NHL teams pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in combined salaries every season, but putting a value on players remains an inexact science.

Let’s take, for instance, puck-moving defencemen. They’re prized for, among many things, the ability to make the so-called “first pass.” A deft first pass drives a clean breakout. A clean breakout keys a forceful rush. But if you asked an NHL GM to tell you which NHL defenceman’s first pass is most likely to generate a possession in the opposing team’s end, the GM would only be guessing at the answer. Is it Duncan Keith or Keith Yandle or Jake Gardiner? As it stands, there’s no way to give a definitive reply to that question and countless more like it.

Still, in the not-so-distant future it’s possible that a definitive answer will be available with a few taps on a tablet. At least, that was among the topics discussed at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference last month in Boston. Other sports leagues, including the NBA, have installed motion-tracking cameras on the catwalks of arenas that record the real-time coordinates of every player in every game. The system can tell an NBA executive which point guard runs the most effective pick and roll, which forward hauls down the highest percentage of rebounds that come within his reach, which player runs the farthest and the fastest.

At least one system of this kind has been tested in NHL games. So it seems inevitable that one or a few NHL teams will eventually take the relatively modest financial plunge — the NBA standard known as SportVu costs about $100,000 a year — and see what the numbers yield.

“We’re on the cusp of having that kind of data,” said Eric Tulsky, the Bay Area-based hockey stats analyst who was a panellist at the Sloan conference. “I think some teams will be faster to see the value and start doing it than others. But I talked to several different people from teams that have had discussions about doing it.”

Tulsky and other watchers of hockey’s slow embrace of advanced analytics figure the NHL is about five to seven years behind the NBA, which in turn has been slower to accept the math-based study of the game than, say, baseball. Right now the NHL only tracks basic statistics with hit-and-miss reliability. Video-tracking technology would amount to a massive leap forward.

“Instead of just picking one thing or a few things, you’re recording everything,” said Tulsky. “Whose first pass is most likely to lead to an offensive zone possession? If this player touches the puck in the offensive zone how likely is a team to generate a shot on goal? We’ll get a lot closer to capturing a player’s true value. Right now we infer a lot about the value of players from how teams perform when certain players are on the ice.”

Claude Loiselle, the Maple Leafs vice-president and assistant general manager, attended the Sloan conference for the first time this year. He said a lot of what he learned amounted to “good reading,” but that he remains in search of an analytical tool that will give his team an edge. He called the idea of a motion-tracking system “interesting.” But he said he’s unsure if it’s on the verge of becoming an NHL fixture.

“We’re still waiting, still looking to see a (statistical tool) that benefits us. But I’ve yet to find one,” Loiselle said. “You need to watch players play. And it’s all about scouting. If there’s another angle that’s beneficial, by all means let’s look at that. But it’s just not there yet.”

Whether or not there’s an NHL club that has found a beneficial angle is anyone’s guess.

“The teams that are the most involved with stats are also the most tight-lipped about it,” Tulsky said. “The Kings, Sharks and Blackhawks didn’t go (to the Sloan conference) — they routinely don’t — and all of them are known to be involved with stat work.”

No one involved in stat work appears to be advocating, say, the planned obsolescence of the travelling scout.

“You can’t take a spreadsheet and run a team without watching the game,” Tulsky said.

Still, the data-based study of the sports world isn’t going anywhere except deeper into the mainstream. Monday marked ESPN’s launch of FiveThirtyEight.com, the site headed by famed election prognosticator Nate Silver, another fixture at the MIT Sloan conference. In Silver’s site manifesto he takes issue with the stats-wise outlook of ex-Leafs GM Brian Burke, the noted skeptic of analytics. It’s worth a read.

“(Often), general managers and CEOs and op-ed columnists use the lack of data as an excuse to avoid having to examine their premises,” writes Silver.

Kyle Dubas, the stats-friendly general manager of the OHL’s Soo Greyhounds, said his time at last month’s conference gave him the feeling that hockey is only a few years from a wider acceptance of analytics. But he understands the resistance.

“I think people fear that it’s going to eliminate the way sports are managed,” Dubas said. “I think that it moreso works in concert with managing a sports team. I always look at it like, I want as much information as I can possibly get. I’d rather have that, rather than just trusting my eyes or just lending myself to subjectivity.”

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Ultimately, results will drive the market. If a tech-wise NHL franchise or two find value in video tracking and carve out an advantage that translates into wins and losses, it’s hard to imagine competitors won’t copy the formula.

“Hockey, I think it’ll get there,” Dubas said. “The most interesting aspect of the conference for me was listening to the panels from different sports where, five or six years ago, all this stuff was so foreign and was kind of scoffed at. I’ve got a lot of faith that in hockey we’ll continue to progress and see teams begin to have a lot of success doing things that are pro-analytics. With every other sport, that’s kind of the way it’s taken off.”