The most important thing is they're there. After years of heated debate at the head office in New York, the NHL is officially aboard the analytics train, with chief operating officer John Collins in the conductor's chair toot-tooting the horn.

Decades behind baseball and years behind basketball and football in this department, the league added dozens of new statistics to its website on Friday as part of a big unveiling of what it's calling Phase 1 of the project.

By Phase 4, both players and the puck will be tracked in-game with RFID sensors and the possibilities for new data will (presumably) be endless.

"It's the same company that developed the glowing puck," Collins said of Sportvision, one of two firms the NHL has teamed up with to provide analytics.

Let's not hold that against them.

None of what has been added to NHL.com so far is revolutionary. There are now several variations of possession stats (i.e. Corsi and Fenwick renamed for a wider audience), first and second assists, zone starts and a few other not-so-advanced advanced stats that have increasingly become part of the hockey conversation online the past few years.

Most have been available since 2006-07, when analyst Gabriel Desjardins launched behindthenet.ca.

The troubling part of the NHL's launch is how confusing and, in some cases, wrong the new data are. Without a filter for games played or ice time, for example, little-known players such as Andrew Agozzino and Miikka Salomaki lead the league in points per 20 minutes.

It's not clear whether this is an even-strength stat (as has been convention) or not.

Other stats, such as penalties drawn, are flat-out incorrect. In this case, the league has included fighting majors as a drawn penalty, which means that a stat meant to highlight players that put their teams on the power play is useless.

Typically an analytic that fast, skilled players excel at – because opponents hook or haul them down – NHL.com's list has such enforcers as Luke Gazdic and Chris Neil on the leaderboard.

Behind The Net, meanwhile, has stars such as Nathan MacKinnon, Vladimir Tarasenko and Alex Ovechkin atop its rankings.

That's only one example, but it's one that highlights how much further ahead the fan- and analyst-created sites are.

Thankfully, Collins said the league doesn't intend to shut down their competitors now that they've launched their own site – a possibility that had many analysts concerned the past few months.

"No, not at all," Collins said. "We think our role in this process is to be the authentic place for a digital record of what's happening on the ice … hopefully that will spur a number of cottage industries in terms of how people analyze those aspects."

The league may well get there. The addition of tagging and tracking – which is expected to launch in time for the start of next season – should produce an Everest-sized mountain of new material, similar to what the NBA's generated with their camera data.

The hard part is going to be making sense of all of it, especially considering the NHL's very early efforts with much more basic statistical information aren't encouraging.

Rather than try to offer an odd, limited version of what others have done better, they would have done well to hire someone like Desjardins or Andrew Thomas of war-on-ice.com to get things right.

Because the initial offering won't be winning many converts.