Interviewing to be a Hockey Analyst with the Leafs: The Application

This is the first of a four-part blog series detailing my experience applying/interviewing to be a Hockey Analyst with the Toronto Maple Leafs. In this part I take you through my approach to the original job application and the things that I think contributed to my success. I hope this series sheds some light on the process of how interviewing for an analytics position with an NHL team works (or at least how one such process worked).

I actually heard about the ‘Hockey/Research & Development Analyst’ position posted by the Toronto Maple Leafs from three different sources: a WhatsApp group of high school friends, my girlfriend (who I suspect was tired of my semi-employed status at the time), and the /r/leafs subreddit. As an amateur hockey analytics enthusiast, I initially dismissed applying to the job; I was well aware of the surplus of talent in the hockey analytics community and assumed that the position would go to one of these existing, very talented peoples.

However, on the day before applications were due I was just starting a month-long cross-Canada train trip, and figured, “nothing ventured, nothing gained”. I threw together a cover letter, spruced up my resume, and submitted my application.

At the time I had no formal experience with hockey analytics or computer science. While I had dabbled with programming in high school (shout-out to Turing) and seriously considered doing computer science degree, I ended up doing an undergraduate degree in biology as a result of my aspirations as misguided 17-year-old to become a doctor. One of the program requirements for that was a single computer science course, which I took in my last year of study. That was enough to rekindle my interest in programming, an interest that initially manifested in my writing some very ugly code for scraping data from nhl.com.

I got better at programming simply by virtue of the fact that I continued to do it. Over the course of my MSc, I used Python heavily, writing scripts that did everything from automating the weighting of the plants that I used during my experiments to even examining pass-completion rates for the ultimate team I was co-captaining/coaching.

This is the background with which I applied to the ‘Hockey Analyst’ position: one with formal accreditation in data analytics and statistics (albeit in biology) and a personal body of work in programming and hockey analytics. I wrote my cover letter, submitted my application on the train somewhere in eastern Canada, and proceeded to put it out of my mind while I explored 11 cities across Canada in the following month.

So imagine my surprise when I finish my trip, get to Union Station in Toronto and, after connecting to Wifi for the first time in 4 days (I do not recommend taking the train from Vancouver to Toronto), I have an email from the Leafs inviting me to a phone interview. And not just from anyone on the Leafs, from Darryl Metcalf, creator of the now defunct ExtraSkater.com and their Director of Hockey Research & Development.

Getting that email, I literally fist-pumped on the train platform. I’ve been a Leafs fan since I can remember, a fandom that began with my listening to Joe Bowen and Jim Ralph on the FAN590 before I even had a television. The first Leafs game I watched was one of their many playoff away games against the Ottawa Senators; they would sell “home” tickets to these games so fans could watch the game on the Jumbotron in the ACC. Heck, I remember crying after the Leafs infamously gave up a 5–0 lead to the St. Louis Blues with fifteen minutes left in the third period.

More recently, I had been eagerly following the Leafs’ growth of their analytics department, from their hiring of Darryl Metcalf and Cam Charron, to their partnering with SAS, a popular statistics analytics software. Being as large a fan of the Leafs as I was, coupled with how familiar I was with the Leafs moves in the analytics field, getting that email was a very surreal experience. One that would prove to be the first of many such surreal experiences.

In retrospect (with the disclaimer that this is entirely conjecture), I think my cover letter was the major reason I was offered the initial interview. I spent about an hour-and-a-half heavily customizing an existing template I had, really emphasizing that my background in hockey analytics and programming, while informal, had resulted in the creation/completion of several significant projects. In particular, I had a lot of familiarity with hockey analytics and experience scrapping NHL data with Python, all of which were directed related to desired skills in the posted job application.

Unfortunately, MLSE has taken down the original job posting, and I have’t been able to find an archived version (nor did I have the foresight to save it locally) but the majority of the things that I included in my application and discuss here are mentioned because they were heavily emphasized in the original job posting.

In the initial paragraph of my cover latter (below) I setup the background for why I was applying to the role despite my background in biology/academia. This was a boiler-plate part of my standard cover letter; I had been applying to a lot of Data Analyst/Software Developer-type roles, and had taken to using this background description to justify why I was trying to pivot into new roles for which I had limited formal experience or qualifications. It also allowed me to more smoothly transition later into describing skills that were transferable to these new roles (things like data analysis, statistics, etc. as we’ll see later in the cover letter) despite me gaining them from previous “unrelated” experience.

After that I struck straight for the heart of what the application was looking for; familiarity with hockey analytics and Python (specifically using Python to scrape hockey statistics). Luckily, this was one of my major hobbies. To this end I had created two different libraries that I could explicitly point to as evidence of my proficiency; HockeyScraper and hockey-stats (I am not an creative man).

As mentioned in the cover letter, HockeyScraper was not truly my initial foray into scraping hockey data, but it was my first foray that actually largely worked. I touch upon my original attempt earlier in the article (“very ugly”), which I wrote before I learned about Git (a version-control tool used for software development) so the only copy of it exists in an old computer in my basement somewhere. A future iteration on this same theme, hockey-stats, was written in response to the NHL changing how they populated tables in several areas on their site (from just plain HTML to a method that I suspect involves a JavaScript intermediary object). This more recent library uses Selenium, which I highly recommend to anyone looking to do web scraping of any kind.

Later in this same paragraph, I allude to a project that I was working on in conjunction with my brother at the time. Ultimately, due to various time constraints and scheduling conflicts it never came to fruition.

After this is some more boiler-plate. I touch upon some of the transferable soft-skills that I gained during my MSc and point to vaCATE which, at the time, was the most significant software project that I’d solely designed, created, and distributed. It served to automate and enhance some of the more labour-intensive data analysis that my lab conducted. I’ve actually recently published a paper describing its operation that you can find here.

Finally, I end the cover letter on a personal note. I actually agonized over whether or not I should call the Leafs “my team”. I was worried that it might be taken in a hubristic manner, i.e. I would be inevitably getting this position, instead of the intended manner, which was that this was my team simply because I was a fan. Ultimately, common-sense prevailed, I included the last paragraph as you see it, and I think it ended the cover letter with a bang.

I also do some small “attention-to-detail” things that, in all honestly, may be a waste of time. Things like addressing the letter to “Craig Mongeon” (the then highest-level HR person at MLSE that I could find on LinkedIn) and making the cover letter/resume section headers the exact shade of blue used by the Leafs (in case you were wondering, the hex color code for which is #003E7E). I don’t know if these sorts of things are noticed but they don’t take too long to implement.

In order for you to get a through idea of what my application looked like for this position I’ve included the resume that I submitted, though I’ve covered most of its content when I described my background (above). This is largely the standard resume that I was submitted to job applications, with the exception that I would slight tailor my “Summary” section to reflect the skills specifically mentioned by the job application.

So that was largely the process by which I managed to get a phone interview with the Leafs. I will cover that interview (and more) in the next post in this series!