of flow managed by former players making decisions based on instinct and decades of experience. Chris Snow has seen first-hand how quickly that culture can change.
Prior to taking the Minnesota Wild job, Snow spent a year and a half in baseball covering the Red Sox for the Boston Globe, an experience that opened his eyes to a new world. The Red Sox, directed by whiz-kid GM Theo Epstein and famed baseball statistician Bill James, had just won their first World Series in 86 years. Enrollment in ‘Red Sox Nation’ had reached an all-time high and most fans attributed their long-awaited success with ‘clutch hitting’ by David Ortiz or even good-luck charm Nelson de la Rosa.
Behind the scenes as a beat writer, Snow saw a more calculated operation. “I think baseball has been a great template to look at and learn how they’ve integrated video and data into their process,” he says. “It proved to be just a fantastic window into a very progressive and detailed-oriented league that I could then draw upon after the fact.”
In hockey, hiring a Director of Statistical Analysis takes an open-minded General Manager. Calgary Flames GM Jay Feaster has never been afraid to be unique.
Feaster began his career as a lawyer with the Harrisburg, PA firm McNees, Wallace & Nurick. Despite having no background in hockey, he worked his way into a minor-league front office in Hershey and earned Executive of the Year honors in 1997. Seven years later, Feaster was lifting a Stanley Cup with the Tampa Bay Lightning and the team he built put the Sun Belt franchise on the map. Then Feaster did something few in the traditional hockey fraternity would ever dare to consider: he walked away from it all.
Feaster has always said his legal background and education allows him to avoid becoming a ‘yes-man’ in the front office. When his strong will clashed with owners Len Barrie and Oren Koules, he resigned from the Lightning job in 2008 with three years left on his contract. As Feaster enters his first full season as GM of the Calgary Flames, he’s looking to build a staff of specialists who aren’t afraid to debate and disagree.
Craig Conroy was plucked from the ice and named Special Assistant to the General Manager. Craig Hartsburg was given the unique title of Associate Head Coach as part of a tiered staff under Head Coach Brent Sutter. Clint Malarchuk brings ten seasons of NHL experience to the position of Goaltender Coach. Feaster isn’t afraid to admit his weaknesses and surround himself with intelligent employees who can handle specific jobs far better than he can.
“[Jay] is looking for a variety of skillsets to build a team in the front office,” Chris Snow explains, comparing him to an open-minded CEO. “Craig Conroy is a very recent player and has great relationships with other players in the league. With myself, [Jay and I] had never met before November, but he was receptive enough to listen to what I was pitching as my potential value and also where I thought the league was going in these areas that interest me.”
Snow says he gained a lot of experience during his four years in Minnesota, but at times he got away from making specific advancements in data and video. As part of Feaster’s staff, he knows exactly what he’s expected to focus on.
From a statistical perspective, Snow wants to add value to the front office without clouding the decision-making process. “Our relationship is just starting out,” he says, “but I always try to give Jay Feaster a few primary takeaways. I begin with solid information, compile it in an organized manner, and then concisely explain how I got to that conclusion.”
Complicated statistics are quickly finding their way into the hockey world, but Snow insists that logic and simplicity are still very important. “When you get into weighing statistics or making subjective value judgments, it’s hard for any member of the hockey operations staff to put a lot of belief in the takeaway. I want to listen to the needs of the staff and add value to the process without trying too hard.”
Snow will be responsible for building a proprietary stats database for the Flames, but he’ll be utilizing the PUCKS system from Sydex Sports to manage the video aspects of his job. Although hockey coaches have been analyzing game film for decades, today’s video software systems track player ice time and on-ice events like goals.
“The greatest strength of a system like PUCKS,” Snow explains, “is allowing the coach to work with a finished product and utilize it how he wants instead of wasting time marking each time a player steps on and off the ice throughout the entire game.”
The NHL has also put a greater emphasis on tracking shot location and other situations happening on the ice. “The output will only be as good as the input,” Snow says. “There’s much more information available today, it’s just a matter of reducing it to something useful.”
As I conclude my conversation with Snow, I ask if he has any specific goals he wants to accomplish with the Calgary Flames. He says that after seeing colleagues and friends in Minnesota get fired after losses piled up, he realizes the priority has to be doing anything possible to help the team win hockey games.
The Flames finished just short of success last season. They won 25 of 45 games after Feaster took over as interim General Manager in December, but a late-season slide left Calgary three points shy of a playoff spot in the Western Conference.
“Success and failure is such a fine line,” Snow says, “that’s the biggest takeaway.”
One big hit, one blocked shot, and soon, one click of the mouse could be the difference between winning and losing for the Calgary Flames.
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