Edmonton Oilers' Knoblauch speaks on importance of analytics in coaching
Analytics has taken over the NHL over the past decade or so, and the Edmonton Oilers are no exception.
Since Jeff Jackson took over as CEO of the team in the summer of 2023, the analytics department has grown exponentially. Michael Parkatti was brought in as a senior director of data and analytics, CapFriendly co-founder Dominik Zrim is now the director of hockey strategy, and Erik Elenz is now on the coaching staff as a video and analytics coaching coordinator.
It’s easy to see how analytics can influence the upper management side of things with trades and signings, but how does Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch use them?
Offside was able to snag an exclusive interview with the Edmonton bench boss to discuss the role of analytics with the Oilers coaching staff and how they interact with those analytic-focused hires on a day-to-day basis.
“They are always giving us information, something that they found out that they feel can help out the coaching staff,” Knoblauch said. “Most of the time, it’s the coaching staff asking which lines are really good, what the ideal lineup is, who plays well with who, what types of goals are we giving up, where are we strong… I think there is an unlimited amount of information as a coach you can receive.
“It’s important finding out which information is important because if you want everything, you get overwhelmed.”
NHL head coaches tend to skew toward more traditional means of coaching that don’t include the heavy use of analytics. That hasn’t been the case with Knoblauch, who, despite playing hockey and beginning his coaching career well before the dawn of the analytics age, explained that he has been interested in the numbers side of the game for a long time.
Listen to some of his early-season press conferences when the team was struggling and pick out how many times he mentioned things like expected goals; it’s more than the average NHL coach these days.
“It depends on how you define analytics; any kind of information that has numbers is analytics,” Knoblauch said. “I’ve been looking at analytics since my first year of coaching in Prince Albert. Goal charts, I charted where goals were coming from our team and opposition, and that was a message to our team about how goals were scored. That’s as primitive analytics as there are.
“In Philadelphia, that was my first time having an actual department, and it was still primitive then. When I really dove into what was useful information was probably when I was in Hartford.”
Still, even with the progress of hockey analytics, there are plenty of fans and people working in the sport who believe the eye test reigns supreme. Knoblauch admitted that analytics aren’t perfect and that you can’t put all your eggs into any one basket when it comes to coaching in this league.
“I go back to my coaching before analytics and having a GM after a game come down and be like, ‘Such and such played a terrible game,’ and the next day, I’d watch the game, and I’d think that player made one mistake, but the rest of his game was fabulous,” Knoblauch explained.
“So often our perceptions change because of one instance. That’s why the analytics are so important because we have personal biases that you want to confirm, so you’ll watch the game and look for the information to confirm you’re right. The most important thing about analytics is you have that information, and it takes the bias out of it.”